Phones to Get With No Contract May 2013

… I am about to purchase a new phone and I am thinking out loud more than anything in this post. A caveat before reading, a cursory look at the current offerings for pre-paid shows a dire need for them to update their phones…

Samsung Galaxy S 2 : You can find this phone on most no contract carriers. For instance the Virgin Mobile version is going for $330 base price, while Straight Talk seems to be offering it around $300, though the prices from various online stores is all over the place. One thing to note is the VM phone has Android 4.0 while the Straight Talk device is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which , for me at least, makes the VM phone more of a deal.

MetroPCS goes one step further and offers the Samsung Galaxy S3 for $450, which would be the phone I would recommend for anyone who would want more recent technology than most No Contract Carriers are ready to offer. That said, $450 is quite a lot of money, and perhaps this is why it is difficult to find this sort of phone with their competitors, however expect this phone offered more and more now that the S4 is out. I was somewhat interested in purchasing this phone myself, however MetroPCS is very aptly named: Their service only works in a few large population centers, so check coverage before buying. T-Mobile has purchased MetroPCS and closed the deal three days ago, so perhaps an OTA update will link their offerings to the wider T-Mobile network. Time will tell.

Before I go on, I want to give my readers a few pointers in determining whether a smartphone is worth purchasing. One is the processor… Dual core is the minimum you need to run high end games or to do anything serious on your phone. Secondly, the screen size, diagonally 4.3 should be an absolute minimum, unless you have small hands… There is no point doing a lot of texting on a screen keyboard 4.1 inches or less, it can be done but it becomes exhausting as your typing always has to be corrected. The S2 has a 4.5 inch screen, which I believe is perhaps a  more reasonable minimum than the 4.3 inches I mentioned earlier. Not to say you cannot type on smaller screens, but I don’t recommend it.

In my opinion the coverage of a carrier is the most important consideration, followed by the specs of the phones themselves. There are only 2 resold networks to my knowledge: Verizon and Sprint. Virgin Mobile for instance uses the Sprint Network, verses Straight Talk, which uses the Verizon Network. I will do some more research after this post but I am operating under the assumption this is still valid today. After choosing a provider dependent on coverage, things get murky, ergo this post.

Pre-paid, no contract carriers on the Verizon network all seem to offer older or cheaper phones than those on the Sprint network, while Sprint resellers seem to focus on the 4G WiMax service. I want to qualify this by coming right out and stating the obvious: I am a VM customer. This is a calculated situation, due to their network covering my whole town and a decent but admittedly limited offering of higher end cellphones. Higher, not highest, which they compensate for by putting newer versions of Android on the phones they offer. However these offerings are becoming dated, so I am assuming there will be a refresh before summer.

Looking at everything I have seen, I would say wait for the next slew of phones to come out on VM if I purchase there again. I love my Evo 3D, but I had to put an extended battery in it in order to avoid charging 2 times a day. The S2 is a  decent phone but at $300 is too dated at that price. Other prepaid offers I’m considering have Android 2.3 phones.

The one bright point is T-Mobile is positioning itself as a prepaid carrier, and I have a suspicion my next phone will be a T-Mobile phone since I can get a very nice phone on prepaid though at a high cost initial investment. Again, time will tell… Not a good time to buy in general in this space.

Avarice and the Disabled Man’s Desire for Significance

I find myself buying electronic devices to feel included in the tablet boom, and the smartphone revolution. I strongly desire these devices, especially the new devices, to prove, somehow, that I am still relevant in society, now that my 2 disabilities conspire to prevent me from seeing the blue skies and the white clouds from anything more than the living room window.

 

I am glad today for a little perspective. That I can spend an hour or so getting the kinks out of my back with some Ibuprofen and Excedrin, and a lot of stretching and popping, thus enabling me to venture outside. This is opposed to the depression which tells me I am confined to my apartment regardless of what I try. Not every day is like this, it is all incumbent on my sleep from the night before, and any extra physical work I may have done the day before. The trick is to convince myself every day to get out and smell the roses, and ignore the desire to curl into a ball and whimper.

