I don’t receive packages from overseas very often, so I’m not as good at estimating shipping times as well as Adriano obviously is… my Pico Card arrived today. I don’t think the timing could have been any better! (Is it odd that the first thing that comes to mind to say is, “Happy, happy, joy, joy!”? Ren & Stimpy has stained my generation.)

Following the BlueTooth setup instructions over at WikiWikiNewt, at Adriano’s suggestion (plus it’s just a really good resource for most things Newton), I was quickly on my way to having BlueTooth configured on my Newton. However, before I do my quick explanation of how it went, let me just say these two things: this is the buggiest thing I’ve ever tried to do with my Newton MessagePad 2100; and Escale (part of DCL) works just fine on the Intel Macs (this tested it on my MacBook Pro).

After downloading and installing¹ Blunt and the prerequisite packages, I started trying to configure it. Configuration is pretty straightforward, but I experienced a few crashes here and there (some to my not paying attention to which was the English and which was the German package, but others related to trying to “Get Services”). I’m not talking hard freezes, I’m talking spontaneous reboots.

Discovering, pairing, getting services, and sending files via BlueTooth OBEX is all pretty straight forward both on the Newton OS side and the Mac OS X side, but my success rate is about 0.75 notes sent per reboot. Basically, I can send one to two notes before my Newton reboots during one BlueTooth process or another. Unfortunately, the reason that the ratio is less than one at this point is that it often needs me to “Get Services” again, which has about a 50-50 chance of a reboot. :\

Buggiest thing I’ve ever done on my Newton? Yes, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. The notes I’ve been able to transfer are ones I’ve been unable to transfer via Mail V (too large?) or even sync with nSync. With that in mind, I’d definitely say this has been successful.

Also worth noting, I may try to keep my Newton’s internal storage clean (and I do have about 720K free, even with all my packages), but I don’t know how free my heap is, nor how fragmented my internal storage is (it’s been a long time since I did a backup, brain wipe, and restore). It’s likely that I need to do a little more spring cleanup on my Newton or freeze some packages at startup to make BlueTooth more reliable.

Ignoring that fact for now, Eckhart has been working on Blunt 2 for quite some time (see his blog), so hopefully he’ll have an update out sometime this year. Blunt 2 is a complete redesign and should prove to be immensely more stable than its predecessor, so I have high hopes for it when it’s released.

I won’t be giving up on BlueTooth on my MP 2100 anytime soon, this looks like it’ll be quite an interesting adventure.

¹ In my haste, I missed the fact that I couldn’t use the latest Blunt (0.7.7) with the Pico Card and had to use 0.7.6 and so had to endure re-downloading and re-installing a couple packages. Only lost a little time to troubleshooting that one.