No luck tonight on getting my Bluetooth and Wi-Fi USB dongles working. Despite the excellent instructions by James Nebeker and David G. Young on getting the software setup, my dongle does not support Bluetooth LE to begin with. If you’re getting

Can't set advertise mode on hci0: Connection timed out (110)

…after you’ve arrived at typing in

hciconfig hci0 leadv 3

…the best explanation I can offer is that your Bluetooth dongle doesn’t support LE.

The end goal here is to make a beacon where stuff happens (the opening up of possibilities) based on my proximity to my Raspberry Pi, as determined by my iPhone 5. The following look useful once I get the proper dongle:

Once I get a dongle that’s compatible with LE, that is. At least I won’t have to do the Bluez software compilation again.

Connecting the Wi-Fi dongle was met with the same result: a failure to connect. On the plus side, some learning about how I can setup my network, and a apt-get update and a apt-get upgrade to get the latest and greatest of everything.

I found the following links helpful:

I’m grateful to my past self for properly setting up the Ethernet connection with a static IP address, an entry in ~/.ssh/config on my laptop, and SSH keys. This ensured that any mistakes made to my networking settings would be confined to the wlan0 section and not lock me out of my Pi.