If only you had realised this years ago, I might not be battling Microsoft SQL Server 2000 using RDP over a 31.2kbps PSTN modem link yesterday and this morning.  I might’ve instead been using a mysqldump-like tool over something akin to SSH, which would have been very welcome yesterday and today.

Dear Mal,

Please.  What is your problem?

This evening, your behaviour on this band was absolutely appauling.  For someone who has apparently had a radio license for longer than I’ve been alive, I am disappointed.  Sadly this is not an isolated incident but for now I’ll turn a deaf ear to previous offences and just focus on tonight’s offence.

I’m not sure if you’re the one that has been playing music over the top of us… some have made this allegation.  I’m happy to give you the benefit of a doubt, but the tirade that followed is very unbecoming of a radio amateur.  Foul language, deliberate interference, not identifying, name-calling, and generally making a nuisance.  As best I can tell, completely unprovoked.

You claimed, “I was here first”.  I was listening on 3584kHz from around 9:15PM.  I did hear Danny ask “Is the frequency in use“.  Several times.  I was mobile at Red Hill at the time.  Prior to this the frequency, as best I could hear with my marginal antenna, was devoid of all activity.  None the less, we gave you the benefit of the doubt, and after listening to your protest, we did the respectful thing and QSY’ed to 3590kHz.

Not a minute after we had done so, there you were, trying to talk over us (and only succeeding with the exceptionally weak stations), and misbehaving as before.  We had left you 3584kHz, moved to 3590kHz, and you followed us up the band.  Why?

All I have heard, is the ramble from a seeming madman.  All I, and others want to do, is use of 2.4 kHz, to have our friendly weekly chit chat.  You are even welcome to join in if you wish to be civil and play by the rules.  If you wish to have a discussion with someone else, we are not going to stop you.

On the 80m band, you’ve got 3.503kHz to 3.700kHz and 3779kHz through to 3800kHz.  You can go anywhere on that spectrum which isn’t already in use, why pick the frequency we’re using?  If you still wish to use the frequency we’re on, why not do the gentlemanly thing, and ask politely?  We’re reasonable, we will move if you ask nicely.

Please, I am asking as nicely as I possibly can, please leave us alone.  We do not wish to interfere with you, please don’t interfere with us.

Regards,

Stuart VK4MSL, and other regulars of the Australia Wide Night-Owl and Insomnia Net.

One thing that gives me the irrits is companies trying to tell you the customer, what one wants.

The phone I had, was bought outright (I think for something like AU$350).  It replaced an older Ericsson A1018S which had been bought a few years earlier on a pre-paid service… that phone sat in its box unused and the prepaid service expired.  When I came to use it, we bought a new ~AU$10/month service through Telstra… and I’ve been pretty much plodding along with that.

My needs are basic … I send the occasional text message, and make the odd phone call, but normally the phone will remain dormant.  I rarely go over $30/month on a phone bill.

One feature of the Nokia 3310 I thought initially was a gimmick, was the voice tags facility in the phone book.  With a hands-free kit plugged in, you pressed the answer button momentarily, then announced the names of one of the contacts in the phone book.  It would then try to match that to one of the voice tags, and on positive match, would dial that number.  This was invaluable on the bicycle, as it turned out.  I had the headset embedded in the helmet, with the PTT button on the handlebars for communicating via radio … the same rig plugged in the phone, the PTT became the answer button, and it meant that in order to dial a frequently used number, I didn’t have to take my hands off the handlebars at all.

Looks like I’ll have to learn to live without this feature.  The other thing was the older phone had a monochrome LCD screen … reflective type.  Much easier to read in broad daylight than today’s back-lit colour fancy affairs.  It was also less prone to damage than touch-screen devices.

One thorn though; the 3310 had no external antenna jack.  If you were in a bad spot, tough luck.  And there have been times I have been in such locations.  If you can plug in an external antenna, you can either get a higher gain antenna/directional antenna, or put a low-gain antenna up high, and get better performance.  A dipole may not offer much gain, but it should do considerably better than the minimal thing built into the handset, and of course it will do much better up high where the handset can only be as high as the user’s head (or their hand, if using a headset).

Now that the phone has died, I’m in the market for a new one.  The phone I am using for now is a ZTE T7.  Not overly bad, I suppose it’s taking a bit of getting used to.

