I am very very happy with this phone, but there is one problem. My Google Nexus S already received the Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.4) upgrade and as the Galaxy Note came with (only) 2.3.6 I wanted to see whether the software is all up to date.

So into Settings – About Phone – Software Update – Update

Clicking on the latter first gives a warning about being on wifi or not and after clicking OK I come to a disclaimer page with Terms and Conditions on the top and Privacy Policy at the bottom. Both are in Mandarin Chinese and I can only proceed to the next screen when I accept both.

After happily agreeing the confirm button becomes clickable, but after clicking on that I receive an error that tells me (in broken English): Registration is failed. Try again?
No matter how many times I click on OK (to try again), I always get back to this screen.

Before I decided to write a post about my issue, I already have contact the Samsung Customer Service Center on 3 (three) occasions. Needless to say that I think that Samsung needs some time to discover the Service part of their Customer Service Center as the level of that currently is horrendous at best. I even dare to go as far to say that I suspect that the people that man their “service” center are trained to give the most ridiculous and evasive answers possible.

I also tried calling the center in Hong Kong, but although English is a language choice in their menu, the only words the staff can utter in English are “esjuze me Sir, but…”

To give you a sample of my requests and the unreasonable and non-personable replies from the staff at the center I have collected them and pasted them below.

Replying to their emails is not an option as they bounce back…

EMAIL TRIAL 1
request:

Since approximately a week I am the proud owner of a Samsun Galaxy Note. As my previous phone (Google Nexus S, which I also purchased through Hong Kong) already was upgraded to Android 4.0.4, it was a bit of a disappointment to see that my brand new Galaxy Note was on 2.3.6.

I therefore have tried to perform the Software update, but I cannot get through the registration process:

Settings – About phone – Software update – Update

There I first need to accept Terms and conditions and Privacy Policy. When I tick both boxes and click on Confirm first a screen appears that says

Registering device…

quite quickly followed by an error that says (in poor English):

Registration is failed. Try again?

(Screenshot attached)

No matter how many times I click on OK (to try again) the error always comes back.

If this means that I therefore cannot upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich, then basically I have a useless product.

How can I solve this apart from rooting the phone?

Thanks,
Piet Bos

reply:

Dear Piet

This is an E-mail from Customer Service Department of Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd.

Thanks for enquiry. Sorry to inform you that we do not have the upgrade for this model at this moment. For latest news, please kindly keep update from our website.

Thank you for your supporting to Samsung product.

Should you have further enquiry, please free feel to contact us at (852)3698-4698 or visit http://www.samsung.com/hk and click “Contact us” button to send E-mail to us, we are always at your services.

Yours Sincerely
Customer Service Department
Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd.

EMAIL TRIAL 2
request:

attempt #2 to communicate with you.

I purchased the Galaxy Note in HongKong, but I am living in Beijing, mainland China, where I currently am.

To register the phone, I need to go to:
1. Settings
2. About phone
3. Software update
4. Update (check for updates)

The next screen first shows a Disclaimer and I have to accept the Terms and conditions as well as the Privacy Policy.

After ticking both boxes I click on Confirm.

However, almost immediately an error message comes back that says Registration is failed. Try again?
(screenshot attached)

No matter how many times I click on OK (to try again) the error always comes back.

It would be really helpful when you can offer a solution to this problem. In my previous attempt to contact you via email, I received a non-related answer upon which I replied to the message. However, for whatever reason, replying to your replies results in bouncing emails.

Also calling your helpdesk is completely futile as the staff barely speaks English and does not address the questions. It actually seems that they have no knowledge whatsoever of the device models and operation menus.

reply:

Dear Piet

This is an E-mail from Customer Service Department of Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd.

Thanks for enquiry. Samsung account for checking updates is able to use in Hong Kong. However, we do not have information for Hong Kong mobile using this service at this moment.

Thank you for your supporting to Samsung product.

Should you have further enquiry, please free feel to contact us at (852)3698-4698 or visit http://www.samsung.com/hk and click “Contact us” button to send E-mail to us, we are always at your services.

Yours Sincerely
Customer Service Department
Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd.

EMAIL TRIAL 3
request:

Before this email, I already have contacted the Samsung Customer Service THREE TIMES, twice via email, once via telephone.

All three experiences were horrendous at best and have left me with a real sour taste in my mouth after just having forked out a substantial amount of money for a phone.

I begin to suspect that the people manning the Customer Service desk have been trained to giving evasive answers. Naturally not giving a working reply-to email address feeds my suspicion.

Suffice to say that by now I demand an answer that addresses my question in full.

Problem:
I purchased the Galaxy Note in HongKong, but I am living in Beijing, mainland China, where I currently am.

