Category Archives: Tech

Bandwidth caps are rate hikes – Cringely on technology

Leave a reply

That 250 gigabytes-per-month works out to about one megabit-per-second, which costs $8 in New York. So your American ISP, who has been spending $0.40 per month to buy the bandwidth they’ve been selling to you for $30, wants to cap their maximum backbone cost per-subscriber at $8.

via I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Bandwidth caps are rate hikes – Cringely on technology.

I upgraded to “Extreme 50” DOCSIS3 recently. Essentially I’m paying $100 for the same $8 worth of backbone cost. 250GB is definitely very tight, 500GB would be more reasonable.

It’s almost time to drop the phone number

Leave a reply

I’ve used FaceTime with my phone in my pocket many many times for free voice-only calls. Now that I can use my email address in addition to my AT&T number for FaceTime in iOS5, I pretty much don’t need my phone number anymore. I’ve been using iMessage a lot and it’s amazing. I can’t wait for iOS5 to be out for everyone so I can stop using other SMS-replacement apps. What about non-iOS friends? Well, they will just have to get an iDevice, and worst case it will fall back to WhatsApp, and then Google Voice, and lastly, SMS/MMS.

Apple’s built a peer-to-peer calling system that allows you to call multiple devices using just an email address, with no central service or account management to speak of. All the company has to do is roll out updates that enable voice-only calls and support for calls on 3G and 4G networks, and millions of iPhone 4 users will stop using their minutes when they call each other. What’s more, FaceTime is built on open protocols like XMPP and SIP, and Apple’s promised to eventually open the standard to others, meaning that multiple apps and devices could someday support FaceTime calling. All you’d have to do on a new device is enter your email address, say you’re willing to accept FaceTime calls, and you’d be all set. If Apple plays it correctly, iOS 5 users will be able to call and text each using only data by this time next year, without regard for phone numbers at all. Add in some iChat integration on the desktop and, well, you’ve got the dream.

via iMessage, Skype, Google Voice, and the death of the phone number | This is my next….

My iPad Screens

2 Replies

Kevin asked me what apps I use so I took these screenshots. Thought they’re interesting enough to post here. (this post might be best viewed in your browser than your feed reader to take advantage of a javascript images cycle plugin)











Making Mailplane steezy

1 Reply

After about 8 years of using Apple Mail on the Mac (that is if you don’t count NeXTMail on my NeXTstep back in CMU), I finally got fed up with it and had to find a better solution to access my Google Apps gmail accounts. It pretty much came down to Mailplane and Sparrow. I went with Mailplane for reasons I don’t really want to get into here. Very happy with it so far. One thing is that there are a lot of stuff in the gmail web interface that doesn’t make sense to have in Mailplane, most of which actually open up in your default browser when you click on them.

To make Mailplane a little bit more minimalistic, you can include your own stylesheet, and it’s super easy to do coz you can inspect the page right there with the webkit inspector inside Mailplane.

Minimal changes, but makes the experience a lot better. I’ve put up the stylesheet here, mostly for @seoulfully to grab and keep up with my changes easily: https://github.com/ayn/Mailplane-Steez