It’s rather refreshing in Information Technology when something just works as advertised. And that’s how it went using the Cradlepoint 850 to provide remote 4G LTE connectivity to a water meter that was in a location that made general wired Internet connectivity extremely expensive. It took all of 5 minutes to install the Cradlepoint and be able to access the water meter remotely through a Verizon 4G SIM with a public IPv4 address.

LAN2 on the Cradlepoint 850 is automatically setup for IP Passthrough, so any connection to the public IPv4 address of the Cradlepoint will be NAT’d through to the device connected to LAN2.

Later I went back and setup DyDNS to account for the occasional DHCP address change on the Verizon 4G LTE. This way I only needed to provide a single URL to the customer.

Why can’t everything in IT be this simple?

Update: June 30, 2019

After a number of new versions recently released it would seem that I’m now able to send messages reliably. Now there’s another issue where a message will appear in the preview pane but won’t actually appear in the app when you look through the Inbox… one step forward, two steps back.

There’s been a lot of angst around the net regarding the UI changes between Android 8.0 Oreo and Android 9.0 Pie. There are quite a few visual changes, which most users will almost immediately notice.

I personally like the new gestures, swipe up and down… all the visual changes aren’t that alarming… and I’m sure folks will get used to it eventually. I’m curious to see how the notifications will work – I wasn’t a big fan of getting a blitzed with audible alerts every morning at 7AM when my nightly ‘Do Not Disturb’ period expired.

Feel free to let me know what you think, I’ll probably post an update after a week or two.

Cheers!

Update: Sunday February 24, 2019 – I really liking the dark theme available in Android Pie, I noticed that I had to reset some of my application notifications – I’m not sure what happened there. So far no big complaints.

1. I’m essentially paying the same monthly fee I was paying for two smartphones on Verizon with five smartphones on T-Mobile [Note: I purchased all the smartphones up front],
2. I don’t have to worry about the girls going over data or text messaging limits and ending up with some crazy overage billing.

Interestingly a lot has changed in the past year – Verizon and AT&T have gotten much more competitive with their plans and fees, not so much that I would entertain switching back… but if you really like Verizon or AT&T you can likely make the numbers work much easier than you could have a year ago.

I also recently returned my Samsung Galaxy Note 4 to Samsung for repair under the manufacturer’s warranty and was really pleased with the whole process. Samsung repaired the phone and returned it to me within 6 calendar days. That was an awesome customer experience!

If you’re looking to shave a few $$$ off your monthly mobile bill then you might want to give T-Mobile a call.

Now what to-do with my exploding cable bill? Is it time to cut the cord? That’s my next hurdle with Verizon FiOS and Comcast.

Cheers!

Cheers!

After running all the numbers time and time again I landed on T-Mobile.

I purchased a pair of Samsung Galaxy Note 4s for myself and my wife and then I ordered a pair of Motorola Moto Es for my twin girls. My oldest daughter has been using a Motorola Moto G for the past two years and had been asking for an Apple iPhone, not wanting to be the tech father that pushed his kids to non-Apple solutions I ordered an Apple iPhone 6 for her from T-Mobile. I had looked around at various refurbs/second-hand from sites like Amazon and Gazelle but choose to purchase new seeing how she’s taken pretty good care of her Motorola Moto G.

My experience with T-Mobile has been fairly good to date. I will call out David the sales order representative that I spoke to while placing the order with T-Mobile. David initially tried to tell me that the 2GB plan was for “flip phones”. I politely told David that I wasn’t in need of an upsell and my daughters would be fine with 2GB data plan. After that point David was very helpful and successfully placed the order.