To register the phone, I need to go to:
1. Settings
2. About phone
3. Software update
4. Update (check for updates)

The next screen first shows a Disclaimer and I have to accept the Terms and conditions as well as the Privacy Policy.

After ticking both boxes I click on Confirm.

However, almost immediately an error message comes back that says Registration is failed. Try again?
(screenshot attached)

No matter how many times I click on OK (to try again) the error always comes back.

Regards,
Piet Bos

reply:

Dear Piet

This is an E-mail from Customer Service Department of Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd.

Thanks for enquiry. According to your mobile situation, please kindly back up necessary information first. Then, please kindly bring the device, invoice and warranty card to our customer service centre for further inspection.

Thank you for your supporting to Samsung product.

Should you have further enquiry, please free feel to contact us at (852)3698-4698 or visit http://www.samsung.com/hk and click “Contact us” button to send E-mail to us, we are always at your services.

Yours Sincerely
Customer Service Department
Samsung Electronics H.K. Co. Ltd

Anonymous person at Samsung Customer Service Department:
DID YOU FUCKING READ MY EMAIL???

Unfortunately still no answer to what I think is a pretty normal question.

Naturally I welcome anyone that has the same experience and/or knows someone at Samsung that can shed light on this issue to let me know!

Just downloaded WordPress for Android app from the Android market.

This makes the wpToGo app redundant and “development will be discontinued in favor of the official WordPress app”.

The app is suitable for self hosted sites as well as WordPress.com sites.

If you’re on android and WordPress then you can scan this code to download the app yourself.

More info on the official WordPress for Android page.

There are numerous apps available via the marketplace and one of them is wpToGo, as the name suggests, WordPress on your phone.

As you can imagine, this little post is written on the HTC Magic.

Off now to cook, Mia after all has to put up with my geek behaviour, so I’d better show that I do care…

Yesterday I was unpleasantly surprised to receive an email from the Google Search Quality Team sent to all possible email addresses for the domain beijingdaytrips.com; the subject line read “Malware notification regarding beijingdaytrips.com”.
[singlepic=276,320,240,,center]

After reading the vague email, I of course went to check immediately and what I saw was not pleasant: a dark red Google screen that said that the site I was planning to visit was malicious.

In Firefox I disabled the warning message (seems not possible in Chrome, my default browser), so I could have a look at my source code. All the way at the bottom I noticed some sort of code that I certainly hadn’t put there. It was some Javascript calling “Yahoo! Counter starts” and pointing to 2 IP addresses 218.93.202.61/cp/ and 78.110.175.21/cp/. With a quick search I discovered that these IP’s point to some Russia mafia sites for all kinds of shit you certainly don’t want on your computer.
[singlepic=277,320,240,,center]

Since the bad code seemed to be in the footer I uploaded the footer again to check if that helped. It didn’t. I then had a look at the footer.php stored on my computer and saw to my dismay that it actually had changed! That piece of shitty code had been added to my footer.php on my own very computer without my knowledge!!!

Mind you I have a paid security package from AVG that scans my computer each and every day.

So I deleted the malicious code, uploaded the clean file and had another look in the source code. Huh? Shitty code was still there! Time to contact the help desk of Namecheap. Their first response was that they could not help with Google warnings, but after explaining again they started to think with me.

Now, 36 hours later, the site is up and running again, although the Google warning still has to be removed. My best guess is that disabling the warning will take longer than them enabling it in the first place, but so be it UPDATE March 5 noon-time: site is back into safety zone, wonderful to see that they white-list as fast as blacklist!. A safer internet is what we all want, right?

If you would like to know how I eventually got rid of the malicious code, please read along.

Since uploading a clean footer.php didn’t help, I deleted all theme-files and re-uploaded clean ones: no positive results.

Then I deleted the entire WordPress installation and uploaded it again, while I was at it, also upgraded to the latest version. Again, no positive results.

I had CCleaner, Spybot Search & Destroy and AVG run full system checks. This afternoon I added another paid program: Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware. Spybot and CCleaner came up with the usual entries, nothing to worry about and certainly nothing that pointed even remotely in the direction of this “Yahoo! Counter starts”. The full computer scan of AVG also didn’t turn up anything, so now it was down to Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to come up with something, otherwise it would have been EUR 25 down the drain…

It did actually find 11 malicious entries that I quarantined and deleted! Makes you wonder why the other 3 cannot pick up on that…

Since the malicious piece of code had been able to add stuff to my files, search through my entire computer to extract FTP login details, use Filezilla without causing any alarmbells to go off and upload the edited files to my server, I was not taking any risks anymore.

I changed all passwords and deleted all my existing FTP-accounts. I printed out a list of all my existing passwords (email, MySQL, WordPress login, etc.) and deleted them permanently from my computer. The only safe place is a hard copy (i.e. a paper with all this info) and you just gotta hope that you won’t lose it!

