Let me start off by saying I hate bluetooth on laptops.  I love my bluetooth headset for my cell phone, but for laptops, connecting any type of device, namely a cellphone, is just a freakin’ nightmare.  When I previously had a Toshiba M200, I solved the problem by replacing the Toshiba stack with the Microsoft Bluetooth stack in XP SP2. 

However, I now have a Sony VGN-SZ381p laptop for which I’m having the similar problems as I did with my M200.  The software that comes bundled with the Sony SZ series laptops is absolutely terrible.  I’ve finally found a solution in the NotebookReview.com forum’s that is worth re-iterating here.

The solution entails is installing the much friendlier Widcomm v5 bluetooth utility followed by install a modified version of the Sony SZ bluetooth drivers that will allow it to work with the Widcomm software.  Why use the Widcomm software?

• vastly superior and easier setup than all other bluetooth software I’ve seen
• ability to sync Outlook contact and calendar data with non-Windows Mobile cell phones
• view and copy files on your phone in shell mode.
• set-up virtual serial ports to use bluetooth in certain applications

In my case, it finally made it possible for me to connect my Plantronic Voyager 510 headset to my laptop so I could use it with Skype.

Step-by-step:

1. Uninstall all previous bluetooth utilities/software
2. Turn off your bluetooth using the Sony utilities (VAIO Wireless).  On my laptop this is Hotkey combination Fn+F1.
3. Download the Widcomm v5 software and install it.  It’s 78MB, so I’m not hosting it :)  Instead grab it from here.
   1. While installing it, it will tell you that it cannot find a bluetooth device, which makes sense since we turned it off in Step 2
   2. Choose “Cancel” to continue with the installation.
4. After installation completes, turn your bluetooth on using Fn+F1 (or whatever other method you want to use).  When prompted for drivers, you the modified Sony SZ drivers. These are only 41kb so I’ve hosted them here.

Now everything should work!

JDiskReport is a nifty freeware tool that will analyze your HD and tell you where all your diskspace is going.  With the proliferation of large hard drives it’s easy to leave large files around w/o even realizing it.  The tool is completely ad and nag free.  Being Java based, you’ll have to install JRE first.

Check it out: http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Here’s a list of 7 random things that you probably didn’t know you could do on the internet:

1. See what a website looked like 10 years ago!

Check out the Way Back Internet machine, which is a website that has archived tons of pages, dating back to 1996.  For example:

- Google in 1998

- MSN in 2000 (which i think looks better than it does today)

- Sun in 1996

- Marthastewart.com in 1998 (not really “a good thing”)

2. Order New Mexican tamales

Apparantly these are world famous mexican tamales from a restaurant in Santa Fe named “Leona’s Restaurante“.  $15 per dozen with a pretty heft $30 shipping and handling fee..it does get sent overnight though so you could be enjoyihng a couple dozen tamales with your morning espresso!

3. Become a reality TV star

My wish has always been to be on survivor, but they seem to want to discriminate by only allowing American citizens..sigh. (Maybe some network genius will come up with “World Survivor” and Canadians will come and stomp some ass)  But anyways, check out ManiaTV where you can submit a 5-minute video clip of yourself, and if chosen, they’ll feature 1 hour dedicated to you and your life.  Better hope you have something interesting going on that’ll fill an hour of video tape

4. Compare cell phone plans across carriers

WireFly is pretty good as helping you compare plans and phones across carriers.  They seem to miss some of the promo deals that may be happening, so make sure you double check each carrier before you make your final decision.

5. Anonymously rat out your co-workers’ annoying habits

Ever wanted to let your co-workers know about some annoying habit they have? Bad B.O? Weird facial ticks? Burping and belching grossing you out? Well now you can… Check out annoyingcoworker.net.

6. Buy a cheaper alternative (and just as good) to the Tempurpedic mattress

Ever dreamed about owning a tempurpedic memory foam mattress that you see at stores like Brookstone, but don’t want to fork out $1500+ dollars?  Do what I did, and order from memoryfoam.com and save yourself a bundle. Not only do they have same quality and better warranty, but you can also customize the mattress with different layers depending on how you sleep. Make sure you visit their forums to read advice on what configurations to buy.

7. Become a world champion Rock Paper Scissor player

Buy the Rock Paper Scissor strategy guide from Amazon and you’ll increase your odds of winning the World Rock, Paper, Scissor championship. 

I’ve currently got an iPod 30GB Photo and correspondingly uses iTunes.. But I also have a media center.  Biggest pain in the butt is tryign to synchronize the song rating information between the WMP and iTunes.  Both apps store song rating information outside of the actual files, in their own proprietary library meta-data files.  The result? Song ratings in iTunes+Ipod aren’t recognized by WMP on my MCE… not cool.  You would think that rating information would be standardized in the MP3 header along with the other ID3 tag information.

I stumbled upon this thread over at The Green Button, where some dude created a neat little app to sync song data between iTunes and WMP.  AWESOME.

Update: The software’s creator has just updated it as of Oct 6th to add some cool features. Notably, command-line operation and my own requested feature of not sync’ing ratings for songs where the rating hasn’t changed.  The latter is important if you have any playlist that is derived from “last changed” date of songs.

App is a little buggy, but it does the job.  I have already provided him feedback to make sure on subsequent runs of the tool, that he only updates/touches songs where the ratings have actually changed.  This makes a difference for those of us that use smart playlists based on song changed date. 

Note: Make sure you have WMP setup to “Maintain my star ratings as global in the media files”. This basically tells WMP to store ratings information inside the MP3 itself.  This helps when you want to copy your music to other computers, because if you don’t do this, your songs ratings won’t be present on the target machine.