With Verizon I was paying ~ $130/monthly for 2 lines with 2GB of data each, 500 SMS text messages and 700 minutes shared between the phones in the plan. That equates to about $3,120 over the course of the two year contract plus the $299 I paid for the Motorola Moto X when I first purchased it (buy one get one free). So all total I paid Verizon just over $3,400 for 2 lines. With T-Mobile I’ll be paying ~ $110/monthly for 5 lines with 2GB of data each, unlimited SMS text messaging and unlimited minutes. That will equate to about $2,880 over the course of two years plus the ~ $2,100 I paid for all 5 phones (2 Samsung Galaxy Note 4s, the Apple iPhone 6 and the 2 Motorola Moto Es). The benefit here is that I have my entire family on a single plan (no more pre-paid phones) and I’m free to jump ship (to any GSM capable provider) since I purchased the phones outright.

Update: I just received my first bill.. $144/monthly with all the taxes included… that’s $34/monthly in taxes and fees, 23% of the bill.

Cheers!

What to do?

With my daughter entering middle school I thought she was old enough and responsible enough to have a cell phone. Obviously being the daughter of an Information Technology professional (me) she wanted a smartphone with all the bells and whistles having seen and used mom’s and dad’s Motorola Droid 3 quite often.

Thankfully I still had my old original Motorola Droid that I had purchased when I moved from AT&T Wireless (formerly Cingular Wireless) to Verizon Wireless back in December of 2009. I rooted the smartphone and decided to install Peter Alfonso’s Bugless Beast GPA19 custom ROM which is based on Gingerbread. It’s supposedly a very stable release and has quite a few upgrades over the stock Verizon ROM.

Which cell carrier to use?

Now that I had a phone I had to figure out which carrier to use. Since I already had a phone I had to stick with carriers that support CDMA as opposed to GSM. As I previously alluded to I already had a Verizon Wireless Family Plan for my wife and myself but Verizon won’t allow you to add a smartphone to any plan unless you purchase a data plan. I could change my grandfathered unlimited data plan to a Share Everything plan but the current data caps are really harsh for power users such as myself and my wife (Facebook). What other options did I have, what about the prepaid carriers?

I literally stumbled across Page Plus Cellular while doing some research. Page Plus Cellular actually utilizes Verizon Wireless’s cellular network so I immediately knew that my Motorola Droid would work without any issues. And that the signal coverage was excellent – in my area. While doing some background research on Page Plus I stumbled across Kitty Wireless, an authorized reseller for Page Plus Cellular. I posted a query to Twitter and received the following response;

Well I took them up on their offer… I activated my old Motorola Droid online via Kitty Wireless, I purchased a $10 PIN and I was off and running. The whole process took less than 30 minutes although there were quite a few things that needed to be accomplished as a first time customer of Kitty Wireless. I had no issues following the instructions (there’s a brilliant idea) and was up and running in no time.

Parental Controls / Monitoring

Now the question that almost every parent struggles with… should I and how can I effectively monitor my child’s cell phone (and Internet) activity? This topic really deserves a post by itself but I’m not sure that I have anything earth breaking to offer on the subject. I will probably do something for at least for the first few years especially since I have daughters. I see that “My Mobile Watchdog” seems quite popular so I’ll probably try that out first – can’t seem to find out how it’s monitoring (reporting) will work when the smartphone has data disabled and will need to rely only on WiFi for Internet access.

I came across this advertising image from IG Parental Control which is a definite attention getter.

I think every parent will need to decide for themselves what do-to and how far to take it. I think we’d all like to believe that our children are saints but there are definitely some that need a stronger hand than others to help them stay on course. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of apps out there that claim to provide filtering and monitoring.

Anyone have any recommendations?

Google Family Safety Center
Microsoft Family Internet Safety

Cheers!

What’s the spin?

There was already a law passed in Philadelphia back in 2009 that banned using a cell phone while driving unless it was hands-free (within the city of Philadelphia). The new state law supersedes and preempts any local ordinances including the 2009 Philadelphia law.

So you can now talk on your cell phone without the need for a hands-free headset but you can’t text or email on your cell phone while driving in the state of Pennsylvania.

