I wrote this for my girlfriend to practice her upcoming Pecha Kucha presentation with.

It is one of the ghetto-est J2ME apps I’ve come across. Since J2ME doesn’t have a font as large as I wanted for the numbers to display, I made each number into a PNG using MS Paint. They’re even offset sometimes to keep your attention.

It also disables screensavers or the phone’s backlight from turning off so it can be used a constant timer. Just counts down from 20 to 1 over and over and over (20 seconds being the length of a Pecha Kucha slide).

Bluez and everything in userland were all fine, but in the 8.10 version, the Ubuntu team decided to compile the kernel with a new subsystem for Bluetooth, ‘btusb’. This is a new module compiled in to replace the older (and perfectly working, so WTF) ‘hci-usb’. So the new ‘btusb’ only works with some newer Bluetooth adapters. I had a cheapo little Chinese one (KY-BT100 is what lsusb says) that always worked in all previous Ubuntu’s just fine. New ‘btusb’ only seems to work for half or less of the adapters out there, and this didn’t concern anyone on the Ubuntu kernel team? Really?

So it was time to compile a new kernel. I copied the config from the default 8.10 one I had installed except I disabled ‘btusb’ and enabled ‘hci-usb’ back. After compiling and booting into the new kernel, everything worked perfectly again and Wiimote pairs nicely.