Prepaid mobile phone cost comparison

Using a mobile phone with a traditional service plan is not a cheap way to make phone calls, but they are so useful they've become the ubiquitous gadget. And while there's a lot of advertising that promotes the latest mobile phones, you'll have to look much harder to find out what the real cost of ownership will be to use it for a year. My research into this shows that prepaid mobile phone service can save you a lot of money.

A few years ago I had a standard cell phone family plan that I shared with my wife. It was pretty basic with 500 minutes, free calling between our phones, and the standard free weekends, all for only $50 per month (really $64 after taxes and extra fees). After our 2 year contracts expired I started shopping around and concluded that prepaid service was far more cost effective for us.

Here is the spreadsheet I use to compare the real cost of each of the plans. You can download a copy of the spreadsheet and adjust the numbers for yourself. To use the spreadsheet you need to add up all the minutes you used over a year (even if they were "free" minutes). We needed 2 phones so I only included family plans, and since we aren't heavy text message users I did not consider that in my calculations. If you need lots of text messages or a data plan then you probably won't find a suitable prepaid plan today (sorry iPhone fans). I'm hopeful that a data options will come to prepaid in the future but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Prepaid services can get confusing too, with variable per minute cost and minute expiration periods. The best ones I've found are Net10, which is always 10 cents with only the expiration time varying (up to 6 months based on how much you spend upfront), and T-Mobile which is 10 cents and last 1 year when you add $100 increments.

Check them out and run the numbers for yourself. If you have suggestions about how to improve the spreadsheet or tips for lower cost mobile phone services please share them in the comments.

Upgrade a wireless router with Linux

Wireless routers are cheap and often the firmware they come with shows it.
It can be buggy, unstable and require you to reboot the router frequently to maintain your internet connection. If you're a network geek like me you've probably heard you can run linux on your home firewall router. Projects like dd-wrt and OpenWrt both offer excellent ways to do that.

You need a router that is supported and there are many so you may already own one. You can buy the Asus WL-520gU at Newegg for under $40. It's a bargain with it's USB ports and Linux compatibility. Asus even mentions support for dd-wrt on their product description.

I use OpenWRT at home and it's been great. I've also recently tried dd-wrt and it was so easy to install and setup that I figured I'd write about it to encourage others to try it. If you're not comfortable configuring you current router this may not be something you want to attempt.

Before you start I recommend reading the official documentation specific to your router. For my Asus router the instructions are here. After reading that, you can follow the list below which summarizes the steps to install this new firmware.

1. connect an ethernet cable between your computer and the router
2. configure your computer with the manual address 192.168.1.2
3. hold in the recessed reset button while you connect the power cable to the router
4. the router power light will flash slowly to indicate it is ready to receive the new firmware (then you can release the reset button)
   
5. load the latest "Standard Generic" .bin firmware file for your router with the tftp command
6. then wait 10 minutes and login to your router at http://192.168.1.1 and setup the admin password
   

Eye-Fi and workflows

What is your digital photography workflow? Most amateur photographers like me probably don't think about it very often. It's the theme of this post because I bought an Eye-Fi Explorer card for my new camera and it's whole purpose is to change how you handle digital photos.

The story of the new camera is pretty standard. My old Canon S230 broke (note to self: don't let a 2 year old use the new camera). To replace it I got a Canon SD980 which records HD video (720p h264) and has a 24MM wide angle lens (the extra wide angle is nice). Like most new cameras it uses SDHC flash cards and that research lead me to the Eye-Fi.

The Eye-Fi card is an SHDC card that can connect WiFi networks and upload pictures to your computer. The software that receives the pictures can then use the log of WiFi networks to Geotag each picture. Okay, that really glosses over this amazing miniature technology but it's enough for this post. At $100 it's significantly more expensive than a standard 4GB SHDC that are around $15 now, but I imagined all the cool things it could do and it seemed worth the premium.

This is my workflow:

1. After I take the photos, I put the SD card in a card reader and plug it into my computer.
2. Then I run a script which copies all the files on the card to a folder on my web server. I just tell it the name of the folder to put the files in.
   
3. Last I view the folder in my web browser on my picture gallery site to add descriptions and delete any pictures that are not worth saving.
   

I expected the Eye-Fi card would let me skip the first 2 steps, but quickly discovered a few of its limitations. First the Eye-Fi card won't delete files after it has transferred them to the server. This puts a big kink in my plan, as I either have to manually delete each photo on the camera after verifying that it has been uploaded to the server or keep doing the first 2 steps. The other issue I discovered was that the video recordings on my nice new SD980 had audio static noise caused by interference generated by the radio transmitter in the Eye-Fi card. This meant I couldn't use the Eye-Fi card in my new camera, and while the company was aware of the problem they couldn't provide any assurance that it would ever be fixed.

There's no doubt the Eye-Fi card is an amazing device. The company seems to be friendly to the small group of Linux users who have made a few versions of the receiving software. I even added geotagging to one for my own use. If the issues I found are ever fixed will definitely try Eye-Fi card again.