Awhile back, I heard that cellphone companies were going to start offering personal coverage extenders to be installed in one’s home, to enhance their networks for users who have difficulty getting decent signal strength in their house/apartment. In theory, this should be really easy to sell; you get awesome service at your house, and the company gets reduced network load over their primary towers. Everyone wins!

Well, not quite. In the spirit of all things related to cellphones, all of the companies offering this service are really screwing it up. For instance, AT&T, which hasn’t quite launched theirs yet, will offer these features:

• Up to four simultaneous users supported
• No unauthorized access
• Supports 3G data service
• Unlimited minute plans available

Ok, so not too bad, honestly. But, notice the wording of the last point; unlimited minute plans available. In cellphone-speak, that means that you have to pay extra to get unlimited use of a network device you paid for, that’s attached to your internet connection. In other words, by purchasing this device, you’re basically paying for the privilege of reducing AT&T’s network load, with no real benefit aside from better service in your house.

Unfortunately, it only gets worse from here. Let’s take a look at the microcell offering of Sprint, my new provider:

• No unauthorized access
• No data service supported
• Unlimited minute plans available

Similar to AT&T’s offering, but without data coverage. But, the kicker is in the pricing: $99.99 one-time price for the base unit, $4.99/month to use it. Not only do you have to buy the device itself (which isn’t that big of a deal, honestly), but you have to pay a monthly fee just to use the thing. That monthly fee doesn’t provide any sort of extra minutes, or unlimited use, it’s just an arbitrary fee for no real reason. To get unlimited use of it, it’s $10/month per line, or $20/month per family-plan account.

The worst offender, however, is Verizon, my former provider. They already kinda suck at billing, and at high-speed coverage (among other things), so it should be no surprise that they completely flubbed their microcell offering (despite being the originator of the idea, claiming it would be the “weapon of the century”).

The only point in Verizon’s favour is the lack of a monthly fee to simply use the device, like Sprint requires. However, their microcell device doesn’t support data service, doesn’t even offer an unlimited calling option for using it, and costs a whopping $250. But, the most insulting part of their microcell product is the fact that you can’t restrict its use to only authorized users. You can give priority to your own account/your family plan, and it only supports three users at a time, but any random user in-range will see a microcell as an ordinary cell tower.

So, let me get this straight, Verizon. You want me to pay $250 to set up a low-range public cell tower in my home, using my broadband connection? How the heck is that beneficial to me? Oh, and if they’re encouraging this to be used in areas where the signal is pretty much unusable, that means that the device will have a nearly constant load on the user’s internet connection, due to other Verizon users in the area being routed through it. Shouldn’t they be the one’s paying us for this?

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I loathe text messaging via cellphones. I have a number of reasons for this, but one of my biggest reasons is the pricing scams used by cell providers for these things. And this article on DSL reports reminded me of it.

We’ve frequently discussed how SMS/MMS services are a cash cow for wireless carriers, the costs being marginally insane when compared to the actual bandwidth consumed. The New York Times has an interesting article on the high costs of text messages, 3.3 trillion of which are expected to be sent in 2009. With most carriers now charging twenty cents per message bi-directionally for each message, they’ve attracted the attention of some lawmakers, who’ve begun to inquire how much the services actually cost to deliver. While carriers try their best to keep this hidden, the Times notes that once carriers have storage covered, the costs to deliver small 140 byte messages is virtually nothing. Of course the market dictates what consumers will pay, and many consumers simply keep paying.

Text Messaging: Nice Profit Margin You’ve Got There on DSL Reports

Now, I’m already boycotting text messaging, but more people need to do it as well, especially teenagers whose parents are more than happy to keep paying out the nose for the most overpriced data-transfer service on the market. Hey, parents: If you quit buying into this tripe, the cellphone companies will stop raping you, and your kids will learn that there are better and cheaper ways to chat with their friends from their cellphones, if they absolutely must use a sophisticated voice communication device as an email terminal.

