bilingual / çift lisanlı blog

I just received my Sony Ericsson K750c (c denotes an Asian model). It’s a pretty decent phone – apparently the best seller of the company last year. I decided to buy this model instead of a newer model because it uses regular memory stick duo (and pro duo) as opposed to the micro version that came out more recently. I thought it would be a cheaper to get a decent sized stick for this model and I was right. I just ordered a 2gig Sony one with MagicGate (I’m not mentioning because I’ll use this, but to make price comparison easier) for around $70 from overstock.com. There’s also better support for it on both Windows and Linux because of the relative maturity of the phone.

As soon as I got the phone I wanted to install an rss feed reader so I can read lewrockwell.com articles from anywhere I want. Most free rss readers seem to require some sort of registration the purpose of which escapes me. So I finally found one that doesn’t need registration. This one isn’t free-as-in-free-software either so I will need to find a replacement. The software is distributed as a .jar file which is a glorified .zip that java enabled devices know how to handle. You just send the file to the device and it asks you what to do with it. “Install” would be my pick :) But how do you actually send the file to the device?

First you need to have your bluetooth set up under linux. Nowadays it’s not that difficult. Then you need to download some sort of obex ftp client which is the client for an ftp-over-bluetooth kind of protocol. Then you use this client to send the file to the device and voila (or “bak ÅŸu allahın iÅŸine”) the phone installs the software and you can start using (!) it. (Come to think of it, wonder what it does with the archive file itself once it’s decompressed. Probably deletes it)

If your bluetooth is set up properly you can use the hcitool utility to scan and find your phone.

oktay@sibop:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:12:EE:90:DF:FE Kestane
oktay@sibop:~$

Next, you can use the obexftp command to send the file to this phone.

oktay@sibop:/usr/share/doc/gnome-bluetooth$ obexftp -b 00:12:EE:90:DF:FE -p ~oktay/Desktop/RSSManager.jar
Browsing 00:12:EE:90:DF:FE …
Channel: 6
Connecting…done
Sending “/home/oktay/Desktop/RSSManager.jar”…-done
Disconnecting…done
oktay@sibop:/usr/share/doc/gnome-bluetooth$

If your phone keeps asking for a PIN/Password but won’t accept whichever password you enter, you need to configure /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf and set the “pin_helper” parameter in “options” to something like:

pin_helper /usr/bin/pin-helper;

You can use various other pin helper scripts like I had decided to use ‘bluez-pin’ but apparently I neglected to fix the line above and it still works. Beats me. I had tried a bunch of other stuff one of which must have worked. :)

So just ignore this post till I figure out what’s going on.