Comments on: Idiot Interfaces 67 and 68

By: Bill Bowman

Bill Bowman — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:57:07 +0000

I once had a bluetooth on my dongle and let me tell you, that hurt like the dickens.

By: Ron Fischer

Ron Fischer — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 20:45:51 +0000

Recalling more details. Phone’s bluetooth password is probably just configured once by you. When you discover, select & pair to the phone from the PC the phone may or may not ask you to confirm depending on how bluetooth is configured.

By: Ron Fischer

Ron Fischer — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 05:44:05 +0000

Bluetooth was a latecomer to XP. Even today Microsoft doesn’t provide a complete stack of protocols. You depend on your dongle vendor to fill the gaps. Some do it well. I think Kensington is a good brand.

Make sure Bluetooth is turned on on both devices and the phone is set to be discoverable. Ask PC to find devices. When you see phone, pair with it. Phone should pop dialog about someone wanting to pair, give password to phone and say yes. PC should then say device wants password to pair up, give it same one. After this your phone should appear in list of paired devices on me PC. Phone probably supports showing your PC its file system.

You could pair in the other direction, but I doubt a PC has service profiles the phone will find interesting.

So remember pairing is not symmetric it’s about seeing the service profiles on one device from another. You pair to something whose services you want to use. Pairing goes: search, select device to pair with, share passwords & accept on both sides.

Also check Kensington web site support.

Luck!

By: ima

ima — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 02:55:25 +0000

Was John`s explanation of any help to you?
Ima

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 15:30:45 +0000

Telephone keypads were designed to be like telephone dials (which I remember, so you must too), with the 1 on the top and the 0 on the bottom. And dials were designed that way so that dialing 1 (or rather letting go after you dialed it) would transmit one click, and dialing 0 would transmit ten clicks. When area codes were assigned, long after the design of dials, AT&T made a point of assigning low-click-count area codes to populous places: hence New York got 212 (five clicks), L.A. got 213 (six clicks), and Chicago got 312 (also six clicks).

When push-button keypads were first being worked on, Bell Labs folks experimented with using accounting-type dial keypads, and also investigated having large buttons with no “whitespace” between them. The latter design worked much better (it’s harder for the finger to slip off a larger button), but was inexplicably rejected by the PHBs of the day.

ObTrivia: the original design of the Touch-Tone keypad allowed for a fourth column of buttons; these were never used on the public network, but were used on the DoD network to allow high-priority callers to boot lower ones from scarce trunk lines.