And yes, I’m aware that for the low-low-price of $10-20/month extra, a cell user can purchase unlimited text-messaging. But, it’s still a ripoff, because that’s just for SMS messages, and doesn’t cover anything else (except for “Pix” and “Video” messages, which are basically just emails with attachments). To get data service (a vastly more useful add-on), it’s an additional $15 on top of that. Which is fine, but can anyone explain why (beyond “to make money”) a cellphone-only email system costs as much as (or more than) a relatively unfettered internet connection over the same networks, using the same protocols?

On a personal note, part of my disdain for text messaging comes from my own family. My sister is addicted to texting to the point that she’ll probably have carpal tunnel in her thumbs when she’s my age, and this has caused all sorts of havoc every time she switches providers. My mom has received several cellphone bills costing almost a thousand dollars from both Verizon and Alltel at various points in the past, thanks to my sister, and just thinking about it makes me sick. If any other company pulled this crap, they’d be out of business in a month.

The cell providers have spent years trying to make themselves a vital utility in the eyes of the public, while still maintaining the pricing structures and billing policies of a luxury service (Internet providers don’t even require credit checks just to sign up). Now that they’ve succeeded in the former, they need to adjust their billing procedures accordingly, but it’s not going to happen if people keep supporting their current business methods.

Yay, I have my new phone! And it’s purple! :-D

After dealing with the headache of trying to get the email system working with Lupinia’s server (Sprint’s network does very awkward things with port 25 for SMTP relay, even though that’s the default in practically every email client ever written, including theirs), my shiny new phone with mobile email is working smoothly.

If you send a text message to my phone number, it will disappear into the digital void.

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Now, because Verizon is full of fail, and delaying the porting of my old number by almost two weeks (they won’t release it without cancelling the account, and I won’t let them charge me an $80 cancellation fee), I’m going to have a temporary number for awhile. Thing is, I really like my temporary number, I like it a lot better than my old one. It’s much easier to remember.

So, I’ve created a poll (because I like polls); should I say “good riddance” to my old number and stick with the new one, or should I stick with my old number?

Click here for the poll

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Until I decide which number I want to keep, I won’t be distributing my new number, unless you’re a Sprint customer and want to call me for free. This is only because I want to minimize confusion if I do keep my old number; considering that there are people out there who still call my original number from like four years ago, I don’t want to put out another phone number for myself if it’s temporary

You know how I hate cameraphones, and think most smartphones are a horrible idea? Well, I just bought one. This one, to be precise.

When cellphones with cameras first debuted, I (like many, many others on the DSL Reports forums) thought it was a stupid “gee-whiz” marketing gimmick with no practical use whatsoever, that would never sell. See how wrong that prediction turned out to be. I still feel the same way about them, and decided that I would never buy a phone with a camera in it, because I didn’t want to support this trend.

My feelings of disdain toward text messaging are largely rooted in the same principles, refusing to support a service that I feel is pointless and obscenely over-priced. In fact, my feelings toward texting can be summed up almost verbatim by this.

And, what about smartphones/internet-enabled phones? Admittedly, my dislike for those is largely rooted in the fact that the designs of such devices are so ridiculously bad that I just kinda swore off the whole “genre”. Until recently, there were three basic designs; ordinary cellphones/flip phones with extra software, PDA-sized handheld computers with a speaker tacked on, and shiny touch-screen monstrosities that become smeary and hard-to-read if you so much as look at them funny (I’m looking at you, iPhone). None of which are particularly desireable.