In the meantime the help desk had been checking the entire site on their end too and eventually told me that it had to be the databases. They had checked them but couldn’t find anything. Of course I could delete them and use an old backup to restore them in another clean WordPress install, but I first wanted to try out something else.

I made a list of all installed plugins and then deleted them all from the server. I checked the site and…. the malicious code was gone! , yup my first happy face.

I then downloaded all fresh (and therefore clean) versions of the plugins. Now I needed a secure FTP, so I did a search and came up with WinSCP. To enable it I needed to set up shell access on my cPanel and generate a public and a private key. Also Namecheap needed to enable shell access for me on their side and when that was done (and I had to write down another long password on my hard copy) I could start uploading all fresh plugins again.

It is now 2 hours ago that my site is clean again and I immediately requested Google and StopBadware to review my site.

The good thing about this experience is that I never even knew that FTP was so unsafe and that I now have Secure FTP access to my sites. With the private encrypted key, it will take a very long time for any type of software to do a “guess attack” on what it possibly could be.

I also learned that although Namecheap has not offered hosting for a very long time, they certainly make their customers feel safe in their hands. They literally have been doing anything in their power to solve this serious problem. The people that man their help desk are very valuable to the success of the organisation, something my old host could learn quite a bit from…

Namecheap Help Desk and in particular Evgeniy Z, thanks for all your support!

WordPress 2.7 has been out for a month orso and although I didn’t really want to change, I guess I’d better, because lots of plugins are updated to this latest version too and I don’t want anything to break. The direct changes for you as the viewer are none, but the entire look of the admin panel, the dashboard, has had a major make over. They have changed the top navigation to sidebar navigation of which I am not a great fan, but flexibility is important when working on the web and I will get used to this eventually…

The update went smooth, which – although never something really went wrong (knock on wood) – is always a relief. Basically you are deleting your entire site and then uploading the new software, so there is always a chance that your entire site is gone, yup a pretty scary thought!

After the update I first checked if my site was still there and it was, so that was cool, the famous three step upgrade worked once again!
My new admin panel was missing the sidebar however and if it wasn’t for the sneakpeeks I had been taking I would not even have known that it was missing. Fortunately I found the solution pretty quickly: it had to do with the Ozh admin drop down plugin that was no longer needed for 2.7.
Today I also noticed that my lightbox view (the cool overlay for viewing pictures) was not working anymore. After some searching on the WordPress forums I found another lightbox plugin by Rupert Morris that promised to always work. I uploaded it and indeed the lightbox is back; tiny bit different from the previous one, but I can live with that. Most important is that it has kept its promise: it works

I will not go into every detail of my Nokia software update, but I can mention that it was a horrible experience. Actually I am writing this in reverse order as I first did the Nokia and then the WordPress one, which was all the better for me…

I had to backup my entire phone (Nokia 6300), then install the update and then it briefly mentioned that probably all my settings were turned back to factory defaults. Wow, nice of you to tell me after the fact…NOT.
No worries though, with the previously made backup, I would be able to restore it back to my own settings. Well, unfortunately that part didn’t work and I had to redo my entire phone!

THAT SUCKS Mr. Nokia! No more software updates for my phone, that is a sure thing!

Bluetooth

Ever since I have my new phone I once every now and then like to synchronize the phone with the compu and I do that with bluetooth. The synchronizing all goes allright, but right after that my computer shuts down. It shows a blue screen with loads of error messages to make sure that you realize that something serious is wrong!

After restarting the thing, it can hold for about 3 mins, even in safe mode, before it collapses again, so that is not good at all!

Solution: go into the BIOS and shut down Bluetooth alltogether. Basically you have to ask yourself how often you use it. And since my answer only is when I want to synchronize my phone, I have decided that it works a lot better to get a USB cable at the Nokia shop and get rid of the mafan once and for all!

Basically Ericsson has for a long time been a favorite of me, but ever since Sony joined them the product has gone down, pity because it used to be a really good business phone.

Anyways, time for a new one and I decided to go back to Nokia. I can’t care less about an onboard camera, MP3-player, radio, email or any of that shit, because that’s where I have a computer for, right?

This Summer Nokia came with a new model, the 2630, perfect for me! It’s almost half flatter than my old one and I think it looks really slick! The actual measurements are 105mm x 45mm x 9.9mm (on it’s thinnest point) and it weighs only 66g.

image source: mobilegazette.com

A slight disadvantage was of course that you cannot exchange info one on one with SonyEricsson and connecting the Nokia with Bluetooth to my computer for the first time, caused an enormous crash at the latter…

Well that it all behind me now, so no point to write another story about that nuisance and finally after 3 days I can now start using my phone