Tag Archives: computers

Juggling Internet Bandwidth

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Working with bandwidth limitations.

This summer, I’m on the road again, working out of my RV, the “mobile mansion.” And, after dealing with crappy, overpriced Internet service at my first stop for the past three years, I decided to go it alone this year with a My-Fi.

Why My-Fi?

My-FiThe reason I picked the My-Fi (instead of setting up a mobile hotspot from my smartphone) was twofold:

  • The My-Fi unit came with better plans. There was a 3GB plan for $35 which would only cost $10/GB if I went over. I knew I’d likely go over at least a few times a year — last summer, I had an 8GB month. The other plans would have been far more costly for that overage.
  • I’m a Verizon customer and I wanted to be able to talk on the phone while using the Internet. I admit this was not a primary concern. Last year I used mobile broadband tethering from my BlackBerry and did occasionally get interrupted by a phone call while doing my Internet thing. It didn’t kill me to wait until I was done talking. After all, I spend very little time actually talking on my phone.

I should note here that I do know that the Virgin Mobile My-Fi has a plan with unlimited bandwidth. But what good is a device that doesn’t work where you are? The Virgin Mobile device doesn’t have coverage in the areas I travel to. Verizon does. That’s the same reason — or one of them, anyway — why I don’t have AT&T.

My Plans

Last summer, I was spoiled. Although I paid for Internet at my first stop, I also had free unlimited Internet access through my BlackBerry. I’d had tethering for years and was grandfathered in on a plan that offered unlimited bandwidth for only $15/month. That plan was not available for either iPhones or Android phones and I needed a step up from my BlackBerry. Turning off that plan was one of the hardest things I ever did as a techie.

Of course, my iPhone and iPad also have 3G coverage, giving me access to the Internet from either device without a Wi-Fi (or My-Fi) connection. The iPhone’s plan has unlimited 3G, which is nice. But I’ll be the first to admit that the last device I want to surf the Web with is a smartphone. For the iPad, I went with a limited plan offering only 1GB per month. The idea was that I’d do my heavy Internet lifting with my desktop or laptop computer and limit the iPad’s use to reading RSS feeds, doing a little Web surfing, and sending the odd e-mail.

My goal, of course, is to not go over any bandwidth limitations for the entire summer. And that seriously changes the way I access the Internet.

For example, right now my My-Fi is turned on and ready to access. But the AirPort (or Wi-Fi) connectivity on my computer is turned off. Why? Because my computer seems to access the Internet any time it can, sucking down my bandwidth for no apparent reason. No, I don’t have a virus or worm. But my computer does like to check in with the various services I use — MobileMe, DropBox, etc. — to see whether it should download any updates or get any files. It does anytime it’s connected. While I could disable a lot of these automatic checks, it’s a lot easier to just turn off Wi-Fi until I actually need it.

SurplusMeter

SurplusMeterYou might be wondering how I know what my computer is doing. Last summer, I picked up a Mac app called SurplusMeter. It’s kind of neat. You set it up, tell it how much monthly bandwidth you have, and what day the month starts on. You also tell it how you’re connected to the Internet. It calculates a daily allowance; the idea being that if you use less than your daily allowance, you have a surplus to use during the rest of the month. Then it runs in the background, monitoring your network access. You can launch the app at any time to see what your totals are. Here’s mine for this month, which started just a few days ago. Last night, I was in the red, so even though it’s early, today’s allocation has been partially consumed.

Now, of course, I can use as much Internet as I want per day. The idea is for the monthly total to be less than — or, ideally, exactly — 3GB. SurplusMeter helps me rein in my Internet usage so I can minimize it.

Two things to note about SurplusMeter:

  • I’m only running it on one computer. That means it’s only logging bandwidth usage on one of the four computers I have with me. (Don’t ask.) Laptop access is not being logged. This results in an understatement of total usage.
  • It logs all AirPort activity, including local network activity. That means that every time one computer talks to another — for example, to share files — that usage is also logged. This results in an overstatement of total usage.

I’m hoping these two discrepancies net each other out.

And no, it isn’t worth it to set up multiple copies and use some other file transfer method to get more precise information. All I’m interested in is ballpark numbers.

But if you do know of a better app for the task that doesn’t cost a fortune, please do let us know about it in comments.

Getting the Big Fat Files

Of course, I still have to access the Internet for things that would make a serious dent in my allowance. For example, right now I’m working on a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion book. The Developer Previews I’m using as I write are about 4GB in size. There are two problems with this, and both are pretty obvious:

  • Downloading a 4GB file over a My-Fi with a max download speed of about 1Mbps would take more than 10 hours.
  • If my monthly allowance was only 3GB, I’d exceed that with just one download.

Fortunately, I’m running Lion on a laptop. Over the years, I’ve identified some Wi-Fi hotspots with pretty fast download speeds. One is in Wenatchee, at a coffee shop, where I was able to download a 900MB file last summer in less than 12 minutes. There’s a gas station in Quincy that used to have pretty quick Wi-Fi, although I admit I haven’t tried it yet this year. And there’s a coffee shop in Quincy that might have decent speed; the only time I used it, speed was not a concern. I do know that the local library’s Internet absolutely sucks, so it’s not likely that I’ll be using it for Internet access anytime in the future.

Yesterday, while in Wenatchee, I used the coffee shop Internet to download podcasts, check for updates, get maps for ForeFlight on my iPad, and do whatever I could. If I’d stayed in Wenatchee a few more hours, I would have gotten the big file I need today. I figure I’ll try the Quincy coffee shop first and if that isn’t fast enough, I’ll try the gas station. If that’s not fast enough, it’s another trip into Wenatchee for coffee and a high-speed Internet fix.

Doing Chores with iPhone

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to use my iPhone as much as possible for small tasks such as checking e-mail and sending/receiving Twitter tweets. After all, there’s no bandwidth cap, so it just makes sense to maximize usage. For some reason, I’ve been getting a ton of spam lately — 10-20 messages a day about dieting or “male enhancement” — and it’s quick and easy to just delete these from my phone so neither my iPad nor my computers need to retrieve them.

I know this is a drop in the bucket as far as Internet usage goes, but the way I see it, every little bit helps.

Rising to the Challenge

This summer is an experiment to see how well I can limit my usage and stay within budget. I’m prepared to pay for the extra bandwidth, but I like the challenge of working within limitations. It’s a lot like trying to conserve energy by turning off lights and turning down the heat/air conditioning.

It’ll be interesting to see how I do.

When Computers Reduce Your Productivity

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How many times has something like this happened to you?

By now, most of us who participate in social networking — Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. — know firsthand how social networking can absolutely destroy productivity. The rest of us with Internet connections can see how having an email client or Web browser open at our desks can seriously reduce productivity. But have you ever stopped to consider how the computer applications we actually use to get our work done hurt our productivity?

For an example of this, I can draw upon something that happened to me last week.

WordPress LogoI manage a number of WordPress-based Web sites, including one for N&W Associates, which sells helicopter ground handling solutions. N&W is owned and operated by Walter, who is an older gentleman who builds wheels and tow bars from scratch in his workshop. He’s a very nice man but not exactly computer literate, so I manage every aspect of the site for him. Every once in a while, he sends me some new material for the site and I put it online.

About a month ago, I completed my move of all sites I manage from GoDaddy hosting (good riddance!) to Bluehost. N&W was one of the last sites I moved. After moving it, I tested it and it worked fine.

Last week, Walter sent me an email message asking if I’d add mention of R66 helicopters, since their skid configuration is the same as R44 helicopters, thus making his equipment compatible. No problem, I said. It was an easy fix. His site only has about 6 pages so adding references to the R66 should take about 10 minutes tops. I told him I’d do it right away.

And I did. Or at least I tried to.

Trouble is, when I went to log into WordPress on his site, I couldn’t log in. No error message — instead, the login screen kept reappearing, as if I hadn’t even tried to log in.

For about 10 minutes, I tried multiple password combinations. No luck.

For about 5 minutes, I used FTP software to examine the settings files for a password and tried that password. No luck.

For about 20 minutes, I researched the password problem on WordPress’s Support site.

For another 20 minutes, I tried three different techniques to reset the password. No luck.

For about 20 minutes, I researched the login problem on forums on WordPress’s Support site.

For another 15 minutes, I tried both of the solutions people in the forums claimed would work for them. No luck.

For 10 minutes, I went back to the WordPress support forums using a variety of different search phrases. In one forum post, someone mentioned, in passing, the .htaccess file. A lightbulb went off in my head.

For 5 minutes, I used a text editor to open the .htaccess file I’d created for N&W. There was some code I’d included that would automatically rewrite the site’s URL to www.helicopterwheels.com (in the address bar and site logs) no matter how the domain was reached. I pulled out those four lines of code, saved the file, and tried logging in.

It worked.

For those of you who care about the problem, here are the details. The N&W site can be reached through two domain names: helicopterwheels.com and r22bigwheels.com. When I moved the site, to ensure continuity during the move, I moved it using the r22bigwheels.com domain. That’s the domain that was set up in WordPress’s General settings for the moved site. I used DNS on Bluehost to point both domains to the same folder containing the site files and it worked fine. Trouble is, when I tried to log in as an administrator, WordPress wanted to give me administrative access on R22bigwheels.com but the .htaccess file kept directing it to helicopterwheels.com. I’d created a loop. Once I logged in, I changed General settings to www.helicopterwheels.com, saved them, and restored the lines of code I’d temporarily removed from .htaccess. It worked the way it was supposed to do.

That little fix took another 5 minutes.

So if you add up all the time I spent on this “10-minute” edit, you’ll see that I lost an hour and 40 minutes of my day.

I can’t blame the computer, of course. And I can’t blame WordPress. It was my configuration error that had caused the problem. But placing blame isn’t the point of this post. The point is, we rely on computers to make us more productive and get tasks done quickly and efficiently. But all too often, it’s computer problems that slow us down.

The problem could be something technical like this. Or it could be a computer malfunction, such as a bad hard disk or software bug. Or it could be the simple fact that we don’t know exactly how to perform a task and have to learn how to do it before we can get it done.

I’m not suggesting here that we work without computers. But I am suggesting that we keep in mind that the more we rely on computers, the more we’re setting ourselves up for the possibility of getting less work done.

And I’m also suggesting that we try hard to keep things simple. If I didn’t put that fancy code in N&W’s .htaccess file, I wouldn’t have lost an hour and 40 minutes of my day to troubleshooting.

Got examples of how your computer cost you time? Share them in the comments!

Outraged about Apple Tracking Your Every Move? Read This.

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Once again, mainstream media, fed by tech journalists who should know better, get half the facts wrong and blow the other half out of proportion.

The big tech news these days is the story about Apple’s iDevices, including iPhone and iPad, “secretly” logging location information as you go about your daily business. The information is stored on your iDevice and then backed up to your computer when you sync — just like all the other information on your iDevice. (That’s what a backup does: it makes a copy so you have in case data is lost.) The media grabbed this one and ran with it, making a big deal about privacy concerns and even going so far as to suggest that this data is somehow getting back to Apple, which might be using it for some dark, secret purpose. The “discoverers” of this plot even worked up a program that can extract this data from your backup and plot it on a map. Just to show how thorough this information is, tech journalists were quick to seize it and plot their own movements.

Makes you angry, huh? To think that some big corporation is tracking your every move?

To hear interviewees on the radio, read blog posts and news stories, and read the comments left on blog posts, you’d think the government should be knocking down Apple’s doors and grabbing every storage device in sight to snatch this oh-so-valuable information from them. The media is outraged and they’ve made the public outraged, too.

Don’t Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story

There’s just one problem: The story, as reported by most media outlets and bloggers, isn’t entirely true.

Sure, iOS does log location information in a “hidden” file that’s synced to your computer when you back up your device. And sure, that hidden file isn’t encrypted (although it is hidden). But it doesn’t go anywhere else — certainly not to Apple. As was pointed out by someone actually knowledgeable about the situation in an NPR interview I heard yesterday (sorry; can’t find link), the state of California has laws governing the gathering and use of this information. It would be very stupid for Apple to violate this law.

(And do you honestly think that Apple devices are the only ones logging this kind of information?)

You Said they Could!

Guess what? In the iPhone Software License Agreement users agree to give Apple permission to gather this information:

(b) Location Data. Apple and its partners and licensees may provide certain services through your iPhone that rely upon location information. To provide and improve these services, where available, Apple and its partners and licensees may transmit, collect, maintain, process and use your location data, including the real-time geographic location of your iPhone, and location search queries. The location data and queries collected by Apple are collected in a form that does not personally identify you and may be used by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. By using any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its partners’ and licensees’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data and queries to provide and improve such products and services. You may withdraw this consent at any time by going to the Location Services setting on your iPhone and either turning off the global Location Services setting or turning off the individual location settings of each location-aware application on your iPhone. Not using these location features will not impact the non location-based functionality of your iPhone. When using third party applications or services on the iPhone that use or provide location data, you are subject to and should review such third party’s terms and privacy policy on use of location data by such third party applications or services.

Credit Where Credit is Due

So what’s the real deal? You could probably learn more about the facts by reading a blog post written by someone who discovered this back in 2010. Yes, this isn’t a new discovery. It was uncovered not long after the release of iOS 4. It was presented at the Paraben Forensics Innovation Conference in Salt Lake City in November 2010. It was covered in an Apress book called iOS Forensic Analysis that was released in December 2010. It was published in a paper in January 2011; the same month it was presented at the 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

In other words, this isn’t news. Evidently, the “discoverer” who has the most media connections and can shout the loudest gets all the credit.

What’s the Big Deal?

And how can so many people be so outraged about this? It’s absurd in a time when many well-connected iPhone users — and others — are publicly broadcasting their location day in and day out by check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other sites.

The irony of the outrage was best summed up in a tweet that came down my Twitter stream from Mike_FTW yesterday:

7:04: Check-in from bathroom. 7:38: Check-in from café. 8:15: Check-in from bus stop. (Mayor!) 8:35: Bitch about Apple tracking my location.

So what’s the big deal? There’s a log of your locations on your phone and in a hidden file on your backup computer. I’m sure as I type this there’s already an app under development that’ll wipe it clean for anyone who’s really concerned.