But, in recent months, my feelings on these have softened a bit. After seeing just how useful mobile internet access is, I started looking at other providers and their offerings. And, what I realized is that people like me lost the battle when it comes to holding out for bare-bones mobile telephones with bare-bones service. Ideally, I would love to have a pocket-sized mobile phone that, like the landline phone on my desk that I love so much, exists solely to make phone calls, with monthly pricing comparable to regular landline/VoIP service. That would be awesome. But, in the current market, it doesn’t exist. There simply aren’t any good bare-bones cellphones available anymore, and the few that do exist are becoming increasingly poorly-made. My current phone, a Nokia that I paid $40 for (with no contract discount), is actually the third one I’ve had in three years, and I can count on one hand the number of text messages I’ve sent in that time. If I actually did use text messaging, I’d probably have to buy them in 12-packs.

So, after getting over that, I decided to alleviate my involuntary twitch at the monthly pricing on cell service by planning to get data service. A relatively unrestricted internet connection is vastly more useful than text and “picture/video” messaging, and with most providers, voice-only + data is about the same price as “everything” without data.

Unfortunately, I’m probably the pickiest customer ever when it comes to cellphones. An internet connection, in my mind, requires a full keyboard, so anything lacking that is automatically out of the question. I can’t stand phones that require manual opening to make a call, which eliminates all traditional flip-phones and many side-flip models. I’ve become very accustomed to dialing full numbers from memory, and without looking at the device until I’m finished (to make sure it’s right), so phones lacking 10-key number pads and phones that primarily rely on touch-screens are also out. And, since it’s a phone, and not a f***ing MP3 player, anything with prominent music buttons is eliminated simply to keep me from getting angry “crush, kill, destroy” urges every time I look at the damn thing.

I hadn’t really looked at phones in awhile, but while I was in Pittsburgh, I tagged along with to go to the Sprint store to replace his phone. He already had one in mind, the Samsung Rant, and while he was getting it, I spent a good deal of time playing with the display model. The result? I actually like it. Not in an “oh, I guess it’ll do” way, but I genuinely like it. It has the basics down quite well, it’s easy to navigate, and while it does have extra BS like a camera and an MP3/video player, all that stuff stays out of the way and out-of-sight unless you actually want to use it.

So, does this mean we can text-message you now?
In short, no. In long, nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…
As I mentioned above, I did not get any sort of text messaging plan on my new phone. And I’m not going to. I purchased a data plan instead, because it can be used for things other than point-to-point mini-messages. And, as soon as the phone arrives and is activated, I’m going to figure out if I can block text messages with Sprint like I currently do with Verizon. If not, I’m going to demand quarters from anyone who text-messages me, and I’m not joking about that.

However, I didn’t get a data plan just to have an easier time looking things up on Wikipedia. One of the biggest selling points of that extra monthly charge, and this phone, is the ability to send and receive email, using any email server I want. And, I happen to own a mail server. So, I have a dedicated email address for mobile communications, and whenever I’m away from home for extended periods (like, at a con), I’ll check my primary accounts via mobile as well.

But, I can’t email from my phone, so that’s no better for me!
Actually, you probably can. Text messaging is basically email, and with most providers (I know this works with Verizon), you can send text messages to and from email addresses as seamlessly as you would send to a phone number. You can even store email addresses in your contacts, with or without a phone number! Wow!

So, to sum this up:

You still can’t text-message me, but you can email my phone now.

And, what would that email address be? Well, this is a public post, and the last thing I want is a bunch of spam coming to my phone. So, we’ll be sneaky about this.

The username can be a number of things, and still reach me, thanks to the wonders of aliasing. Valid values include “mobile”, or my phone number in 10-digit form (area code and number, with or without hyphens, but no spaces). You can also prefix “mobile” with one of my names and a hyphen, like “natasha-”. The domain is also flexible, and can be any of the lupinia.* domains I own (there are five), as well as either of the softpaw.* domains I own (there are two).

Hopefully, the spammers will be sufficiently confused by that paragraph. By my calculations, there are 56 different combinations that work, in hopes that this will be easy for everyone to figure out. If you’re not sure whether you have a valid combination, try it anyway; as long as the domain is right, it’ll reach me anyway (just not to my cell), and I’ll correct you if it’s not correct.

