I have purchased several new toys over the last couple of months, and I kept meaning to write a little about them. The one I got about two months ago was my Belkin F8T003 bluetooth USB adaptor. Got it working with Gentoo without too many problems, I just needed to add bluetooth support to my kernel and used the HCI USB driver without any problems. Coupled with bluez-libs, bluez-utils, openobex and kdebluetooth I was able to communicate with my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson P800) and my girlfriends new mobile and use the OBEX protocol to transfer files around. Still not got round to trying to use the GPRS feature of my phone with my laptop yet. The next toy I got was the new Motorola V3 Black, T-Mobile offered me a great upgrade deal so I didn’t even have to change tarriff or phone number. It worked well with my bluetooth adaptor and had a much better camera than my old phone. It is also quad band which should be better with all the travelling I am doing soon, and does everything through a mini-USB connector (even charges). Then I bought my girlfriend an iRiver iFP 899 1 GB flash player. Main reasons for selecting it were because it was flash based (no moving parts - better for use at the gym etc), good memory size and it plays ogg vorbis files. My music is encoded about 50/50 mp3 (old stuff) and ogg vorbis (new stuff) so this was important. I contemplated using the open source drivers developed at here, but then decided that I would much prefer the freedom of the UMS firmware - so I upgraded it immediately. It mounted without problems using gentoo-sources-2.6.11-r9 and the USB mass storage stuff I had for my flash memory cards. Transferred some music to it, and it worked just great. Only had it for about a day but it seems great so far, I am thinking of getting one for myself. I may end up getting the iRiver iFP 999 though - we’ll see. That is about it for all my new gadgets - thankfully they all get along with Gentoo Linux just fine on my AMD64 box.
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