As part of my frustration with PulseAudio and my Skype headset, I thought I’d try using my little USB Bluetooth dongle and my headset. Well after a couple of hours I managed to get mplayer to play out of my headset but upon reboot I can’t get it to work, and PA didn’t detect it anyway, so no good for Skype – which annoyingly these days only uses PA and not direct ALSA devices.

I paired my BT headset with my Android phone which worked nicely, but the voice dialler is shit – no better than via the phone’s mic.

I also wasted an hour more trying to get PA to route Skype to my wired headsets and everything else via the monitor speakers – with the option to switch easily, but that didn’t work so I’m back to my odd little hack of firing up alsamixer and switching between 2 channel and 6 channel a couple of times and loading Skype then turning off the Surround channel using amixer.

I also updated the blog to WordPress 3.2.1