This review is part of the 1 Pound Challenge – can you find a decent gadget in a pound shop?

So far, it’s been quite a good hit rate with the products I’ve been reviewing as part of my 1 Pound Challenge – the majority have been rather good. And I’m happy to say that the trend is continuing.

I’ve now been taking a look at the Livewire Bluetooth USB Dongle – a tiny USB dongle that you plug into a PC or laptop to give it Bluetooth capability (in this case Bluetooth 2.0 and supporting voice data). It’s got a 100m range and 3mbps transfer rate. It cost £1 from PoundWorld.

I initially tried this on my wife’s Acer Aspire One and it worked immediately. It installed the appropriate drivers, the Bluetooth icon appeared in the system tray and everything worked as expected. Trying it on any of my other PCs or laptops – all running Windows 7 64-bit – failed, though. To be fair, the packaging does show compatibility with Windows up to (and not including ) Vista. This may be because of the built-in drivers that are part of Windows 7. Or that it’s 64 bit. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t appear to be Windows 7 compatible (and looking on the internet, other people are finding just the same).

The device is a tiny black plastic half circle (this is the bit that sticks out of the USB port) and a metal USB plug. The plastic has a number of ridges on it making it easy to grip for pushing in and pulling out. Unlike other similar products there is no blue flashing light built in (personally I see that as an advantage!)

The packaging shows the product is from ITP Imports, which shares an address with PoundWorld. ITP Imports have been in the news in the past for some suspect pregnancy testing kits and have to withdrawn dangerous items from sale (their “Deadly Dinosaurs” range turning out to be just that).

Summary of Livewire Bluetooth USB Dongle

If you’re not on Windows 7 this is brilliant value for money – it’s a particularly good way to add Bluetooth to a Windows XP netbook. If you have Windows 7 then buy with risk – it may not work.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 27th October 2011.

If you wish to use a non-standard font for your website then there are a number of ways to do this. However, I prefer to use the font-face CSS option. It’s not without its disadvantages, so read up on it before proceeding.

For each font that you wish to add simply add the following code to your CSS…

@font-face {
    font-family: 'DroidSansRegular';
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot');
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.svg#DroidSansRegular') format('svg');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

You’ll need to change the font-family to the name that you wish to give the font. Then there are 5 references to the font files – 4 different types to cover different browser requirements. Again, these will need changing appropriately.

This site previously used the font named Droid, which is the open source font used by Android. With last week’s introduction of Android 4, however, they’ve created a new font named Roboto – this has been designed for HD screens, so is perfect for websites.

If you wish to use either of these fonts, I’ve bundled them up ready for font-face (i.e. with each of the 4 formats that are required).

Download Droid

There are 3 versions of the font – standard, bold and mono space.

Download Roboto

There are 2 versions of the font – standard and bold.

I was recently asked, as a commercial request, to create a WordPress plugin that would allow users to click a button and copy text the clipboard. It seemed an easy enough thing to do – 2 weeks later, though, and I’ve thrown in the towel.

Using JavaScript to capture contents is the easy bit – adding it to the clipboard is a lot more difficult. IE has a JavaScript command built in, other browsers vary. Unfortunately, other browsers (e.g. Firefox) also restrict this ability for security reasons. This is because the ability to write to the clipboard also comes with the ability to read from it as well – quite why this functionality can’t be detached and restrict just the reading I don’t know.

So, using JavaScript is problematic.

Thankfully I’m not the first to come across this problem and a third party script named ZeroClipboard is available. This uses Flash to update the clipboard, which doesn’t have the same security limitations. Of course if you’re viewing from a device that doesn’t support Flash (cough, splutter, iPad, iPhone, cough) then you’re still out of luck. None-the-less this seemed a perfect solution.

Unfortunately, my limited JavaScript skills failed me – I found the program to be over-complex for what I needed and failed to be able to get it to work.

At this point I found an alternative – ZClip uses ZeroClipboard but is controlled via JQuery (which is built into WordPress) and provide a much easier and friendly method of access.

I was now in a position where I had a working plugin. Until I used Admin Bar. That seemed to affect the positioning of the Flash overlay so you had to click slightly above the “Copy to clipboard” button to get it to work.

The customer, though, didn’t have an issue with this and I could only hope that they didn’t have anything else within their theme or plugins that could affect it in this way (I did try contacting the developer of Zclip but got no response).

What really ended it all though was the limited way of capturing text in zclip, which I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. ZClip can capture in 2 ways – from static fields (e.g. the text between a SPAN) or dynamic (e.g. from a field). The first doesn’t capture any formatting, even paragraph breaks – returning everything as one long line of text. The second did, but by capturing the HTML.

The customer wanted the customer to be able to copy to the clipboard long paragraphs of text – neither offered a neat solution to this.

Then I gave up. One day I may return to it – certainly ZeroClipboard will probably allow me to do what I need it to, but I’ll have to get my head around how to first.