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TL;DR Version: I have a new cellphone on the way, and you still can’t text-message me, but you can email me, and my mobile address is buried in a paragraph above to keep it safe.

Edit: A few people have expressed confusion over the above paragraph explaining my mobile email address(es). I’ll post the real ones in a friends-only post later, but due to how intelligent spam bots are, the above description is the closest y’all are getting in a public post. Sorry. If it’s too confusing, just message me.

This is officially the coldest it’s been here in well over a year. Possibly in over two years, I’m not sure.

On the plus side, at least I now have confirmation that the wireless thermometer sensor on that clock works in extreme cold. Got it at Wal-Mart for $20; it’s an atomic clock with indoor and outdoor temperatures (with support for up to three sensors that you can cycle through), alarm clock with two different times, easy timezone cycling (instead of using a tiny switch on the back like some of them), and it displays 24-hour time format as well as the standard 12-hour format (the biggest selling point for me).

Oh, and mine only says it’s 75 degrees because it’s four inches from a passive vent on my computer. I’m leaving it on the coffee table overnight to find out exactly how far off it is in the location where it typically sits on my desk, but considering how frigid my toes are, I’d guess it’s off by about ten degrees. Not a fault of the clock, just a fault of my desk arrangement

UPDATE: After 20 minutes of it living on my coffee table, at knee-height in the middle of the room, it now reads 67 degrees in my office. No wonder my toes are freezing.

For anyone who didn’t notice, I kinda disappeared this weekend

I really wanted to spend some time with symelion, so I headed up to his place on Friday. I had a full two days of overtime saved up, and we had nothing to do at work on Friday anyway. Didn’t do much when I got there, though, it was a little late.

Saturday was really fun! We went out to an Indian restaurant for lunch, first time I’d been to one of those in over a year, and then went to a Best Buy (a rare treat for me, since the closest one is over an hour away). We picked up a gift card for our boss, since he’s so incredibly awesome, then met up with kelbypup, makuus, swiftfoxfire, and vu1pes for a lovely Italian dinner. It was really nice to spend time with some different people, too - no offense to anyone in the NoVA/MD area, but after years of seeing so many announcements for lame furmeets on the area mailing lists, and going to the awesome ones in Pittsburgh, I kinda forgot that NoVA was an awesome travel destination as well. Needless to say, I won’t make that mistake anymore, especially if I keep up my increased pace of road trips.

Oh, and I think I was the only one at dinner who didn’t have an iPhone/smartphone to play with ;-). At one point, something in the conversation prompted everyone to want to look something up, and on that cue, half the table whipped out iPhones to look up the topic at hand. My $20 dumb-phone and I were amused

Anyway, after dinner, we played Rock Band. I’ve never played it before, nor have I played anything similar like Guitar Hero (my opportunities to play console games are very limited). But, this was the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game! See, for most of my life, I’ve had idle fantasies/daydreams about being a rock singer. And, while I lack the skills to be a pro, I have spent most of my time on road trips practicing my singing for the last 8 years (as well as occasional “jams” in the house). So, for the songs that I actually knew, I got really good scores with the vocal part, even surprising myself a few times :-P. I gave the other parts a try, and enjoyed the drum set (an instrument I’d like to learn to play someday, though if this game was any indication, I may lack the coordination for it). The guitars were a little weird, but still fun. Overall, a really fun experience

Sunday was fairly low-key, with the best pizza for dinner that I’ve ever had (even better than Sarpino’s at MFF that was oh-so-yummy). Jerry’s Subs & Pizza in College Park is incredible, I highly recommend it!