Something I’d like to investigate is the possibility of being able to develop applications for these more modern phones.  While I traditionally criticised the more modern phones with all the bells and whistles, I recognise this is where industry is moving.

I don’t care for a camera on a phone.  The GPS devices on some of them are pretty minimal in functionality and are inconvenient to use – at least the T7′s one is.  The T7 GPS will only give you latitude and longitude, maybe altitude and speed, and has no track-log ability, and certainly no maps or navigation.  Plus you can’t refer to it while on a call.

I can make up for some shortcomings in a phone if I can code applications to run on it.  With the modern smartphones, this is a possibility that didn’t exist back in 2002 when we bought the 3310.  These days, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Maemo and the like are all the rage.  The T7 appears to have Java on it, probably J2ME… I’ll have to research this. (Update: it does… MIDP 2.0)

For me to make use of the features, I’d really need to be able to develop the applications using the (mostly Linux-based) tools I have, or can get easily.  Microsoft Visual Studio is something like AU$1000, and I really disliked WinCE 5.0 so there goes Windows Phone.  Apple iOS has all sorts of strings attached to it, and while the development kit is only $5 (if you can pay)… it’s a 4.5GB download!  No thank-you.

Android and Maemo however are quite viable for my needs.

However, the key thing for me, having a phone that can work in regional areas, and can be enhanced with an external antenna, is more important to me, than having all the software bells and whistles.  When I look at what’s on the market today, it seems one cannot purchase a ruggedised Android-based phone, which features an external antenna jack.  In fact, so far the only devices I know of available to me, look to be a small subset of the ZTE range, or one (non-Android) Samsung phone.

Pathetic.

And no, don’t even bother mentioning capacitive/inductive coupling cradles… the 6dB gain I might get from a decent antenna will be lost in the very lossy coupling.  They are a very poor workaround, they are not a solution.

As an open-source enthusiast, something which at least respects this would be in my favour.  If I can adapt what’s there to suit my needs, this makes life easier.  Calendaring, for instance, I can code up something on my web server to share a calendar with my device.  If I can make my own software, it can use any protocol I like… otherwise I have to work within its confines.  Okay, I can live with that, but only if I am told what those confines are.  If I have a specification of the synchronisation protocol used between device and phone, I can possibly do something to scratch my own itch (and possibly others’), but if it’s all in secret, I am powerless to do anything.

It seems the assumption on the part of the mobile phone manufacturers as a whole, is that if you live or work out in a regional area (or even if you only travel out there on rare occasions), you’re obviously too stupid to care.  This assumption I greatly object to.  The assumption that, because you’re a dumb user, you only know of a two-OS IT world, where anything that isn’t plastered with Windows logos, must obviously be emblazoned with a piece of fruit that has a chunk missing from it.

Wrong.

I’m still continuing to look around.  Needless to say, I’m getting pretty disgusted by the lack of choice out there.

JoinME for MacOS X is quite capable of loading the data from the phone and storing it on the computer, but there is one problem… where did it go?

Turns out, after a quick fiddle with Instruments.app (part of the Xcode suite) I found them under /System/Library/MobileList/phoneBook.plist.  They’re in the standard Mac OS X plist file format, which is an XML derivative.  I have now backed this file up into a place where I know where to find it and can free up some much needed space on the SIM.

Ohh, and to ZTE: You know fellas, it’d be nice if you didn’t keep trying to hide our data on us!  The phone book on my SIM card is not your intellectual property.

stuartl@atomos ~ $ host www.google.com.au
www.google.com.au is an alias for www.google.com.
www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.52
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.48
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.49
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.50
www.l.google.com has address 74.125.237.51
www.l.google.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:802::1011

I knew World IPv6 day was coming up, but it seems it snuck up on me and I barely noticed. Likely a testament to the fact we run a dual-stack network here, and so everything magically Just Worked™ as it should. Indeed, a lot of websites are now dual-stack, as is much of the gentoo.org infrastructure, Google (as seen above), FaceBook, and numerous other sites.

Sadly, a lot of ISPs here in Australia did the demented ostrich act when it came to IPv6. I wonder how many technical support calls they received, with users complaining about websites being slow to load up or failing to connect.

iTel, formerly “Global Info-Links”, now calling themselves “South East Community Telco“… were one of the masses that drove their RFC791-only heads in the sand and pretended that the entire Internet can be compressed into 32-bits of address space. We’ve been waiting to hear back from them on their plans for addressing since January as we’d like to upgrade the 512/128kbps ADSL link we use here. (Anyone noticed this site tends to load up a bit slow? That 128kbps figure is the reason why.)

