poobal.net » Technology

This month’s data usage on 3G: 12 Gb

poobal — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:03:51 +0000

I am still on my original “Unlimited” data plan for my Aircard. No 5 GiB soft or hard limit. I have been watching TWiT and watching TED. I am currently at woodstock, GA @ my sister’s place and the speed is consistently good.

Speedtest.net test results

Math Fail

poobal — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:19:17 +0000

Math Fail

When is unlimited really unlimited?

poobal — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:10:41 +0000

When I logged into my vonage account I noticed that the Terms of Service [ToS] has been recently updated. One thing that caught my eye was the number of minutes you could use each month before getting flagged as abusive. Like many others, I don’t read the fine print. Reasons for that vary from being lazy to unable to understand legalese. I started checking all “unlimited” services I had and found that pretty much every service had some kind of ToS which limits the use of the service.

This practice is at best deceptive marketing. When i signed up for this service I really thought unlimited is unlimited. Apparently, I am wrong.

Skype has been more forthcoming than Vonage about their Acceptable Usage Policy (AUP). You can see it clearly when you try to sign up. Now, what happens if you violate these policies? I don’t know and I haven’t found anyone who violated the policies and got a huge bill or got their service terminated.

Apple OSX 10.5.8 Update + Airport Performance

poobal — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:46:26 +0000

Apple released the 10.5.8 update last night. Usually I wait about a week to apply any core updated but since 10.5.8 was released as minor update with some improvements to the airport wireless, I did not see any harm in updating. As of this morning, my wireless performance while on battery “SUCKS”. The moment you plug in your power supply, the network performance increases dramatically.
Ping first on battery and in the middle of the test I plug in the adapter and then I unplug the external power.

So what gives? On battery I get anywhere form 300ms to 1000ms ping times and around 70ms while connected to external power. I have contacted apple and looks like most of the macbooks affected are from 2008 but no one sure. There is thread on apple forums where few people have posted similar issues. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2106968&tstart=0

On a side note, I noticed that apple censored the word “SUCKS” from my discussion post. They replaced sucks with *****. It looks like I said “s**** or f**k” rather than sucks. Nice going Apple. Morons. Is sucks offensive?