Monday was a work day, and it was really nice to be in the same room as Syme while we working. Especially since we were working on the same project, a huge bugfix list. We made a significant dent in the list, got dinner, and tried to come back and work awhile longer. An hour into the last part of our shift, and we both said “screw this” and got out Rock Band again. I tried to really challenge myself on the vocals this time, and still did pretty darn good, even on songs I didn’t know. Apparently, my years of singing in the church choir, coupled with my complete inability to read music (ironic, since I was in marching band for seven years), really improved my ability to follow along on-the-fly with a vocal part. There was a song I beat on Expert that I’d never heard before

And, today (Tuesday), I came home. Wee!

Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn’t want to be broadband providers. Manassas was a particular hotbed of interference debate, with enthusiasts complaining the FCC (who for years cheerleaded the technology a little too enthusiastically) didn’t properly test the network and used bogus data to make the case for BPL.

The FCC’s dream technology, embraced in the hopes it would help them obfuscate the fact their policies have created an uncompetitive duopoly, hasn’t been faring well. Last May, a flagship BPL trial in Dallas operated by DirecTV and Current Communications was sold to the local utility. The network DirecTV and Current Communications had hoped would offer BPL service to 2 million residents — is now being used for smart-electrical grid monitoring. After five-plus years of the BPL industry insisting each year would be “the year of BPL,” it looks like 2008 may be known as the year that BPL died. It’s estimated the technology never saw more than roughly 5,000 subscribers, most of them trial participants.

Comtek, the company who originally built the Manassas network, has read the tea leaves and begun focusing on smart electric grid technology like Current Communications. Comtek was somewhat obnoxious when it came to complaints from ham enthusiasts in Manassas, claiming that interference didn’t exist, and that ham groups like the ARRL were engaged in a “campaign to turn back the clock on broadband in the United States.” These days Comtek wants no part in the network it hyped for years, and the city has taken control of the network:

ComTek was supposed to sell the technology — used to provide basic Internet capabilities to residents and businesses — to Smart Grid LLC. However, the deal fell through this year. Instead of axing the program right away, the council decided to keep the service for the roughly 675 customers until April, when it will be on the budget cutting room floor for fiscal 2010.

In other words, another network that was supposed to be a shining example of broadband over powerline’s promise is likely going to be shelved. The city may potentially keep the network operational to monitor the city’s electric grid, but says the technology simply isn’t viable as a major broadband option. That’s something we’ve been saying for going on half a decade, though many didn’t want to hear it.

2008: The Year Broadband Over Powerline Died at DSL Reports - Oct 16, 2008

For those who’ve never heard of this, BPL (short for Broadband over Power Lines) is a technology that, on the surface, is a brilliant idea. The idea is to transmit high-speed data over power lines using radio waves, because the infrastructure is already in place. However, there is a serious flaw in this line of thinking. Typically, high-speed data transmissions are carried over well-shielded coaxial cables (single wire, commonly used in radio antennas), tightly-twisted wire pairs (used in telephone and network cables), or fiber optic cables. All of these wire/cable technologies are specifically designed for two things; keeping the signal inside the wire where it belongs, and keeping outside signals out of the shielding. Power lines, on the other hand, are bare copper, with no shielding outside of buildings, and no twisting to cancel interferance. Plus, many rural power lines are fairly old, with high resistance. In radio terms, this sort of wire works better as an antenna, not a carrier line. So, when trying to transmit radio signals over power lines, more of the signal is transmitted outward more than is carried through to the next node, requiring the signal to be re-generated every few hundred yards, creating massive amounts of interferance.

Since BPL equipment operates in frequency bands already allocated to other users (as with most networking technologies), this creates significant interferance issues, particularly in emergency and amateur radio bands. I’ve been following the news regarding BPL deployment and interferance research for a very long time, actually, it was what brought amateur radio to my attention in the first place, and it was what sparked my interest in the mechanics of radio waves.

So, in short, this is excellent news. BPL has always been a poor delivery method for long-range networking, and I’m quite pleased to see the only real US deployment of it finally failing. Hopefully, we can now focus on rural broadband delivery methods that will actually work, like “white space” wireless technologies.

