Many fast food joints will give you free stuff just for taking the survey seen on the receipt. Arby’s was giving away a free beef & cheddar, Taco Bueno gives out free beef tacos or bean burritos, and Taco Bell gives away a free taco.
The surveys are all anonymous, and you get free food out of it. Might as well!
AT&T getting closer to launching Femtocell products, according to Unstrung. A femtocell is basically a small cellular network device that plugs into your home broadband network and provides service to your cell phones. It’s your own small cell tower in your house. It’s a pretty cool idea because it can give you coverage where you might not have it but the big unknown at this point is how they’re going to price them. Verizon has one that’s $249.99 but you still have to use your included minutes when you’re using the device. You get to take a small load off of their network, dump it on yours, and you still eat up minutes. Not a very appealing deal at all.
The AT&T one is rumored to have unlimited airtime packages – for a fee, of course. Sprint’s AiRave device has an unlimited airtime option for $10/mo. T-Mobile doesn’t seem to have any such ambitions, instead using what’s called UMA. That’s what we have here. My wife & I both have a BlackBerry (She has the very sexy new Curve 8900 and I have a beat up old Curve 8320. What’s up with that?!) and the Unlimited Hotspot Calling for Families package. It’s $10/mo, and our airtime is unlimited when the call originates from a WiFi network. When we roam onto a wifi network, the phone will show “UMA” and we’re ready to go.
We picked up a used Linksys router branded for T-Mobile from Amazon.com for $15. The BlackBerry devices use it, and the other wireless devices in the house use the Apple AirPort Express. The AirPort Express didn’t work well at all with the UMA phones, unfortunately, but I have not tried it with firmware 7.4.2, since it just came out a few days ago. The T-Mobile branded Linksys will prioritize the UMA traffic which helps save battery life on the phones.
The Hotspot service has certainly saved us money. Between the unlimited UMA calling and the MyFaves setup, it’s difficult to estimate how much we’ve saved but we know it’s quite a bit. We were able to drop our rate plan from Unlimited minutes to 3000 minutes to only 1000 minutes because 98% of the calls we make are either to myfaves or are made as UMA calls. The wife uses about 3000 minutes a month by herself, but again, they’re all either UMA minutes or MyFaves minutes.
T-Mobile has since altered the rate plan to have 1800 minutes for the same price and they added unlimited Mobile to Mobile calling, helping us out even further. The rate plan we’re at is the best price point because the next cheaper one is only $10/mo less but comes with only 700 anytime minutes. There are three of us, and we average about 400 anytime minutes a month. It’s worth the extra $10/mo for the 1800 minutes. We haven’t had any overage charges yet, which is good because they’re rather costly.
Tags: economy, Technology, tmobile, wireless
MacMedics were lucky (hah) enough to be the experts taking a look at an obviously fake iPhone that someone purchased off of eBay. Their blog entry about it is pretty interesting and has the video of the product that the unsuspecting eBay user wound up with. I wish there was a screenshot of the ebay auction, and I certainly hope that ebay does the right thing and fully refunds the money and bans the seller permanently. I don’t trust ebay anymore because of that. It’s far too easy to get ripped off, and the buyer protections are very flimsy. It’s much easier to deal with Craigslist because at least you can see the stuff beforehand and verify that it’s actually what the ad says it is. Even then you can still run into problems. The PC that I bought for Windows 7 said it was a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 but it was actually a 2.4ghz Celeron N. Easy mistake to make, since Dell did sell that PC with a Pentium 4. In that case, it wasn’t a big deal and I went ahead with the purchase but I would have been upset if I had purchased it off of eBay and paid for shipping.
Tags: Technology
One of the most entertaining ways I’ve found to discover new music these days is by using Pandora. Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project. CNN has a little article about Pandora here.
But thanks to the ever increasing royalties being demanded by SoundExchange, Pandora may cease to exist. SoundExchange’s idea? Shove audio advertisements in between songs. “The only way Pandora can survive, he says, is by adding audio ads in between songs.” Another option is for SoundExchange to just go away and leave small/internet webcasters alone, but unfortunately that seems unlikely.
One of the beautiful things about listening to Pandora is the fact that you are not constantly assaulted by advertisements, and I’m certainly hoping that they can keep it that way.
Tags: music, Technology
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