A very kind colleague of mine has allowed me to borrow his Bluetooth USB dongle to try out on my Linux laptop. Well, after about 5 minutes of fiddling about on my Windows laptop I managed to get it working with Softick PPP. It was a fairly painless procedure. The next challenge was to make it work on my main laptop which is running Mandriva Linux. This took about 3 minutes with the help of the following page. The only thing I needed to configure was the PPP-peers bit and the contents of the /etc/sysconfig/dund file. After that it was up and at them! I downloaded and installed an IRC client, to see if I could do anything else besides syncronise my Avantgo. Well, it works! It's a bit of a pain in the butt to type anything since you have to use the Zire's Graffiti 2 writing.

[21:22] /*/ [In] mighty-zire (~upirc@xammy.demon.nl) has joined #foobaz
[21:22] < mighty-zire> hello world

Pretty nifty, eh? If you're not a total geek, there's no way you can ever fully appreciate the coolness factor that comes with making things like this work. Don't worry about it too much. The only drawback of using Bluetooth constantly is that it drains your battery like crazy. I suppose you could hook up the power supply, but then you're not really wireless anymore, are you? I can't wait for small nuclear fusion power packs that can fit inside these devices.