Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup --
Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup

My Bluetooth dongle has stopped working. It was fine on Monday, broken on Tuesday, broken yesterday until I fiddled with it in some unknown way, then worked again, and now I can't get it to do a damn thing. You wouldn't think this would be a problem, because my laptop has built-in Bluetooth. But the Bluetooth software on my computer has some kind of stupid security function that won't let it connect to any device unless it pairs with it, and when I contacted the manufacturer of my steno machine to ask him for the pairing code, he said, "Oh, there is no pairing code. Just tell it to connect without pairing." That works for old versions of the software, but not the current one, and I've tried downgrading, but that doesn't work either. So the obvious solution is to use the software that came with the Bluetooth dongle, which does work without pairing, but reconfigure it so that it uses my computer's built-in Bluetooth rather than the dongle. Nope. Bluesoleil 2.6 is old enough to work without pairing, but too old to be aware of the existence of built-in Bluetooth. It's dongles or nothing, as far as it's concerned. Well, I could buy Bluesoleil 6.0, the current version, and then maybe it would let me connect without a dongle. You bet, but not without pairing. "But the manufacturer of my device says there's no pairing code!" I say to the company that makes Bluesoleil. "Check the packaging or user manual of your device for the default code," they say helpfully. "The manufacturer of my device does not know the pairing code, so he was not able to put it on the packaging or the manual." Sucks to be me. Well, I guess I'll just have to use my USB cable, which I used on Tuesday (and which was kind of annoying, especially since I had to ferry both steno machine and laptop back and forth across the room six times over seven hours, and the cable kept getting tangled whenever I moved it.) But of course the USB port in the steno machine is arranged in such a way that I can't actually tilt the left-hand keyboard to a comfortable angle when I'm using the USB cable, because the tilting mechanism is blocked by the cord. Fnarr rarr grumble rumble graaargh. _ respond?