The Dongle

I have an old HP laptop that’s too big for a lap, but that doesn’t matter because the battery’s dead and won’t take a charge. I use it to record KSHE on Sundays, and to play the thousands of songs on my network drive in Winamp.
However, there are two problems with it: one is that it’s still running Windows 7. The biggest problem, though, is the headphone jack has worn to the point that you have to fiddle with it to make it stop humming from a bad ground, and it keeps getting worse. I used to build desktops, but my attempts to disassemble a laptop a few years ago were futile, so I took it to a repair shop. They couldn’t find a replacement jack.
A few weeks ago it was really nice weather, so I sat outside on the porch with the door open and the stereo cranked. It wasn’t loud enough. I missed the old Kenwood 200 watt stereo I used to have that could wake up folks in the next block. It died, but I’m still using the three way JBL speakers.
It wasn’t nearly loud enough, so I went inside, unplugged the little Dell I bought last year (I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and use the TV as a monitor, only not when I’m doing commerce) and went to Amazon for a new two hundred watt amplifier.
I had been at war with Sony since they vandalized my computer with XCP when my then teenaged daughter played a CD she had bought from the record store where she worked, until I bought a Sony TV by accident. Then bought a PS4 on purpose, and when I saw that the TV remote worked the Playstation, I was happy to find a Sony receiver advertised at 100 watts per channel RMS, like the old Kenwood.
It came a week or two ago. I’ll write a review of it later, but for now the important part was that it had Bluetooth, and I found that it played both my phone and my tablet with no problem. It occurred to me that if that old HP had Bluetooth it would solve the problem of its worn jack.
My ancient Acer that I replaced with the Dell had a marked key combination to turn Bluetooth on or off, but not the HP, so I did a little internet research, which indicated that it didn’t have Bluetooth. Okay, I’ll just buy a dongle. I thought I’d just run up to Walgreens and get a dongle and a couple of phone memory chips. I bought the chips, but they didn’t have the dongle.
I knew Walmart had them, because I’d seen them there. But not today, I searched for twenty minutes, found someone who worked there, who looked where they usually were: they were out.
So I ordered one from Amazon. It came yesterday, as did a charity Covid-19 KSHE t-shirt I had ordered at the beginning of April. The dongle came with a driver CD, and a URL for where you could get the drivers from the internet, and actually had a small sheet of paper with printed instructions written by someone who was obviously a foreigner who didn’t know English very well, but it was still readable and unnecessary.
I followed the directions, installing the drivers, and was informed there would now be a Bluetooth icon by the clock icon. It was there. Clicking it gave a menu, one item was to add a device.
Leave it to Microsoft to not follow standards, even if it means doing some things ass backwards. Anything else calls it “Pairing”, which I turned on on the receiver. The computer then started loading drivers and other Bluetooth tools, and the stereo timed out before it finished. I never could get it to pair. I struggled with it for hours before discovering that it already had Bluetooth, when I was digging around in Control Panel. It had been disabled; I had no idea why, I bought the computer second hand and hadn’t needed Bluetooth until then.
So I unplugged the dongle, did a system restore to get rid of what I had just installed, went back in the control panel to enable the built-in Bluetooth, waited for its drivers and stuff to install, and tried again to pair it with the receiver. And failed again.
I gave up last night. I’m pretty sure it’s a Windows problem, so I’ll just solve both of that computer’s problems by installing Linux.
I hope.