We’ve been with this ISP since 1996. That’s quite a long innings… We’ve stayed put because until now we’ve been happy with the service. 512kbps was quite fast when we upgraded from 56kbps PSTN dialup (14.4kbps dialup when we first started… still have that modem too!). These days it plods along, but the 128kbps uplink is a notable thorn in my side with my telecommuting. So we’re looking at ADSL2+.

However, there’s one hitch. iTel is only a fairly small ISP. At the moment they do the noble thing of providing static public addresses on IPv4 for all fixed-broadband customers, but how long will that last? The last thing I want, is to sign up a contract for 12 months, then find out that in 6 months they need to move us behind CGN (Carrier grade NAT) to squeeze in some more customers. That won’t fly for us. I’d ideally like to ditch the 6-in-4 tunnel I have with AARNet and go native, or at the very least, swap it with one terminated at the ISP, but that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon.

At the moment there is only one ISP I know of that offers any sort of IPv6 connectivity. Internode. Kudos to them for taking the pioneering step! I’m seriously looking in their direction. I’m also hoping the NBN that we keep hearing about, is IPv6 enabled… and I’m holding out with the hope that our little suburb might soon be getting the long strands of glass laid down our street. If it’s only another year or so, it may be worth just hanging on with ADSL1 until then.

Thankfully, we do have the 6-in-4 tunnel through AARNet (and my greatest gratitude to them for providing it). There is a growing community on this newer protocol… I’m also happy to report absolutely 0 spam via IPv6… any spam or malware thus far has been via IPv4 … although I know this won’t last. The good news there is that with one unique address per computer (instead of per customer, or worse, per 100+ customers), it should be easier to track down the guilty party causing such Internet shenanigans. CGN by comparison is likely to be a spammer’s playground.

What am I doing about IPv6 deployment? Aside from my small-time tinkering with the network here… any socket programming I do today is at the very least dual-stack. One of my hobby projects is a digital mode stack for amateur radio… if I get my way it’ll be IPv6-only when used on a computer network.

One of my work projects involves interfacing some proprietary software to some power meters using RS-232 and RS-485 to Ethernet bridging devices. Even though the devices themselves are IPv4 only (and will be for the foreseeable future), I’m designing the software to handle IPv6. Doing this, future proofs the software. Surprisingly, I’m finding it easier to just design for dual-stack than it is to develop a IPv4-only application. If you’re building an application today, dual-stack IMHO must be part of the strategy if the application is going to work beyond this decade.

Some have asked about IPv6 on packet… sadly AX.25 packet does not go anywhere near fast enough to make IPv6 (or indeed, IPv4) networking a viable option on packet radio using existing TNCs… however I think IPv6 will, and should, play a much bigger part in amateur radio communications than it presently does… we can’t expect to hold on to the 44.0.0.0/8 subnet for much longer.

To the ISPs that are lagging behind, I say get moving! IPv4 is older than I am! This is especially true of the smaller ISPs… if you don’t move, you will get squeezed out of the future Internet connection market as address space gets consumed. To the nay-sayers who keep telling us that something else will replace IPv4, to you I say get moving… you haven’t got long to invent this magical silver bullet, in fact I say you’ve left it too late.

This isn’t an isolated case… my mother who works at the Brisbane International airport, often complains about the radio etiquette of her fellow colleagues. A lot of people have a radio thrust into their hands, and haven’t a clue how to use them. In trying to figure it out, they often fall trap to the same bad habits.

I myself have found a lot of this by mistake, and by observing others. A lot of this is also applicable to using regular telephones … I found the tip of standing still when talking helpful when I needed to make a call to emergency services on my mobile phone — the particular spot where I was at the time, the phone would drop out if I moved more than 6 inches in any direction. Learning not to talk too close, or too loudly into a microphone, also helps.

The following is a little chart I came up with. No, the stick figures are not XKCD grade, they’re not meant to be. Click on the image below for a copy as a PDF, or get the SVG source here.  File is provided in the public domain, but attribution would be appreciated.  If you use radios in your workplace, and observe this kind of behaviour in your colleagues, you might like to print this out and stick it on a wall somewhere.

