Authorize.net makes it hard to get a refund after a credit card expires

I'm having difficulties obtaining a refund after the credit card expired. The merchant is willing to provide a refund, but Authorize.net doesn't allow it. After a conference call with the merchant and Authorize.net support, it turns out the merchant needs to add Expanded Credit Capabilities to their account. That service is free, but it involves filling out a form and that makes the merchant a bit reluctant.

This is happening even though the transaction was less than a month ago, the same credit card account is still active, and the new card has the same number. The merchant tried just updating the expiration date, but that didn't work.

Manually downloading Yahoo Messenger

If you "download Yahoo Messenger" from Yahoo, you actually download a small executable which can download Messenger and other things. Yahoo doesn't provide you with links to the actual executable which installs Messenger. You can get links from an .ini file you can download:

http://xp.yimg.com/gj/msgr/10/ini/ymsgr10_us.ini

For other countries, change the _us to another country code, such as _ca for Canada. The Messenger install file is located at the URL which is the INST_PATH value in the YMSGR section. Currently Yahoo Messenger is located at:

http://xh.yimg.com/gj/msgr/10/client/ymsgr1000_1270_us.exe

Copying Windows to a new hard drive with dd

Based on the existence of disk cloning software, one might assume that specialized software is needed to move Windows to a new hard drive. However, that's not true; the raw data can simply be copied. My normal personal setup has a small OS partition and a large data partition. I did the copying from Linux (SystemRescueCd) using dd. Here's the procedure I followed, with sda being the new drive and sdb being the old one (don't mix them up; that could cause data loss):

1. Copy the start sectors, before the first partition: "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63". I could have just copied the MBR with "count=1".
2. Run fdisk and delete the data partition from the new drive. As a side effect, this causes Linux to recognize the newly written partition table.
3. Copy the system partition to the new drive: "dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M".
4. Run fdisk and change the ID of the old drive. This is one of the advanced functions. There's a bug in fdisk: it doesn't save the partition table after this. To work around the bug, make another change. I set the type of the old system partition to NTFS hidden.
5. Reboot into Windows. It should boot off the new drive and mount the partition there as the system partition.
6. In Windows Disk Management, extend the new partition. Windows can always use more space, and new drives are usually bigger.
7. Still in Disk Management, create the new data partition.
8. Copy data to the new data partition.
9. Remove the old hard drive. It is no longer needed.
   

If there's no need to resize the system partition and the new drive is the same size or bigger than the old drive, the entire drive can be copied, simply using "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1M".

When working with modern large hard drives and not moving partitions relative to the start of the disk, the NT boot sector doesn't need to be altered. If moving a partition (for example, to align it for Advanced Format on the new drive) it would be necessary to change "Number of Hidden Sectors" at offset 0x1C in the boot sector.

If the new drive fails, and the old drive has to be used again, the procedure is simple: just change the disk ID to its former ID and unhide the system partition.

Medieval CUE Splitter 1.2 is broken!

Medieval CUE Splitter is a seemingly nice and user friendly Windows application which can split many audio formats using CUE files. It supports many audio formats and preserves tag information. In terms of features, it seems so great, but it's broken and it loses audio data!

I already knew that splitting of MP3 files is broken. I wrote about it in the past, with version 1.0. A quick check in version 1.2 shows that it still doesn't work correctly.

Recently, I learned that FLAC splitting is also broken. The total number of samples in the output files is less than the number of samples in the input file. This means data was lost. There is also another minor bug which may actually be helpful: the MD5 value is not written to the file. This can be used to identify FLAC files may have been split using Medieval CUE Splitter, because "flac -t" will complain about it.

So far, it seems that Monkey's Audio (APE) files split without any data loss. The number of samples is correct, and the concatenated audio data from the split files matches the audio data from the source file. This means that as a workaround, other lossless files can be converted to APE and split. However, this workaround certainly slows things down, and I can't really trust the program because of the other bugs.

Don't upgrade to PowerChute Personal Edition 3.0

If you're running Windows 7 or Vista and you have UAC enabled, don't upgrade to PowerChute Personal Edition 3.0. APC doesn't know how to properly program for Windows 7 and Vista. Their system tray application needs administrative rights, and so a UAC prompt will appear after every bootup or login. APC knows about this issue, and they suggest reducing your security settings as a workaround.

Administrative rights are requested by the executable's manifest. The manifest could be edited or even removed. However, that would probably cause problems. Just use an older version of PowerChute Personal Edition; it works fine.

Prolific PL-2303 driver 2.0.2.1 causes crashes

Version 2.0.2.1 of the Prolific PL-2303 USB serial port driver is buggy. It caused an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (0x1000000a) crash twice, both times when I was sending a file to a serial port via copy in cmd and I aborted the copy with Control-C. Windows fails to find an updated driver, but a much newer driver can be downloaded from Prolific. I'm now using version 3.3.11.152, which seems stable so far. This is in 32 bit Windows 7.

Setting the MAC address on an Inspiron 6400

Dell Wireless 1500 802.11n WLAN Mini-card

The card is actually based on a Broadcom BCM4328 chip, and the drivers are from Broadcom. I'm currently using driver version 5.60.48.35. The advanced tab of properties in Device Manager allows a "Locally Administered MAC Address" to be assigned. It is an 8 byte (or 12 character) hexadecimal string using uppercase letters. It must be a locally administered unicast address, meaning the least significant bits of the first byte are 10 (and therefore the second character is 2, 6, A or E). An address which doesn't follow this format will be accepted without any error messages, but the driver will ignore it, and the card will continue to use its original address.

I wonder if the use of a locally administered address is being enforced to prevent copying of other addresses and circumvention of MAC address filtering on wireless networks. I also wonder if it would be easy to reverse-engineer the driver and remove this limitation. However, I currently have no need for this so I will not attempt it.

Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller

I'm currently using driver version 4.60.0.1. There was no option for changing the MAC address in the advanced tab of properties in Device Manager. However, the address can be changed via the registry. The registry entry needs to be located within the adapter's numbered key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}", the same key where "DriverDesc" is "Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller". Its name needs to be "NetworkAddress" and it must be of REG_SZ (string) type. The address must be entered as a hexadecimal number, with uppercase letters and no separators between bytes. After changing this entry, the adapter has to be disabled and re-enabled for it to take effect. (When changing the address via the properties dialog, Windows does this automatically.)

It's possible to add a "Locally Administered MAC Address" item to the advanced properties tab. All the items there are described by keys in the registry in the "Ndi\params" key within the adapter's key. Since the wireless card sets the MAC address in the same way, you can export the wireless card's "NetworkAddress" key, change the adapter number in the .reg file to the 440x, and then import the .reg file. Alternatively, use the following, also making sure that the number ("0007" here) matches the number of the 440x adapter's key:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0007\Ndi\params\NetworkAddress]
"ParamDesc"="Locally Administered MAC Address"
"type"="edit"
"LimitText"="12"
"UpperCase"="1"
"default"=""
"optional"="1"

The 440x only demands that you use a unicast address, meaning the least significant bit of the first byte is 0 (and therefore the second character is even). If the bit is not zero, the driver will ignore the address and continue using the original address. Unlike with the wireless card, the locally administered bit does not need to be set. This means the mac address of another device can be cloned or spoofed.

A stripped-down Rockbox build for the Archos V2 Recorder

The Archos V2 Recorder has only two megabytes of RAM. This RAM is used for the software running on the device, and whatever RAM remains may be used as a buffer to store MP3 data. It's a very small amount of RAM and even at 128 kbps, most songs cannot fit. Because of this, the hard drive has to spin up frequently to read additional data.

In 2007 I noticed how newer versions of Rockbox left less free buffer space and I decided to make my own build with more free space. The first step was a RomBox build. This helped a lot, but I wasn't satisfied. I saved more RAM by disabling various features which I didn't need: code page loading, language loading and the voice interface. With this build, I have 1.774 MB of buffer space.

I also fixed a few bugs, either by backporting fixes from later versions or by fixing the bug myself. Most notably, I fixed the charging screen issues.

Here are some files associated with this custom build:

• The V2 Recorder build which I'm using
• A slightly less optimized FM Recorder build
• The fonts package
• The build directory with source code

This is all based on Rockbox from November 2007. I've used this build for years on my V2 Recorder without running into any significant problems. I view it as a finished product, because I see no need to update the V2 Recorder to newer versions of Rockbox, and my attempts to minimize memory usage encountered diminishing returns.

I did not make any builds for other old Archos devices because I don't have access to those devices for testing. It should not be hard to build for those. The only tricky part is what I did to the language system to save RAM.

Update 

This is based on Rockbox r15545. You can now download just the patch. Here's a list of the included fixes and changes:

• FS#9638 - temp_cue is unused and wasting memory 
• FS#7631 - Charging screen broken on V2 Recorder. Several fixes enable the charging screen, display of input current on the screen, and proper startup from the charging screen.
• FS#9635 - Instant backlight turn-off on FM/V2 Recorder
• FS#8163 - Rockbox (Sansa) hangs in settings menu. This fixes a crash caused by the scrolling title used for setting text horizontal scrolling speed. 
• Removal of language changing, with English language strings used directly from ROM. (This requires manual intervention when building.)
• Removal of voice functionality.
• Removal of codepage changing
• Removal of the database (this is part of the RomBox instructions).
• Removal of low battery shutdown
• Unused conditionals for removing bookmark functionality. This part is probably incomplete and bookmark functionality remains.

In general, the removals are kind of incomplete and messy. I removed the main memory using parts, but I didn't remove all traces of those features. For example, the settings for removed features still remain. I did not extensively test all possibilities, but I did not run into any problems whatsoever over years of use.