TechnoGeekGuy

Earlier this month I wrote about Verizon Wireless’ Hotspot service and how it is an additional $20/mn charge and it uses its own 2GB data cap – separate from the unlimited data I am already paying for. Last week I decided to leave Windows Mobile and go Android, specifically Droid X, and now I want to see how the DX can handle the hotspot functionality.

One way to do this is to root the phone and install a wifi tethering app. Maybe I will do this, but not just yet. My concern about rooting is the potential of bricking the phone, not being to unroot it, and/or the rooted phone won’t get the OTA update to Froyo.

Update: After reading that rooted Droid Incredible users cannot install the OTA Froyo update, I am glad I held off on rooting my DX.

So I decided to give the Verizon Wireless Hotspot a try for the next week or two. I have been running it for a few days and here are some early observations:

1.   Using SpeedTest.net, I am seeing 2.27Mbps down and 0.20 Mbps up.
2.   For some reason, turning on the Hotspot forces Bluetooth to be turned off. I do not like this! I use a set of Moto S2 bluetooth headphones at work to listen to music and podcasts. I also want to use the Hotspot at the same time. Gee, my beloved Touch Pro 2 did it all without even breaking a sweat! Why can’t my 1GHz DX do the same? Hopefully the wifi tethering app will allow bluetooth to be on at the same time. BTW, enabling bluetooth while the Hotspot is on turns the Hotspot off.
3.   The Hotspot runs in Infrastructure mode – making it easier for devices to connect.
4.   The Hotspot supports the following encryption modes: None, WEP, WPA, WPA2
5.   The Hotspot allows up to 5 devices to connect simultaneously.
6.   The Hotspot costs an extra $20/mn for which you only get 2GB of data each month.

So it works and, except for my bluetooth issue and the additional cost, it works well.

My mom and dad live live in Yorktown, VA, which is just inside the projected cone for the 3+ days projection of hurricane Earl. They’ll probably get so _nice_ rain! I’ll get dad to take some photos over the weekend.

I forget which hurricane it was, but about 4 years ago they got hit – trees down, etc. They even had a tree land on top of the screened-in porch.

We are coming up on the 3 month anniversary of a trip that I will remember for the rest of my life. For 2 weeks this past June, 21 adults and 16 teenagers spent 2 weeks hiking through various parts of Israel. This past 3 months have been so busy and even though I thought about writing about the trip, I never did. Now is the time … before I forget some of the details.

This first post will be an overview. I’ll write and post images for each day as time permits.

Our itinerary:

• Day 1 – Monday, June 7th: Traveling to Israel
• Day 2 – Tuesday, June 8th: Mt Carmel hike
• Day 3 – Wednesday, June 9th: Nazareth & Tzipori hike
• Day 4 – Thursday, June 10th: Golan Heights / Caesarea Philippi / Jordan rafting
• Day 5 – Friday, June 11th: Mt Meron hike, day 1
• Day 6 – Saturday, June 12th: Mt Meron hike, day 2
• Day 7 – Sunday, June 13th: Galilee, day 1
• Day 8 – Monday, June 14th: Galilee, day 2
• Day 9 – Tuesday, June 15th: Jerusalem, day 1
• Day 10 – Wednesday, June 16th: Jerusalem, day 2
• Day 11 – Thursday, June 17th: Mt Masada hike / Qumran / Dead Sea
• Day 12 – Friday, June 18th: Wilderness hike / Red Sea / Jordan
• Day 13 – Saturday, June 19th: Jordan / Wadi Rum/ Petra
• Day 14 – Sunday, June 20th: Jordan hike / leave for home
• Day 15 – Monday, June 21th: Arrive home

As you can see, we were quite busy. Stay turned, more to come.

FOXNews.com – CBO: Eight Years of Iraq War Cost Less Than Stimulus Act

It is very cool that the latest 3G smartphones from all US wireless companies now offer the ability for the phones to act as hotspots, supporting 5 – 8 wifi devices. BUT, what I don’t get is why the data used in hotspot mode comes from a different “bucket” of data usage.

From the Verizon Wireless website:

“The 2 GB monthly allowance is separate from your monthly 3G Smartphone data feature allowance. Additional usage billed at a per-MB rate. When your smartphone is connected using 3G Mobile Hotspot, all data sent or received by your smartphone (including data sent or received by any Wi-Fi devices connected to it, or by your smartphone itself) will be billed according to your 3G Mobile Hotspot feature, and not according to your smartphone data feature.” [Mobile Broadband Connect/3G Mobile Hotspot]

My phone’s 3G data allowance is unlimited – as long as I do not hit the 5GB cap! So why not add the 2GB to the 5GB cap and make it 7GB? That make more sense to me.

Update: Oops! Forgot to give this article a title. Fixed.

“No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn’t perform any official duties. But this hasn’t deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession.”

[First Lady requires more than twenty attendants, Canada Free Press]

Are we surprised!? And remember, every time the First Lady goes somewhere, like Paris, Chicago, etc, many of these “attendants” must go with her. I wonder if the President’s budget he released earlier this week cuts his wife’s budget?

