Archive for December, 2007

“Computer, calculator.”

Silence.

“Computer, cal-cu-lay-torrr.”

“Calculator.”

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I’m talking a customer through some virus-related unhappiness, and my phone vibrates in my pocket. Could be the guy doing a callout needing an address or something, so I pick up and–

“Congratulations! You’ve won fifty-” Call duration: 00:00:02

If you miss a call, google the number before ringing it back. If you’re quick enough to pick up a spam call, just hang up. Don’t press 5 or anything, just hang up.

Also put yourself on the Do Not Call list, you can register land lines and mobile numbers and it takes less time than it just took me to type this up.

This floppy drive lived by the sea.

Guess what happened to the rest of the computer.

Update: I’ve since moved on and started a proper driver guide, including a bit more background info on this device, here: https://tim.id.au/blog/?page_id=121. I’ll leave this page here, but check out the new one too.

Do you have one of these?

I bought one on eBay about 6 months ago, and promptly lost the driver CD that came with it. It actually works out of the box on the latest Ubuntu Linux, but I’ve been completely stuck for Windows support for ages.

Windows XP detects it as an “ISSCBTA”, possibly the least helpful device name I’ve ever seen, and doesn’t know about drivers for it. There’s a driver for Vista on Windows Update, but as far as I can tell that one’s completely broken and useless.

A guy in this thread made an image of the original driver disc and put it up on rapidshare. For the sake of posterity I’m mirroring it here: https://tim.id.au/static/isscbta.zip (13MB!)

I’ve repackaged it in just a zip file, not an ISO in a RAR, so you can just extract it to a folder and run setup.exe without mounting or burning it.

The included software is weird, but functional:

You’ll probably want to remove it from startup items in the start menu too.