Today, I cheerfully made what was hopefully my very last call to Telkom’s 10210 non-service centre. It took 35 minutes for someone to answer my call and 10 minutes to slowly (sorry sir, the system is slow) cancel both my residential ADSL services. I cancelled my two 6mbps (paid for 10mbps) lines that I’ve been line-bonding for years in order to achieve a smell of broadband just a smidgeon under 11Mbps.

The reason I cancelled both lines today, is because I got 100mbps uncapped Fibre from Vumatel, and Cool ISP (cisp.co.za) this past Friday.

It has only taken 15 years for decent Broadband to come to suburban South Africa. No thanks to any government institution for that. They have done everything in their power to hamper the private internet service provision industry in South Africa.

What an awesomely dark techno song from VNV Nation.

Really reminds me of the old school, simplistic underground days.

What a great Depeche Mode cover.

If you need to find the magic secret sauce to get a Vodafone/Huawei K4606 going under linux then the following will help.

Stick the following contents into a file under /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/12d1\:1f19 (the backslash is to escape the colon in the shell)


# Vodafone Mobile Broadband (Huawei) K4606

MessageContent="55534243123456780000000000000011062000000000000200000000000000"


Then, make sure that usb_modeswitch is invoked by Udev during hotplug by editing /etc/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules
and then adding


ATTRS{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1f19", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"


Here’s a blast from the past that I entirely forgot about. Noise Unit, a Frontline Assembly side project.
Hollow Ground, is an absolute classic that defined the era of industrial.