Look what I can do!

See video.

Oliver is a big baby now!

Look! He can finally hold his own bottle... for 3 seconds...and that is good enough for me.

Logitech MediaBoard Pro in Ubuntu

Today I received a Logitech MediaBoard Pro from Dell for $40. It is blue-tooth keyboard/touchpad combo device meant for PS3, but people have been using it for HTPC purposes. The advantages of this device are several: 1) because it is a combo (2-in-1) device, you only have 1 physical accessory, and 2) because it is a bluetooth device, you can use it within a great distance from your HTPC/PS3 and not to have to worry about line-of-sight problem either.

As matter of fact, I am typing this blog using this keyboard. The purpose of this post is to document how I get it to work under Ubuntu (8.04). The steps I took were adapted from a HOWTO on the ubuntu forum.

1) Get the MAC address for the MediaBoard Pro using hciscan
picard [7:58pm]>hcitool scan
Scanning ...
ff:ee:dd:cc:bb:aa Logitech Cordless MediaBoard Pro(TM)

2) add an entry to the bluetooth device configuration:
sudo vi /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf
and add:
device ff:ee:dd:cc:bb:aa {
name "Logitech MediaBoard Pro"
auth enable;
encrypt enable;
}

3) restart the bluetooth daemon:
sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

4) pair up the device:
sudo hidd --search

by now the MediaBoard Pro should work. If you want it to be connected at boot-up, do the following:

5) enable bluetooth connection during boot sequence:
sudo vi /etc/default/bluetooth
and change
HIDD_ENABLED=0
to
HIDD_ENABLED=1

that is it. Enjoy.