Also note that the article is published by the Canada Free Press. We probably won’t see this information on Reuters or CNN – though the way the things are going, the press is starting to lose their rose colored glasses.

With the death of the old Dell Demenion 4700 (P4, Windows XP Pro) that was being used to stream video (Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, etc) to the TV in the living room and the arrival of the Dell Vostro 420 (Core 2 Duo, Windows 7 Home Premium), my family has been enjoying Windows Media Center. WMC has really grown up! With the addition of Internet TV channels and Netflix, we find most of our online content right within WMC. Now it is time to add live TV.

In the past, I have used BeyondTV with Hauppauge PVR-150 tuners. These were PCI cards and only recorded analog signals. Now that analog TV is dead I needed a HDTV solution. I could purchase newer Hauppauge cards or try something new!

And that something new is the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Dual ATSC/QAM Digital TV Tuner. I have known about the HDHomeRun for a couple of years because of my involvement on the BeyondTV forums, but what got me interested this time was a discussion on the The Home Server Show podcast #63, the HDHomeRun was brought up in a discussion and I liked what I heard. So I decided to give it a try.

So what is the HDHomeRun? It is a digital tuner that allows one to take either a OTA HDTV signal or a clear QAM cable signal and watch/record on your computer using WMC, BeyondTV, MythTV, etc. The cool things about this tuner is that it is a network device and does not need to be installed nor connected directly to a computer to work. The model I purchased has 2 tuners in it. Now any computer on my network can stream live OTA HDTV without any additional hardware. With the 2 tuners, 2 different computers can use the tuner at the same time watching / recording different channels.

Setup was quite easy. I had the device out of the box, connected to my OTA HDTV antenna, connected to my network and plugged in within 10 minutes. Installing the necessary software on my Windows 7 box and configuring WMC took another 15 minutes (this includes scanning for channels and downloading the 14-day channel guide). I was watching live TV minutes later and scheduled The Biggest Loser to be recorded that night.

After coming back from the gym and an hour into the 2-hour show, the family sat down to watch The Biggest Loser – fast-forwarding through the commercials! A cool WMC feature is that clicking the FF button once plays the recorded video at almost 2x WITH SOUND! Nice!

I purchased the HDHomeRun from NewEgg.com for $128.99. I highly recommend it if you are looking for a HDTV tuner solution.

Back in August 2008 I posted an article about how my family gave the phone and satellite companies the boot. It’s ~16 months later, so I thought I give an update.

Internet Connection
We are still using a broadband cable connection to the Internet, though it has been upped to 10Mb down and 1Mb up. With 5 computers/laptops and a couple iPods/Zunes/smartphones, the increased bandwidth serves us well.

Phone
The big change here is that I am now using a phone solution provided by my cable provider, but this decision was 100% economic. It is cheaper to have my Internet connection with the phone service than without! Crazy, I know. I elected, though, to have only the “local/state-wide” service and still use Skype-Out for ALL my long distance needs. For incoming calls we now depending wholly on Google Voice. I have been using Google Voice since before it was purchased by Google. Love it! Love it!

TV / Movies / Entertainment
The main change here is that we have dropped Blockbuster and switched to Netflix. I have become a Netflix believer! Incoming vectors for entertainment now include: OTA HDTV; Hulu, YouTube and other streaming sites; and Netflix DVDs and streaming. This is STILL TOO MUCH CONTENT!!!

Email / Productivity / Organization
Everyone in the house is still using Gmail (hosted) for email. While we occasionally need to use M$ Word / Excel / PowerPoint, most everything is done with Google Docs. New this year is that my wife is starting to use Google Calendar. Now that we are using Google Voice 100% and now that Google supports Active Sync (for my Touch Pro2 smartphone), I am centralizing my contact management in Google Contacts (bye bye Plaxo).

Costs
The only cost increase seen this year was the price increase to my Internet connection (+30/mn). I am still realizing savings over what I had 2 years ago!

I cannot imagine going back to the way it was 2 years ago. My family and I do not feel we have missed a thing. I am calling this “experiment” a success!!! Or in Google terms, I am removing the BETA tag 

It was reported in the summer of 2008 that negotiations were taking place that in trade for Hillary Clinton’s support, Obama would help repay some of the “massive” debt the Clinton campaign had incurred [Hillary Clinton in negotiations for Barack Obama to help pay off her debts, Toby Harnden, UK Telegraph]. I just heard on the Rush Limbaugh radio show that the Obama administration has made right on its promise my paying some $5.7M on behalf of the Clinton campaign. Did this money come from the Obama campaign? Nooooooooo …. it came from the stimulus money! Wish means that you and I have helped pay off the Clinton campaign’s debt. Unbelievable!

It seems others are as incensed as I am:

• Obama pays Hillary’s bills with our money

Looking for further articles on this matter.

[Update: Check out http://scottystarnes.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/hillarys-pollster-received-6-million-from-stimulus/]