I keep seeing ads that say that Wi-Fi is essential
The thing is since the pandemic has come and gone, and my smartphone plan now offers unlimited data aka 60 GB a month, plus a 5 GB hotspot, I find that harder to believe. It’s hard to use that much data on a phone. The thing is the modern, basic smartphone can do nearly as much as laptop can do, at least as far as social media, web browsing, Youtube and email. 4G seems plenty fast to me.
I don’t particularly enjoy sitting at a desk — especially after a day at work doing that, and would rather have my phone where I can take it wherever is comfortable. My phone uses a lot less power then my laptop, easier to lug around, and works wherever I have cell service. And not having WI-FI on my laptop means when I’m using it, I don’t have distractions of social media or email pings, or the ability to wander off into the vast space of the inter-webs.
It’s kind of rare for me to go down to the library to work on my laptop but I did for 45 minutes or so this afternoon – I wanted to download some data plus I just wanted to get out of my apartment for a while this afternoon. It also was a chance to get a few more steps in.
If muzzles weren’t required I’d probably go to the library more but these days I find I can do most things with my phone – and I have hot spot service too. I probably could get home internet but it’s expensive, uses a lot of electricity and I like the walk.
Probably the biggest time suck is the internet, just browsing social media and random websites. Not only is it time consuming – it’s expensive with the $50 plus a month for the cable or FIOS service, to say nothing of the electricity consumed and the constant supply of gadgets like modems and routers that you use for a few years and throw in the garbage when they fail or become obsolete.
For years, a resisted even having a smartphone until they finally became inexpensive and it seemed like a growing necessity to have access to email for work. But nowadays it seems like you can virtually do everything on your smartphone – no computer needed.
Bandwidth caps keep increasing and with more powerful smartphone apps you don’t really need computers for much except for the most processing intensive things like GIS work. And heck, it seems like most new phones are including Hotspot capabilities and providers are allowing you to use part of your monthly bandwidth for hot spot allowing you to get your desktop computer online for basic, occasional use.
I just like having my internet access limited at home and not using my laptop, which uses far more electricity than my smartphone. When I need an occasional dataset or to do something best done on the computer, I can use the hotspot mode to briefly connect. And I can get connected wherever.
For bigger files and downloads, I can always swing by a public Wi-Fi network at a local library or other location. My office has WI-FI and that’s where I normally grab software updates, podcasts, YouTube videos that I download and so forth. I like how my internet access is controlled and limited to set time periods at the library or similar other locations.
Even when I own my own land, I really doubt I’ll ever have home internet. It seems like a lot of equipment to buy, services to subscribe to, electricity to consume and equipment to discard. I get that smart homes are very trendy these days but I don’t want to live a life where everything I do offline is monitored and sold for marketing purposes. My smartphone is really just enough.
With the craziness of the world and maybe my own anxiety, I often feel it necessary to head up to the wilderness for a few days, away from cell service. While I used to crave camping places where I could stay connected, especially on long winter nights, nowadays after a year of remote work, sometimes from camp, I have a much stronger craving to get away from it all.
Mr. Heredia is a 19-year-old volunteer with NYC Mesh, a nonprofit community Wi-Fi initiative, and he was there to install a router that would bring inexpensive Wi-Fi to the building. Mr. Cambridge’s family said they had become fed up with the take-it-or-leave-it pricing for spotty service that internet providers seem to get away with in this part of Brooklyn.
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Mr. Heredia crouched to affix the router to a plumbing vent, positioning it so the Wi-Fi signal could avoid the tree down the block. An app on his phone beeped to indicate the strength of the connection. Higher in pitch and more rapid was good. Mr. Cambridge whipped out his phone to search for NYC Mesh among the available networks. “It just came up!”
Of all the disruptions unleashed by the Trump White House on how the federal government typically works, the saga of one small project, called the Open Technology Fund, stands out.
The fantastical tale incorporates the spiritual movement Falun Gong, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, the daughter of a late liberal Congressman, and a zealous appointee of former President Donald Trump.
And specifically, it involves a fierce, months-long battle over whether the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the U.S. State Department should subsidize software developed by adherents of Falun Gong. The decision to prioritize this software stripped money intended for critical apps from a federal fund designed to bolster technology vital to dissidents overseas, officials say. On top of that, once approved for funding, over a six-month period the software served a grand total of four people. That's right, four.