[ Click For Article ]

When the city of Wilmington, NC made the switch to digital broadcasting ahead of schedule, they encountered a problem that everyone who knows anything about RF engineering predicted: Significant coverage gaps in the new digital broadcast network, compared to the analog network.

In order to understand how this happened, we have to take a crash-course in radio transmissions. With analog TV broadcasts, the transmitted signal contains the raw video feed, which can be fed directly into the video device of your choice (CRT and most projector screens are natively designed to accept an analog input signal, while LCD and Plasma screens have to convert analog inputs to a digital signal internally). In the new digital broadcasts, the signal is compressed into a small stream and transmitted in pieces (similar to the way a telephone modem communicates), which must be assembled into usable video data by the receiver.

And, because of the nature of radio waves, both signals degrade over distance, as well as being prone to interferance. If you’re close to the transmitter (within a few miles), there’s no difference between the two signals, they’re both strong enough to use. However, over long distances, things get a bit tricky. With an analog signal, the TV will still display a viewable image even with a very weak signal. It won’t look very good, but it is visible, even when the signal strength is virtually indistinguishable from the background noise. However, with a digital signal, there’s much less data to work with, and a computer (technically) must decode the signal to display it on the screen. With a strong signal, digital TV looks great, and to a certain point, a digital TV broadcast will be less noisy than analog. But, if the digital broadcast loses too much data (and it really doesn’t take much of a loss) to interferance or signal degradation, it becomes completely unusable, as if someone flipped a switch to turn it off. To illustrate this phenomenon, imagine yourself on one side of a crowded, noisy room, with two quiet stereos playing on the other side. One stereo is playing a familiar song, and while you wouldn’t be able to hear every musical note, you’d be able to identify the song pretty easily. The other stereo features a voice reading the lyrics to the same song, with no musical components. Would you still be able to identify the song?

So, in short, we have a ton of people discovering that, thanks to the digital TV conversion, they no longer receive channels at all that used to come in with mediocre or poor reception. Why? Because, when planning this, the FCC failed to account for the fact that most people who receive broadcast TV signals live in rural areas that are a very long way away from the transmitter sites. Nice work, FCC.

[ Click for Article ]

I hate the iPhone. A lot. But, this isn’t a post to rant about that. This is a post to alert all you iPhone users about an impending firmware update that needs to happen to improve the device.

Ever since the 3G iPhone came out, a lot of US users have been angry about the poor performance from it. They traced this to an actual problem with the device, and after further testing, they discovered that it’s software-related.

Apple quickly released a firware update that was supposed to fix it. Except, it didn’t. Users reported no improvement after applying the patch, which led to people blaming it on hardware and screaming bloody murder. However, an anonymous source from AT&T claims that the problem is a combination of phone firmware and network issues, and that enough people applying the patch will correct both issues.

So, if you have a 3G iPhone, and it’s not living up to expectations, try the patch. It’s not like it can make it worse.

I was going to do the list-thing like some have done, but I just don’t have that many items for it. I’m very easy-going and easy to get along with.

But:

DO NOT TEXT-MESSAGE ME!
-I don’t care if it’s how you usually use your phone
-I don’t care if it’s free for you
-I don’t care if it’s cheaper for you than calling
-I don’t care if you’re not in a place where you can call (you shouldn’t be texting, either, in that case)

Bottom line, I don’t care what the circumstances are. Words cannot describe how much I loathe text messaging, and if you send me one, the only response you’ll get (if any) is a canned “I don’t know who you are, but don’t ever send text messages to this number again” template that I have just for such situations.

I say this every year, but every year, someone fucking does it anyway, and it’s usually someone who reads my LJ. So, take note of this now, never send me text messages. Ever.

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I’ll be posting my cellphone number and Westin room number once we check in. Everyone is welcome to call me, of course, if you need information from me or something. I’m not a fan of social calls, except with certain people, but I don’t mind people calling me during the con. Just don’t text me.