Nitelights Illuminator 900

These lights are great from the illumination point of view, and they’re not badly priced either.  However, from an EMC viewpoint, they stink.  I was given one as a present some time ago.  The first night I got it, I mounted it on the helmet, charged up its battery, then went to work the next day.  That evening, tried using the radio on the bicycle as I rode home.  The interference rendered the radio totally useless.

At first I couldn’t figure out why the signals sounded so bad on receive.  I was stuggling to hear repeaters that were normally quite strong.  The only thing that was new was the headlight.  I got home, switched on the set in my room and tuned to 2m sideband, then put the headlight on flash.  The tell-tale static from the radio gave away the headlight as being the culprit.  Worst of all, the emissions weren’t conducted, they were radiated.

Since then I’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out ways to make this headlight less noisy.  The following page serves as a notepad, and I’ll keep adding to this as time goes on.

Initially when I used it I kept the battery in my shirt pocket.  This proved to be a fatal mistake, since the roughly ¼? power cable proved to be a very effective radiator of this interference.  I found winding the power lead up into a tight coil and moving the battery to the top of the helmet right behind the headlight helped things a bit.  Adding a 2.2mF capacitor in parallel to the headlight further reduced emissions to make it barely tollerable.

Then the battery pack died.  After a few weeks of non-usage, the cells collapsed.  So for a while the problem solved itself, I could no longer use the headlight.  The headlight’s battery pack runs at a nominal 7.2V (typical 8V).  Since I run a 12V supply on the bicycle, I set about making a step-down power supply that could drop my 12V supply down to 8V approximate to run the headlight.

Initially I tried using a LM7808 linear reg.  This worked, with one major drawback: the linear reg got bloody hot.  Turns out this headlight draws about 1A of current when at full brightness.  That means in order to drop 4V, the reg was dissipating 4W of power.  Ooops!  Poor thing.

I designed a crude switchmode power supply to do the work.  Using a voltage divider to provide a voltage reference, I used a LM311 comparator to detect when we were under voltage.  The output signal from this would pull down on the gate of a IRF9540N MOSFET which acted as the main switch.  Hysteresis was used to fine-tune the switching behaviour.  Capacitors at both sides would smooth the waveform.  470µF was used on the input side, 330µF on the output (we still have that 2.2mF capacitor not far away).  I also made liberal use of 100nF decoupling capacitors to try and control the rate of switching.

On the breadboard with a dummy load, my circuit performed pretty well.  A fairly smooth output with a bit of ripple at high load.  I mounted it in a box and tested it with the headlight, and presto, the headlight was back in service.  I mounted both on the bicycle directly, so as to minimise cable length and therefore radiation.

Since now the radio shared a power rail with the light, I knew there was potential for conducted emissions to cause problems as well as radiated.  The next evening I tried it out… 2m was lousy with the headlight turned on.  The good news is that it wasn’t much worse than before, but it still rendered the radio useless at times, particularly if the signal was weak from the repeater.

Recently, I added some 470µH inductors in series with the headlight and my switchmode power supply.  I also tried common-mode chokes to no avail.  A 1mF capacitor has been added in parallel to the 470µF capacitor in my power supply to further try and reduce the noise.

Low-pass filtering on headlight: 2.2mF capacitor in parallel, 470µH inductor in series

Part of the problem was that I was shooting blind to try and find the interference.  Today, whilst tuning up the HF antenna, I decided to experiment and see what bands this headlight had an influence on.  To my (unpleasant) surprise, interference was severe right down to 80m.  I used the spectrum analyser built into the FT-897D to hunt for the culprit, and found it lurking at around 400kHz.  When the power supply initially starts up, it’ll be up around there, then it sinks down to 392kHz as the case warms up:

Noise from the headlamp detected around 400kHz

This appears to be the fundamental frequency for the switchmode power supply built into the headlamp.  It would appear to have a fairly sharp square-wave type pulse, as it contains very strong odd-order harmonics.  The same interference can be observed at around 1260kHz (3rd harmonic).

The fact that this frequency is so low, probably suggests it is being intermodulated with a parasitic oscillation at some higher frequency.  This I have not yet found, the CRO showed some other hash over the signal, but I will need to do some further investigation, probably with a more sophisticated spectrum analyser than the primitive one found in my transceiver.

I’d be interested to hear from others who have had issues with these headlamps.  In particular, interference to AM/FM radio reception or transceiver operation would be quite useful if the need to persue this with the ACMA ever comes up.  The manufacturer of the headlights has so far been unresponsive to my queries, so in the meantime I can only recommend that people avoid using these headlights if they intend to use any kind of radio receiver whilst riding at night.

In the meantime, I’ll be chucking further notes here as I find more on this issue.

For someone like myself, who is no longer a student but still not rolling in money, it means if we decide to get involved in this de-facto union, we’re coughing up $80/year.  That’s more than our radio license, which is expensive enough.  Now, I am not a member, never have been… and at the moment I find it hard to justify why membership to an organisation should approach triple figures, especially when one considers that amateur radio is a hobby.

Things like my membership to Engineers Australia, yeah fine, that’s considered a “professional membership” and I can write that off on tax.  (Although I am seriosly considering whether to cull that membership!)  The WIA however does not fall under the same umbrella.  I think things are getting a little extortionate.

Examinations are also a lot more expensive than they used to be.  Apparently if you’re going for a radio license today, you don’t get much change out of $300.  That’s for three examinations (two if you’re a Foundation candidate) and for a “callsign recommendation” (which costs $20 if you wish to choose a callsign, or $5 if you don’t).  If I had to cough up $300 back in 2007 when I went for my Foundation license, I would have left the examination paper on the table unmarked and walked away.  I would not have been able to afford it then, and I would not be a radio amateur today.

Part of this is the agreement that the WIA has entered into with the ACMA.  The ACMA apparently demand that the fees be representative of the cost of the service or some such nonsense.  Once again, I say, this is a hobby.  We’re not commercial enterprise.  We are not using radio communications to make money (in fact for most of us, it’s quite the opposite).  It is therefore not reasonable to treat us like one of your commercial clients.

Some would argue that one needs to support the hobby.  Here I whole heartedly agree.  You don’t however encourage people to join in if you make it financially out of their reach.  Supposing the WIA made the annual cost $200 instead of the near $100 it is now… would they expect to nett more members?  This seems to be the logic, that the status quo will get people rolling in.  Newsflash: it won’t.  It’s probably worth noting that there are some amateurs who will not join no matter what the cost – they believe the organisation is too union-like for their tastes.  This is understandable, and thus perhaps there’s this image problem that may be why attracting members is such a problem.

I myself try to support the hobby by being an active member, lending support to the clubs around me, and generally sparking interest that may entice others to come join us.  Part of this is why I take the callbacks for the WIA news service of a Sunday morning (0900 on 147.000MHz FM).  I hope that by encouraging others to get involved, the community can grow.  This requires minimal expenditure of funds on my part, and I think, is more effective.

Paying $80 to some group in Victoria probably won’t change much around me… but getting out on the bicycle with the radio on board… someone tuning around suddenly hears “VK4MSL bicycle mobile”… Hang on, haven’t heard that before… curiousity gets the better of them and some activity is generated.  Or if not that, it’s the general chit chat between groups about the projects they’ve been working on.

If the bands sound like a ghost town because we’re too busy earning a quid to afford membership fees, then the radio community will die, people will ask “What’s the point?  There’s nobody here!”.  The repeaters here in Brisbane already remain dormant most of the time, and activity on HF is sparadic at best.  Do we really want to encourage this?

I think we need to consider why people aren’t getting involved with their local clubs.  Do we perhaps adopt a model like some parts of Europe, wherein your membership to a given club includes membership in the national body?  Bundle some packages up to offer services more cost effectively?  I for one don’t care for getting involved at a administrative level and magazines aren’t of great concern.  I recognise however that the WIA provides funding for things like public liability insurance and major club projects.  Maybe for those who aren’t interested in politics, there’s room for a non-voting membership that just funds the services needed by our clubs without all the frills?

Whatever happens, it is clear to me that the current trend is not sustainable.  The group and the community at large will continue to hemerage as the populace grows older and daily necessities compete for a chunk of our bank balance.  I think this area by far, is in dire need of reconsideration.

We had a situation with one of my father’s laptops.  The DVD drive mysteriously stopped working a week or so ago.  Well, it could have been longer, but we noticed this then.   The machine is a Toshiba Satellite L300D running Windows XP Professional (it came with Windows Vista Home Premium, but after figuring out how to slipstream service pack 3 and SATA drivers, I soon fixed that).  It had been running great, except now all a sudden, no drive letter was being allocated for the DVD drive.

All we could gleam out of the system was the very non-descript error number 41.  What’s 41 now, one less than the meaning of life?  On to the oracle^W^WGoogle… and apparently Microsoft blame cabling or hardware.  Ohh wonderful.  Okay, off we trundle to buy an external USB DVD burner.  Actually, we decided to buy two, the Lemote systems here do not have CD-ROM drives, and it would be handy for them.  (And I’ve already tested both on Linux reading DVDs, and burned a CD on one of them using K3B.  Ergo, they both work.)

Plug it into the affected laptop, lo and behold, it’s apparently “not working” either for the same reason.  We plug the drive into another Windows XP laptop, working no worries.  Okay, the drive is brand new out of the box!  The only thing common to the two drives is the PCI bus (or is it PCIe, not sure), which would mean a dying laptop.  Okay, let’s prove that it’s not the hardware.

I rummage around for a LiveCD I can boot up that will reasonably test the system.  Ideally I wanted something with a full desktop as it’d put more stress on the DVD drive.  Normally I download minimal Gentoo LiveCDs, but late last year I had downloaded Fedora Core 13 AMD64 for work purposes (I was putting together a firmware build kit, initially using Gentoo/Prefix, and needed to test it on the same OS that they were using).  The L300D runs a AMD Turion X2 CPU (AMD64 architecture).  You beauty, that’ll do.

We stick it in, hit F12 at the BIOS prompt, and select the DVD drive (it sees it).  A minute passes, and I’m staring at the KDE desktop.  The DVD drive works.  Open up a shell, and sure enough, /dev/sr1 is there lurking on USB, and it too works.  So it’s not the hardware.

Okay, so it’s something common to both, but it’s not the hardware.  Disk controller drivers?  Nope, one’s USB storage, the other is either SATA or IDE (can’t remember which).  CD-ROM device driver?  Maybe.  On we search…

Microsoft put out a few tools for “fixing” these problems that cropped up.  One is the automated tool on KB982116.  I run it, no luck, the problem still persists.  I try booting up the Windows XP CD and entering the Recovery console.  In Windows 2000 you could tell the setup tool to go and copy over the original OS files again.  No such luck with Windows XP.  Aside from re-loading the boot sector, it can’t do much at all, so no help.

I had already spent 4 hours fixing this… AU$128 down the drain in labour alone.  My father continued the battle, trying yet more tools.  There’s big money in fixing the shite that goes on with this proprietary mess, and I fear if Microsoft ever gets their act together a big portion of the IT industry will come crashing down as a result.

Today, my father doing further searching managed to find this exerpt on the KB982116 page:

Windows XP

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. In the navigation pane, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
4. In the right pane, click UpperFilters.Note You may also see an UpperFilters.bak registry entry. You do not have to remove that entry. Click UpperFilters only. If you do not see the UpperFilters registry entry, you still might have to remove the LowerFilters registry entry. To do this, go to step 7.
5. On the Edit menu, click Delete.
6. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
7. In the right pane, click LowerFilters.Note If you do not see the LowerFilters registry entry, unfortunately this content cannot help you any further. Go to the “Next Steps” section for information about how you can find more solutions or more help on the Microsoft Web site.
8. On the Edit menu, click Delete.
9. When you are prompted to confirm the deletion, click Yes.
10. Exit Registry Editor.
11. Restart the computer.

Of course, how stupid of me!  Yes, of course it’s HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.  Every computer user knows this…even the beginners!  That’s why the automated tool didn’t bother to even tell us about it, let alone do the above steps, because every computer knows about this instinctively!

The computer came very bloody close to getting a lesson in the order of the penguin with a liberal dosage of virtualisation.  I think that still may be on the cards, because we are both getting fed up with it.

Hi, I left you a DOFOLLOW backlink on my website. This isnt a spam message, i actually did leave you a backlink on my site. If you check the top of the page you will see “Sites we like” and there will be a link to this site. Would you be kind enough to leave me a backlink? If so my website is http://… please use the anchor text “…” for the link and add it to a post or as a widget. Then please send me a email at backlink@… – If you want me to change your links anchor text let me know. Thanks

Sorry mate, backlink or no backlink, I consider your site spam if it isn’t on topic.

RE: It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website … I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!

So what is the problem my friends, I’m collecting backlinks to make my website … appear in the search engines!! whether are the comments look like a crap!

Why the bloody hell should I? Go pay an advertising company like every other commercial entity.