I don't recall 28bytes mentioning the PhoneLabs Dock-N-Talk: This device intermediates between a subscriber set designed for use with a land-line and a cell-phone,
so that the land-line set can be used to place and receive calls by way of the mobile phone. (The land-line set can remain connected to the land-line, and even put a cellular call on-hold while taking a land-line call. To connect the Dock-N-Talk to a cell-phone hand-set, one needs either an adapter cable (which will vary based upon the hand-set) or the Bluetooth module.)

Now, many people might ask

Uhm, why?

The answer that has potential relevance for me is that I have a collection of vintage phones that I would like to have in service in some future home (and the Woman of Interest has a red WECo Model 500 that she probably won't want to retire to the attic), but I'm not entirely sure that I will have a land-line. It would seem less frivolous to buy an adapter than to lease a land-line connection just to be able to put the vintage phones to use.

Now, the product page and the FAQ make no mention of pulse dialing, and my presumption is that the Dock-N-Talk requires tone dialing from the land-line set. But there are commercially available devices that can be placed in-line with a pulse-dialing phone to convert the pulses to tones; and there are other devices, which can be held to the microphone to produce the sounds for tone-dialing.

The fix for the Windows Bluetooth set-up problem was to select Cancel during the portion of the installation that was failing. The set-up routine would then ask for permission to reboot the system. After the system were rebooted, any attempt to use the applications from that package would cause the set-up routine to resume, and it would be able to complete successfully.

So the program was trying to do something that it couldn't do without the computer first being rebooted. It plainly should have at least suggested that much, instead of plaguing me with requests to activate the Bluetooth unit.

Anyway, I will now be more concerned to get Linux to interact usefully with the phone set by way of Bluetooth.

The Dell Bluetooth module arrived yester-day. Physical installation seemed to go off without a hitch, the little Bluetooth light on the case now lights-up, and my Linux installation sees the device (when it is activated).

However, the Windows program for setting-up a protocol stack isn't working. It will run for a while, doing no more than showing a little bit of disk activity, then tell me to activate the unit (by pressing Fn+F2). It doesn't seem to much matter what I do at that point, whether it be to turn the device off and back on, or just turn it off; the program repeats its unhelpful behavior.

The Windows package in which that set-up program was included is obnoxious in other ways. Although it promises otherwise, its only function after a failed or damaged installation is to remove all of the installation. And when one seeks a reïnstallation, it insists upon re-writing the firmware of the unit, which takes a fair amount of time. Partly, this is dat Ol' Debbil, software that assumes that the user is more stupid than the code.

Since I now have another Bluetooth device (my cellphone), I am retrofitting my principal computer for Bluetooth capability. I could have got a USB Bluetooth 2.0 dongle for about US$25, but there's a compartment in the case for a Dell-specific Bluetooth 2.0 module, and Dell sells refurbished modules for about US$20 (counting tax and shipping). The module, like a dongle, connects by way of the USB host interface, albeït not with a standard USB connector.

What I'd like to do is get something installed so that the phone would see the computer as a head-set, and the computer would alert me when the phone were ringing and so forth.

Another virtue of installing the Dell module is that the already present, built-in Bluetooth light will actually do something.