From my Google Reader shares
Archive for March, 2011
Links for March 29, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 29
From my Google Reader shares
- ‘True Legend’ Trailer – ‘Drunken Master’ Helmer Yuen Woo-ping Returns to the Director’s Chair:
- Warner Bros. Is Gonna Reboot Batman (Obviously) and Make a Justice League Flick in 2013 (No Chance): I hope reinvent does not mean reboot. I get sick of seeing the same origin stories rehashed. You’ve established a great thing here, why redo it all over again. It’s so annoying.
- Sign up for the System Update Preview program right now:
- Amazon Cloud Drive Stores 5 GB of Your Stuff Online and Streams Your Music Back to You [Cloud Storage]:
- Jose Canseco Delivers the Greatest Tweet Ever: I’m somewhat compelled to start following him now.
Links for March 28, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 28
From my Google Reader shares
- The Brothers Mario 2 Commits Grand Theft Auto In Donkey Kong Country [Video]:
- Eight realistic things that the 3DS needs:
- NPD Puts an End to Analyst-Shared Data:
- No Hardware Announcements at WWDC 2011? [Updated: No New iPhone Until FY 2012?]:
- TIL that Elmo is a suave black guy.: This is the craziest news I’ve ever seen
- Feist – The Water:
Links for March 27, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 27
From my Google Reader shares
Links for March 26, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 26
Links for March 25, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 25
From my Google Reader shares
- A Day in the Life of a House Cat:
- iOS 4.3.1 released, fixes a few bugs: My touch had the graphical glitches which sucked. I thought I had done something weird to it, so glad to see a fix is out finally.
- How District 9 should have ended [Video]:
Lately Watching
Author: TimothyMar 25
In the sparse time I have free I’ve run through a few series of shows/movies.
- Sherlock – Three 90 minute episodes all of which are great. Highly recommend it. A modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Incredibly well done.
- The IT Crowd – Comedy, 4 seasons but every season is very short. Great for techy type people.
- Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood – 100002873493874932847392x better than the original series. If you kind of liked the first one, this one (more accurate to the manga) is much much better. 64 episodes.
- Archer – On FX. Totally hilarious. If you loved Frisky Dingo it’s in the same vein except with a super secret spy agency.
- Trigun Badlands Rumble – If you liked Trigun it’s worth watching. It feels like an extended episode and feels out of place if you watched the series but it’s still enjoyable.
- All Star Superman – Enjoyable, I hear it’s a much abbreviated version of the comic.
- Young Justice – Ongoing series on Cartoon Network. I really like all the DC animated series. This one has some cool promise going on.
I have a list a million miles long of stuff I have people wanting me to watch. Community, Big Bang Theory, The Wire, Baki the Grappler, 30 Rock, The Office, Mad Men. So much stuff! Hopefully after the summer everything will settle and I’ll have time to start going through the list.
Links for March 24, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 24
From my Google Reader shares
Links for March 23, 2011
Author: TimothyMar 23
From my Google Reader shares
- Limewire Being Sued For 75 Trillion: Pretty classy to sue for so much.
- Q&A: Why Are The Netflix Envelopes Rectangular Instead of Square?:
- Futurama Renewed For 7th Season:
- Elizabeth Taylor Has Died:
Ditching Your Cell Phone: iPod Touch
Author: TimothyMar 23
I remember growing up the only phone I had was in my house. Today it’s extremely convenient to be able to call from anywhere but I rarely do it. If anything, I only need to text periodically. I wondered if it would be possible to ditch the smartphone plan which is basically $70+ a month but keep the benefits of having a smartphone. Additionally I wondered if I could do this while keeping my phone number.
After some research, the basic answer is yes. You’ll need these things:
- 4th Generation iPod Touch (has built in microphone)
- Google Voice account with number
- Google Voice app for iOS
- Talkatone app for iOS
- Textfree
I won’t go into the details of setting up the accounts for all of these things. If you have a Google account for anything (ex. gmail) then you have a voice account, you just need to go to voice.google.com to set it up.
The voice app for the Touch lets you make calls and make/send text messages but it doesn’t seem to send/receive calls. Talkatone lets you make calls using VoIP and your Google voice number. Setting up Textfree lets you have a phone number for the device which you register with Google voice. From there you can setup call forwarding from the Google voice number to go to the Textfree number.
If you have a current cell phone number you can most likely port it over to Google voice. So if you dump your cell carrier you can transparently make this change to everyone without having to give out a new phone number. It’s a bit complicated but it looks kind of like this
- Send/Receive texts: Google Voice App
- Send calls: Talkatone
- Receive calls: Textfree
The downside to this setup is what I alluded to in the beginning. You only have service where you have WiFi, which may only be your home. For me it’s currently home and office and most places I hang out has free WiFi. WiFi enabled places keep going up by the day so this is sort of a very forward thinking setup. If you can live without a cell phone in your car, this is great.
If you can’t though, there are a lot of devices that let you have WiFi anywhere. For example the Virgin MiFi 2200 will connect to Sprint’s 3G network and give you WiFi. The rates are pretty decent, especially compared to smartphone prices. $10 for 10 days with a 100MB cap. Alternately $50 a month with no data cap. You have to pay for the device though but I think the combination of the iPod Touch and MiFi with a $50 plan pays for itself pretty quickly vs having an iPhone 4 with unlimited texting plan and unlimited voice:
- $229 for iPod + $149 for MiFi + $50/month
- $199 for phone + $134.99/month
First month is $428 for the iPod plan vs $333.99. The second month total cost is $478 for the iPod vs $468.98. The third month is $528 for the iPod vs $603.97. Keep in mind this is before all the taxes for having a phone which means the second month is probably the first month where the iPod setup is cheaper than the iPhone. Also if you can deal with a 300MB cap you could just pay $30 a month, or if you can live with a phone only at home for any of those months, ignore the MiFi monthly price. I suppose I should also factor in the price for Internet and a wireless router at home but for the most part you’d probably have this already.
So there you have it, the smartphone without the carrier is totally possible with much more flexible plans for giving you more mobility for how you want to use it.