The next morning I realized that I actually already had Broadcomm Bluetooth drivers, in the dongle’s install CD, so I uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers that were installed, and installed drivers from the disk; or rather, the network drive I had copied them to.
Apparently the old Bluetooth chip doesn’t support the new drivers. So I again uninstalled the Bluetooth drivers, disabled the Bluetooth chip, plugged the dongle in, and installed the drivers yet again, rebooted, and...
It was worse than before, as if it had no Bluetooth whatever. A look at the device manager showed why—it only showed the disabled internal chip, and not the dongle. Stupid Windows!
Time for Linux. I went to the Kubuntu site and downloaded the ISO. As it was downloading I scrolled through Facebook and discovered a post from Lulu saying that they had just done a huge site redesign and there may be trouble.
Half of my books seemed to be missing. I wasn’t going to be installing Linux today!
A couple of hardcover books were listed as paperback, and with the hardcover’s prices. A couple led to 404s. I did a search on Lulu’s site for one missing book, searching for its ISBN, and was led to some book by someone else.
Fortunately they were still for sale at Barnes & Noble and Amazon, so I simply changed the “buy” URL on the books’ pages.
By then I had forgotten all about Linux, running across a magazine article about the Roman Plague Emperor, who was a philosopher. “Hmm,” I thought, “I haven’t added any new books to my site in a while”, and a philosopher’s musings about a plague Rome was enduring was pretty timely, so I went to Gutenberg; it should only take a few hours or so to format it for the site.
There was a problem: it was almost unreadable. Darmok at Galadra. It was translated a few hundred years ago, and the language was more archaic and obscure than the King James Bible. And it got worse; each page was littered with archaic words, many of which I needed to look up in more than one dictionary because it was missing from Webster’s and OED. One word Google couldn’t even find. On top of that it appeared that whoever scanned it left all the OCR errors in. There were a lot of words starting sentences that weren’t capitalized, and words that were that shouldn’t have been. And every speck of dirt on the scanned page became a comma, making it sound like William Shatner playing James Kirk, and far less readable; “The koala eats, shoots, and leaves.”
I decided to edit it and make it my own, making the unreadable prose readable, understandable, and if I do it right, maybe a pleasant read. I’ve been working on it all week, and am about halfway through the first pass.
But yesterday I remembered the Bluetooth/plug problem again when it annoyed me trying to find some music among all the commercials every radio station was playing, so I burned the ISO on a DVD and started the Linux installation.
Or thought I was. I couldn’t find the right key to get to the BIOS; I’ve seen F2, F9, F10, and F12. So I looked it up on Google. I changed the boot sequence to start with the DVD and exited. Windows started booting. WTF??
My bad, the DVD tray was open.
When it got to the part where it was ready to write to disk, there were only two options: try Kubuntu, or wipe the drive and install it. This was really unusual. I started using Linux when Mandrake came out a couple of decades ago, installing different distros on different computers, but every single time I could either use the whole disk, or dual boot. I finally figured the hard drive was nearly full.
I shut off the power, opened the DVD drive and rebooted, just to make sure that I hadn’t trashed Windows, and it came up all right. So I closed the drive bay and rebooted. Half an hour later when it had only been at the opening Kubuntu screen, it reverted to text mode and displayed an error message that seemed to indicate that it couldn’t read the DVD.
Maybe it just got too hot to read, I’ve seen that before. I hope so, if the DVD has gone bad it will be hard as hell to install Linux, since it will have to be from a thumb drive, and I’m not sure it’s possible on this machine; I saw no external drives in the BIOS’ drive list.
At any rate I shut it off to let it all cool and decided to watch Star Trek, so I went to “Movies” on the TV, went through to the directory where the movies are stored, and Star Trek was gone.
Damn. Star Wars was there, but not Star Trek. So I got on the computer, since the TV sometimes misses things, and it really was gone. So I plugged in my backup drive, which now has four full-system backups. The most recent backup was missing Star Trek. I finally found it on the oldest backup, started the HP back up since it has a network jack, the Dell only has Wi-fi.
It will take days to copy all those movies and TV shows. So it will be a while before I start the next attempt at getting Linux on the HP.

I completed the backup, shut the HP down to let it cool, and then tried to get it to run Linux from the DVD. It locked up before it got to the part where it asks if you want to try it or install it, so apparently the DVD is as worn as the headphone jack. Maybe I can find a USB drive with Kubuntu on it already, but I’m not hopeful.
For a week or so I used my phone’s Bluetooth to hear KSHE, using the Dell to play OGGs. Not an ideal solution. Then I remembered that I still had the old phone, although it no longer has a carrier. The KSHE app was already installed on it, so I started using it.
In the two months since I replaced it I forgot how often it crashed when it used Bluetooth. So that was out, and went back to using the new phone. Then I thought “wait a minute, I can use the headphone jack.” I dug out a stereo RCA cable and couldn’t find an adapter.
Digging through the fire drawer; the kitchen drawer with matches, light bulbs, and other assorted fire stuff for an adapter, I found the old Wi-fi dongle I’d searched for and couldn’t find. Now I have two I don’t need.
But I did find an an adapter and plugged it all up and into wall power, and tried it out.
With the headphone jack it was all bass. It only took a few minutes to come up with a solution; there must be an equalizer app available.
There was. It took a little fiddling to get the sound right, and it’s still not quite as good as from bluetooth or the computer, but it will do.

That was written quite some time ago. Since then, the old phone crapped out and I’ve been using the tablet’s bluetooth. Then today I wondered if Windows 10 had fixed Bluetooth? I googled it, and strangely enough, they had. Really unlike Microsoft, I didn’t expect that.
So now the Dell notebook feeds KSHE to the stereo with Bluetooth. It's accomplished! But I have two unneeded dongles...