Cutting the Cable…..

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Randy

I’ve been thinking about how much money I send to Verizon, AT&T, COX, NetFlix, etc. every month and their ads on how to save money by bundling their services together.

So if I move my home phone from Verizon to Cox I can save $14/month.  Maybe more, it looks like the “bundle” pricing is less than I’m currently paying 🙁  So the minimum bundle with Cox (intenet, local phone, basic TV) is $68/month compared to my current unbundled cost of $148/month.  Assuming Cox isn’t telling me about the $13 in telco fee’s & taxes that probably get added in, it’s still $67/month lower!

Or maybe move my TV and Internet Access to Verizon, oops FiOS isn’t here yet so it’d be DSL and Direct TV for now… Not going to go to a slower connection.  Too bad, since it’d be nice if I could get a bundle that included the mobile broadband data plan from them.

So, combining services gets me down to $80/month (which I’m not sure I believe since it’s less than my current bill!).  Now what if I dump services instead of just consolidating them?

Why not dump the wired line and only use my cell phone?  Granted no power means no cell phone service, but that’s only if it’s a major power outage.  How about dumping cable?  I’ve got Roku with Netflix and can add Hulu Plus, and for local channels a USB TV Tuner is only $50 to get the local over the air channels.

So if I bump up the Internet Plan for Cox to go from 16 to 24 MBPS and That gets me down to $59/month, saving almost $90/month!

But what did you give up?  no more telemarketers and political pollsters calling and from the entertainment/TV side.  Guess it’s time to try to live without cable news…..



Posted in Tech@home | 1 Comment

Ted meets Google

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Randy

Picked up the TED 5000 home energy monitor and began, well, monitoring our home electrical usage.  Easy to install and use; once you allow it to connect onto your home wireless network (Glad the security was working).  It lets you analyze your usage down to the second.

Once you get it up and running the question becomes what now?

Well, first off it only stores 2 days of data.  humh, google likes keeping data for ever and you guessed it.  Google’s PowerMeter app will gladly store a life time of 1 second energy usage data.  Microsofts Hohm doesn’t play with TED, so no joy there.

Looking at the graphs you can see your baseline, constantly on energy drain…time to find all those adapters that suck the juice 24×7.  And you can see that the air conditioner dwarfs every other device in the home.  You can also see some cycling loads (dehumidifier? freezer?) and you begin to see where you might start looking for some savings.  you can tell TED what device your going to turn on, and it will learn that devices profile and isolate it’s usage and cost.

Get your utility bill out and you can plug in cost data and CO2 info and look at in terms of your personal contribution to global warming or the $$$’s your spending every hour 🙁

Now, to get google to add PowerMeter to their data api and you could get your data back as a feed to do some fun mashups……

Posted in Tech@home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

IronKey

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Randy

Was looking into secure USB devices and decided on going with the IronKey basic.  It sets up quick and easy, provides hardware encrypted storage, is waterproof, tamper proof (not sure if smoke will come out when it self-destructs!) and provides encrypted backup.

Not going to trust them totally, so not using their identity management or other on-line services.

If you need to keep a few files secure and want portability between work, home, travel this is worth a look.  I haven’t tried it on a mac or linux, but it says it will support them as well.

Posted in Tech@home | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Politics….

Posted on August 23, 2010 by Randy

With everyone thing going on in the world, we decide to obsess over whether the President of the united states is a Christian or a Muslim?  I’d say he’s a politician and like many, he views his faith through the lens of public opinion.  President Obama used his Church in Chicago to launch his political career, but when it became too controversial for main stream america it was time for some distance.  Now we’re to believe he has a rolodex of “acceptable” christian leaders he calls for guidance.  Maybe I’m just jaded, but I’d be willing to bet his advisors picked them to give him a “basket” of christian leaders to trot out that would play well in the polls in a number of key states.

Maybe the political pundits should look at how he lives his life, and not at the latest Pew Survey results.  Or better yet, any of the news worthy stories they should be covering.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

First Post…

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Randy

Yep, another blog….just what the world needs.  It’ll be interesting to see which topics grab my attention enough to get posted here.  My initial thoughts are to let this range far and wide, so expect to see a little politics, a lot of tech, and pretty much anything new that catches my fancy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment