I find it fascinating how there has been so little change to their approach to the first user experience, right from the “Open This First” envelope through to the minimalist, product-centric design of the packaging. And… he does look soooo pleased with himself!

Link to Flickr set

Here are my accounts of the process.

WARNING!!! If you choose to attempt the same modification to your Eee PC, I accept no liability whatsoever for anything that may occur as a result of you doing so.

At the very least, you will need:

• Experience of working with surface mount PCBs.
• A desolder pump.
• A low-wattage soldering iron with a fine tip (eg: 0.7mm).
• A good multimeter with sharp probes and an audible continuity test function.
• A magnifying work lamp.
• Lots of time and patience.
• … and of course, a healthy fear of bricking your Eee PC.

The first step was to remove the USB connector from the bluetooth adaptor. I used largest adaptor of all the ones I had laying around because I was expecting to never see the damn thing again.

Then, I removed the keyboard and the top cover from the Eee PC. I won’t go into great photographic details here, but the procedure consists of removing they keyboard by depressing three little catches above the “¬”, “F6″ and “Pause” keys, then undoing all the screws under the keyboard, followed by all the screws on the underneath of the case.

All the screws are the same size, so as long as you don’t lose any of them, it doesn’t matter about remembering where they came from.

Removing the top panel should be done with your fingernails, working from right to left, as the top panel catches around the audio sockets on the left hand side.

Removing the screen bezel is very difficult. In addition to the four screws at the top and two at the bottom, it is held tightly by plastic catches at regular intervals around the edge. Removing the screen bezel should not be done more than once or twice. The screws are hidden behind the rubber studs at the top and the decor covers at the bottom. All can easily be removed intact with a sharp knife ready to be replaced afterwards.

I attached wires to the bluetooth adapter following the USB wiring colour code of Red = 5V, Black = Ground, D+ = Green D- = White.

Moving the speaker and WiFi antenna cables aside, I mounted the bluetooth adapter to the side of the screen, holding it in place with double-sided foam sticky pads. I routed the wires down through the hinge in a short piece of sleeving to protect them.

The wires are carefully routed between the surface mount devices to avoid being trapped when the machine is reassembled.

The main board can be removed and flipped over by releasing it from the two catches at the front edge. You should cover the screen with something to prevent it from getting scratched.

The wireless card can be seen towards the right of this picture. You need to remove it in order to access the USB connections underneath. You can replace it later in order to keep the wireless connectivity. The wireless card does not use the USB connections available on its connector.

The final connections are made as follows:

• Red (5V) to the right hand pin of the voltage regulator above the mini-pcie socket.
• Black (Ground) to any spare ground point, as found using the continuity tester.
• Green (D-) to the 8th pin from the left under the wireless card connector.
• White (D+) to the 9th pin from the left under the wireless card connector.

You must make certain using your continuity tester that no shorts have been made whilst soldering the wires on, because soldering these connections is kind of like playing the piano with a sledgehammer.

Following initial successful tests, I found that the bluetooth device wasn’t detected any more. Investigations showed that the wires had become trapped between the fan duct and the underneath of the main board. I re-routed the cabling via the notch in the back of the main board for the fan connector and all was well again.

I don’t use Windows – it just doesn’t do the things I need a computer to do for me – but I was sufficiently irritated that people were getting a raw deal on the music they’d purchased that I was prepared to put my neck on the line and host the file, fully expecting to be nastygrammed at some point.

It’s not that I’m intending to tempt fate by dragging the issue up, but enough time has passed for me to call bullshit on the presumption that Microsoft is behind the notices. Let’s examine the facts:

* Sites reporting the news noted that the notices were sent on behalf of Microsoft by so-called Internet Investigator “James Young”.

Now, this James Young chap seems to have sent a few takedown notices for a handful of cracks and keygen type tools, but not much else. I have no idea of determining whether or not he really is acting on behalf of Microsoft as he claims.

* The site the takedown notices originate from doesn’t appear affiliated with Microsoft.

microsoft-antipiracy.com, the site the takedown notices have originated from was registered via a UK consumer ISP, Nildram. The site is also hosted by them in UK. Mail for the domain also goes to mailboxes on Nildram’s servers. If this were a bona-fide Microsoft operation, I’m quite sure the hosting arrangements would be different.

* There has been no comment from Microsoft on the notices.

Microsoft have consistently stayed silent on the whole subject, apart from reassuring their partners that they’ll fix their crummy DRM again and again if they have to.

* The takedown notices don’t bear any legal weight.

Even when sending notices to US sites (jamesholden.net is hosted in the US, but I’m a British citizen living in the UK), the DMCA is not invoked. The boilerplate is purely a request to remove the offending file, with no clear legal threat.

So, I assert that Microsoft isn’t responsible for the takedown notices, and that James Young isn’t acting on behalf of Microsoft. I suspect that Microsoft turns a blind eye to his misguided vigilante notices, preferring to take comfort in the fact that he’s a volunteer cog in the Microsoft FUD machine.

…and what the hell is an “Internet Investigator” anyway?

The system is provided by Gracenote, and appears to be a mixture of ID3 tag recognition and audio waveform matching.

Of course, there are many valid reasons to upload material that the system may tag as infringing, such as parody or critical review. It’ll be impossible for any blogger to add clips of songs to a music review now.

• *#06# – Show the serial number (IMEI)
• *#0000# – Show the software version
• *#7370# – Factory reset (the default lock code is 12345)
• *#62209526# – Show the WLAN MAC address
• *#2820# – Show the bluetooth address

Also, if the phone won’t boot and hangs on the startup screen (white background, blue Nokia logo), you can initiate a factory reset by holding *, 3 and the green button.

Some or all of these seem to work for other S60 devices too, eg: N80.

You can get a copy from the download pages, or via their Shipit service.

I’ve been using it for the last day or so and I’m impressed. There’s a spell checker for forms, which makes writing blog posts like this much nicer, there are also new tools for reporting phishing sites and sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox, so that the Firefox team can check them out.

Also, tab handling has been improved. There’s now a menu entry that shows recently closed tabs, which is very useful. I’m always closing tabs I didn’t mean to.

It’s not a ground-breaking release, but a nice incremental update that keeps Firefox comfortable ahead of the competition.

Contrary to what you might think, I’m actually in favour of this.

For starters, the general procedure for companies who fail to purchase licenses is a knock at the door, followed by the rapid purchase of said missing licenses. Once the company is in compliance, then the BSA have nothing else left that they can do. The BSA would like to punish companies who fail to buy licenses as well as just having the licenses bought, so given that 80% of infringements are down to oversight and not malice, it might give companies another reason to avoid the proprietary licensing in the first place and move to free software where you don’t need to keep a careful count of what you’re using. Believe me, I’ve managed licensing before and it’s a complete pain.

Also, if the government is going to enforce Microsofts, Adobes and the rest of the software industrys licensing requirements, by rights it should also enforce Free software licenses such as the GPL. It’s always sad to see the companies wilfully breaking the GPL by incorporating GPL licensed software into their products, and by and large they do this because they know that the guy who wrote it doesn’t have the legal means or the cash to bring a civil case.

If the government will enforce this type of license violation, then it can only be a good thing.

The case is being closely watched, not only by the software industry, but by the pharmaceutical industries, who see it as an important reinforcement of patent rights. This is more than a little flawed though. I can see how patents may be beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry due to the massive investment required to develop a new drug, but the concept of patenting software inventions is rather different. There is simply no way that a ‘Buy’ button on a website comes anywhere near the complexity and development effort of a new vaccine or treatment.

With a little luck, the outcome of this case will be favourable and strike a blow against the system of software patentability in the U.S., and consequently the its introduction into Europe.

1. Find somewhere nice to put it.
2. Plug it in.
3. That’s it. You’re finished.

Enabling the encryption isn’t mentioned, neither is changing the default admin password. You have to dig around deep in the back of the manual to find any mention of these, which is pretty poor considing the default Belkin admin username is admin with no password!

It’s been shown that having an open access point isn’t going to exonerate you if illegal activity is traced back to you, so why are some manufacturers shipping devices with no encouragement to use the encryption? Not all maufacturers seem to follow this trend though; 3Com enable encryption by default, and have a random admin password that’s provided via a sticker on each individual device.