Neat setup, $3 Cell plan

IME most people lose a ton of time because of their smart phones. By incessantly tapping on them, whipping them out and looking at the screen at the slightest whimper the phone makes, et cetera.

When I am on my mountain bike I really don't want that. It's largely impossible anyhow because cell phones display "No signal" at many places I go.

No!

Same here. But when I want files on the road I spool them onto my netbook. I didn't even bother to re-install dropbox when I got this new office PC end of last year.

Our teens including, unfortunately, my own granddaughters are going to have permanently deformed left hands ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Den tirsdag den 3. marts 2015 kl. 22.20.06 UTC+1 skrev Jim Thompson:

I'm sure thousands of years ago some old caveman sat in his cave being grumpy about those stupid kids spending all their time with tools and wheels ;)

-Lasse

Indeed ;-)

I can recall reading some Aristotle complaining of the decadent youth of his time ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Same thing with e-mail. Instead of batching and looking at their email once or twice a day (tops) they have their computers set to make noise and pop up dialogs every time a spam comes in-- disturbing work flow. A lot of people play mindless games incessantly on their phones and tablets and spend hours a day watching mediocre TV about wedding dresses and unsuspected pregnancies.

Nothing forces anyone to do that- you can't really blame the tool.

There's even a productivity tool called Pomodoro (Italian for tomato or literally golden apple) that requires users to work at least **25 minutes** without interruption. That wasn't so much of a problem 50 years ago.

Oh. It's unsafe to use headphones on an urban bike ride, but for stationary cycle or treadmill I'd much rather listen to an informative webcast or entertaining frothing left/right wing partisan than music- with noise cancelling phones of course. I don't run into loss of signal in most cases, though sometimes the signal degrades to only 3G.

Central California was a bit spottier on GSM than most last time I was there (T-Mobile network).

Some carriers are even un-metering music apps like Songza and Spotify so they don't count against your 2G or whatever of data each month.

It's quite empowering to be able to take and access useful photos and videos, translate foreign languages (OCR and translate signs), find nearby places you want to go, access subway maps while standing up, review ownership of companies outside their door- or in their lobby, check prices before you buy in person etc. etc. Oh, and it holds my domestic boarding passes, tickets to events from Eventbrite etc. Same stuff will mostly pop up on my tablet so even if I'm mugged in some foreign hellhole it's not all gone.

All with something small enough to have it with you 24/7. Main wishes- infinite battery life (oka, at least days with the screen lit) and inexpensive 256G memory- and better security.

The youth of his time _were_ decadent, though. That's why Philip of Macedon was able to assert hegemony over the formerly proud city-states of Attica and the Pelopponesus. (The Pelopponesian War and the plague at Athens were important factors as well.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yep. We had to read all that history in the Freshman "humanities" courses at MIT.

I wised up in later semesters taking "Music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque", etc., and various art courses.

Easier than basket weaving... and almost as good as a course in wine tasting, which I took after I moved to Arizona ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I'm a huge fan of late mediaeval and early modern polyphony--Josquin, Machaut, Tallis, & co. One of the benefits of being in the NYC 'burbs is having lots of those sorts of concerts to go to.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The ones I've seen are about the size of a stack of a half dozen credit cards. They're available for all carriers. You don't have to buy them from the carrier, though you might have to buy a lot of them for the manufacturers to be interested. ;-)

Absolutely true.

Yikes ...

I can't stand bland activities such as stationary cycling. Tried it for half a year while watching Spanish language TV to learn the language. Then I bought a real man's toy, a full suspension mountain bike. It open a whole new world for me.

For those who need this stuff for some reason, ok. What I can't stand is this: I was waiting for a connecting flight at LAS, in the Irish pub at gate C1. Had to work and this required pulling lots of datasheets during a circuit design on my netbook. Some major game was on. Instead of looking at the big screen running in the pub half a dozen people were watching it on their i-whatevers. The result was a totally bogged down Wifi.

Sometimes I think about the advantages and so far I always came away with not enough in added benefits over my netbook & regular cell phone. I tend to print out boarding passes (Hotels will gladly do that or provide a lobby printer), maps, and for local stuff to see or dine at I ask the locals. They know best. I've found places that way that don't even have any web presence. They don't need to.

Now if a (non-Apple) phone came out that had a truly useful stand-alone GPS mapping feature that works without cell tower connection I might be game. Has to be rugged, as in mountain bike proof. So far they were too slow. A funny case was an engineer who said "George, put you paper map away, let's use modern technology for a change, shall we?" ... "But we should merge right here" ... "Let the phone show us ... oh ... dang ... we should have used the on-ramp on the right ... DANG!"

Battery life is the most important feature for me as well. My netbook can run for 8h which is great because most airport administrations aren't smart enough to put in enough outlets.

Well, the UBlox is smaller but unfortunately not on the list. Price is also an important factor. As is sleep mode and idle power consumption where we had to design our own circuitry to make that work.

Unfortunately things don't seem to have changed much and economists don't have much hope that it will :-(

But they could use one of these too: