Bluetooth Question

I have a netbook. It has a Bluetooth dongle. An IOGear dongle using a Broadcom 2046 chip. Don't know if that makes any difference.

I have a phone. A Samsung Instinct. Don't know if that makes any difference.

I wanted to try to use my Samsung as a data modem for my netbook in those few moments when I didn't have WiFi close by. Never really got it to work. Not really a huge concern for me, as I spend most of my time within easy access of WiFi.

And now, when I have my netbook on, it seems to try to connect every 30 seconds or so to my phone.

• I work out of cell phone reception, so it couldn't connect on my desk if I wanted it to, which really I don't
• It drops to the speed dial menu after it fails and drops the lock, which puts me in danger of butt dialing
• It keeps it from being in sleep mode, thus eating the battery

So, clearly, I hate hate hate that it does this.

Any pointers to fixing this behavior while still keeping the Bluetooth dongle on? I on occasion want to copy things to the phone without finding my USB cable, and would rather have things on.

Phoon Fail

We all love having our Bluetooh® Wireless Technology

I have a lot of problems with you bits!

I haven't yet removed the cut-tag style from this blog's default. It's a minor thing, but I nearly never write long enough to justify it, and there's no conditional.

My work machine doesn't start ssh, cups, cron or samba on startup, meaning I must do it manually, which sucks. Really considering a reinstall. Perhaps "planning" is a better word. Not having printing always is a bit annoying, and SMB networking is more a toy than a crucial item, but SSH is crucial to me, and cron is more so.

You see, I have a program called jBiff that tells me when important emails come, and that requires them to be scheduled via crontab. No cron, no messages, and I get people coming up to me saying "Did you get my email?" I hate being caught flat-footed in those situations. So, must reinstall to fix cron.

And my Samsung Instinct phone will not talk to Linux. That one's a bit beyond my ability to manipulate, I think.

Love The Phone You're With

I used to be on Verizon, and when I was there, I had a Blackberry Pearl. I have to say, it's a swank phone. Never had an iPhone, so I don't know the full experience of the ultimate app-phone, so to me, the coolest phone I ever held is that Blackberry.

But that's not my phone anymore.

Right now, I carry a Samsung Instinct. It is not the phone I want. But it is the phone I have.

I am not a bleeding-edge wired individual, but I have been electronically connected for over 20 years. I'm wired and wireless and all that. And today, Google is the center of all connectivity. Between the phone and the provider, it was quick and painless to set up Google Voice as my voice mail, which is nice. Someone calls you and it translates it and sends it to you. That's sweet. Plus, web interface, which you don't have to deal with the confusing "If you want X, dial 4" stuff.

Google Mail was also an easy config. I do most of my GMail manipulation from Thunderbird via IMAP and between that and sorting, I've gone hog-wild for labels, but the mail interface is inbox-only. This just means I have to be more clear in sorting and filtering to make sure only what I want enters the inbox, but that's OK.

But that's it. I want to sync the on-board calendar with my Google Calendar, but it seems there's no connection capability. I learned the joy of having an online calendar when I worked for the clinic, but the calendar I had was the clinic's Exchange calendar, so I lost all my stuff when I left. The onboard calendar is pretty neat looking, but you can't have it synchronize with my main contacts list in Gmail. Yeah, there's a synch through Sprint, and that's fine. It means I can get my contacts back should I lose my phone, but that still means I manage them through on-screen one-handed typing rather than the full keyboard on my desktop.

I use XMPP, mostly through Google Talk, and the choices I have are AIM, Yahoo or MSN, and I went to GTalk to avoid those three. And there's no connection between my connections in GMail and my phone connections.

Plus, it uses a different power and connect cable than everything else I own, which I think use Micro-AB USB. The industry should unify on one.

But it is pretty, it has Bluetooth, it has a camera, it takes a microSD card, and it works just fine as a phone. It even works in the house, while K's phone kinda doesn't. There are elements I don't like about it, sure, but I do like it. I am decided in being happy with it.