I support the current ban on texting and e-mailing as do a great many drivers. I’m left scratching my head though wondering what happened to the hands-free provision? I personally don’t spend too much time in the car but occasionally I do need to jump on a conference call and always utilize my trusty Plantronics Voyager 510 headset.

Have you ever had any close calls because you were distracted by your cell phone?

Do support restricting cell phone use while driving?

Cheers!

It was ironic because once I made it past the triage nurse the physician’s assistant, who was very nice, she took a quick look at me for a few minutes and said Lyme disease. She asked me if I had any spots and asked me to stand up at which point she found a red blotch on my back at my waistline that she felt was probably the originating spot. The physician’s assistant explained that she had diagnosed more than 30-40 cases in the past month and later we started to hear about all our friends and neighbors that had recently been infected and diagnosed.

Ultimately, the physician assistant’s diagnosis was confirmed with positive blood test 3 days after my visit to the hospital and by then the antibiotics I was taking were starting to kick in. It would take me almost an entire 2 months to get my strength and stamina back to where it was before I got sick.

While laid up in bed I quickly grew tiered of managing the heavy laptop and the smartphone display was too small so the wife went out and purchased a Motorola Xoom for me. I’ll admit that I had put the bug in her ear about it (Thanks Kim!)

Motorola Xoom

I’ve had the Motorola Xoom for about 3 months now and I’ve been very impressed with both the hardware and software. I just recently finished reading my first eBook, Web Operations:Keeping the Data On Time written by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins via Google Books. Not much unlike my Motorola Droid 3 (Google Android 2.3) the Motorola Xoom (Google Android 3.1) does a great job of managing all my personal and work contacts including my email and calendar. It’s very fast and responsive and the ability to view Adobe Flash content is a big key to using the device to view almost any website.

What tablet are you using and what for?

Cheers!

I was able to “root” my original Motorola Droid which was running 2.2.2 by using SuperOneClick written by CLShortFuse. Then I stumbled across Peter Alfonso’s port of Gingerbread 2.3.5. I was able to use ROM Manager along with ClockworkMod Recovery to install the custom ROM and I had my old Motorola Droid running Gingerbread 2.3.5 in a very short time.

Anyone have any recommended or favorite Android ROM for a Motorola Droid?

Cheers!

I had done my research and was very eager to stay away from any Windows Mobile device, deciding instead to embrace Google’s Android operating system.  In the weeks leading up to my decision I was flip-flopping back and forth between a Smartphone and a Netbook. I also had to keep the wife in mind… no purchases would be authorized without her buy-in. Thankfully the wife had been looking to ‘upgrade’ for sometime, looking for a more efficient way to organize and carry her address book and calendar. It was the Motorola Droid for myself and a HTC Eris for the wife.

That was about 2 weeks ago now and I’m here to report my experiences. Overall both myself and the wife are extremely satisfied with our purchase and with the quality of Verizon’s network. While the wife was already a big fan of Facebook and social networking the HTC Eris has really brought her into the Web 2.0 world. We did have some challenges uploading her Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts into Google so we could sync them up with the phone.  Other than that one issue she’s really embracing the technology and using it to improve her daily life and activities. She lives by the calendar and activities list that are now loaded onto the phone.

As for myself I’m also getting into the Web 2.0 world. While I’m on Facebook I’m not very active although I am taking a liking to Twitter and really enjoying the Seesmic Android client. I will comment on the slide out QWERTY keyboard; for a guy who is 6′ 5″  the keys are just way to small for my large hands. The on screen touch keyboard is really the only usable option for me personally. The battery life of both phones has been pretty decent although I did install Advanced Task Killer from the Android Market on both phones.

Of course as Moore’s Law goes, Google released their Nexus One only two weeks after my purchase of the Motorola Droid. I have yet to feel any buyers remorse because I’m pretty happy with my purchase. Hopefully this phone will last me two years and I’m sure that technology will have moved on by that time.

Cheers