I’m rather excited to announce the release of my new plugin, WP Plugin Cache.

Intended for plugin developers, this provides file cache facilities to other plugins. Developers can add a single line to their code and, assuming the user has WP Plugin Cache installed as well, files will be cached.

Expect my existing plugins to be converted over the coming months to use WP Plugin Cache!

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago about the memory card in my daughters mobile phone failing after 4 months (actually 3.5 months to be more precise).

Phones4u sent me a replacement card – a SanDisk equivalent, but a lowly type 2 instead of the Samsung type 6.

I also took the opportunity to write to Samsung to see if there’s anything they’d be willing to do about recovering the lost photos and videos on the card. I sent that letter on Friday so was pleasantly suprised to find a message on my answering machine yesterday from Samsung. It was a chap named Jim, who asked me to give Samsung a call on a specific number with a customer reference. Great.

So today I rang, quoting my reference. I didn’t get the gentleman’s name but he started off by saying that there was nothing that could be done about recovering the data. Odd, that many other companies can. He said that their memory cards are covered by 5 or 10 year guarantees and that I should ring a different number about this. So I dully rang this other number and got through to… Orange sales department? OK, the phone was from Orange but I’d never mentioned this at any point to Samsung.

I rang Samsung back and spoke to Karen. And after giving all my details again, she dropped a corker on me.

Apparantly, Samsung don’t make mobile phone memory cards. Wow. Just, wow. No, apparantly they make memory cards for cameras but not phones. Which is odd, because this is a MicroSD memory card, and not many cameras use those.

She doesn’t know why I was given the number for Orange and was generally unhelpful. When I mentioned Jims name from yesterday, she suggested he call me.

As soon as I hear from him, I’ll let you know. Needless to say, so far, Samsung customer service has been anything but.

Update:

Minutes after posting this, I had a call back – not from Jim, but Helen again.
My customer service query had ended up at the Mobile Phone customer service, and they don’t support memory cards. I was told that the number they’d quoted me earlier (the one that turned out to be Orange) they’d “got from a website”. As that was wrong they were escalating my case elsewhere (didn’t catch where to), but that a response would be 1-3 days away.

After speaking with ZyXEL, they are happy for me to make public their firmware fix for media not appearing in iTunes when using their NSA210 NAS drive.

1. Click here to download the firmware from MediaFire. It’s a little over 26 MB in size.
2. Unzip the resulting file. You should find a .bin and a .txt file
3. Sign into the NSA210 administration screen
4. Click Maintenance > FW Upgrade to open the following screen…
5. Follow the on-screen instructions to upload the .bin file you downloaded and uncompressed previously
6. Once complete you should find your firmware level to be shown as V3.20(AFD.0)2010Apr06
7. I’d now recommend turning off and on the media and iTunes server and rebuilding the database.

If you are having further problems and are from the UK then you need to contact ZyXEL customer services via their email or call them on 0845 122 0301. If you are outside the UK, then you’ll need to contact your local ZyXEL support team.