 

After moving into this apartment, I found that excessive lifting and walking up and down steps could cause the most egregious of back pain, and also induce a state where sickness could creep in: 1 1/2 weeks of bronchial distress was enough for me by miles. At the end of the ordeal I have made sure to convince myself not to move anytime soon, regardless of the state of affairs with whomever is living with me.

Which brings me to another point: I must learn to be pleasant to all persons I encounter during the day’s journey, unless I end up trapped here with the outside world wishing for nothing but me to remain here in obscurity without recourse. Selfishness doesn’t benefit much, and neither does sharing pain from a wound that cannot be seen outwardly.

 

I must completely relearn perspective, having taken the Amtrak trip of selfishness round trip. I am finding it to be less than helpful in my daily life.

Ruminations on Building a New Rig, or: Laptop or Bust.

I have been building desktop computers for over 10 years, however I suspect I have come to a crossroads in terms of needs for portability and general processing power. I fear that this desktop may well be the last one I self-assemble, or purchase, for that matter. In fact, I have been in this new apartment for 1 day shy of 2 weeks, and it is still not necessary to plug the 1100T system in. This, despite the desk being set up, and the power all sorted out. If I set it up, it may be simply because this blog post goads me into doing it.

My desktop is not truly portable in most senses and my laptop, tablet, and smartphone have seen much more use than the desktop, despite its considerable horsepower and stability. This combined with my lack of desire to Game anymore has left the desktop unplugged and forgotten… destitute and forlorn.

I had planned on building an A10 system as a backup desktop, but this move to the upstairs apartment and the general lack of need for the desktop, and more importantly, the lack of desire for the back pain that comes with a desk and chair, has resulted in my decision to end my adventures in desktop computer building. I never did LAN parties, I was never that good at the MMOs I played for 9 years, and I started to develop back pain from all the time spent at the computer, not to mention a necessary move from mouse to trackball thanks to repetitive strain injury. Also, a $1200 laptop could easily pump out enough pixels to do the game playing should I ever desire to return to Azeroth or Telara.

My desktop building days started when  needed to upgrade my $2000 HP Pavilion that I had when I started at the local Technical College… purchased by my Father who felt I needed a good system to last for a few years. At that time it had come with a 14.4 kbps telephone modem, and I eventually wanted to upgrade to a 33.6k modem. The modem cost $210 dollars, the process was difficult, and I was sweating bullets. Once everything worked though, I was as hooked as an automotive student who had just installed a new engine.

Many self-made desktops later, I think I will look back on this experience with both pride and shame. Pride because I usually had the best rig of anyone I knew (for a few months at least), and shame because I rarely had a truly stable rig… there was always something amiss with my rigs, from something as simple as a device driver, all the way to blue screens that caused me to fly into a rage after working on those problems for days. I think a BSOD is a good psychological stress test, and I am afraid I failed most of them. Somehow the loss of the girl in high school shone through greatest when the computer refused to work.

Oddly enough, now that I am finally letting go of all that pain, I am also no longer going to build desktops… perhaps there is a correlation…

Freedom of Religion

How many times do the laws need to be changed to benefit sexual orientation, race and class before the religious establishment demands equal representation under the law?

Every time a homosexual is beaten for choosing to follow his passions, it is considered a hate crime. Every time a man or woman of color are called the N word, those actions are considered a hate crime. But if you are assaulted someone because of religious doctrine, it is simply a crime. Granted none of these other crimes should be treated any differently because of the circumstances, religion nevertheless must learn some tricks that the liberal establishment has given to their cherished causes, and I see no reason why we cannot use the system to shore up our own agenda.

Much like the humanist agenda has subverted race relations, from church to state, the religious establishment can take control of the situation legally. Thus adherents lives ,when tested , become part of a specially protected class of persons who, if harmed or discriminated against during the practice of religion or speaking about their faith, have strong redress in the modern courts, if we pursue this idea.

This would upend 60 years of the denigration of religion and religious persons in the west and ensure a safer work environment for all types of religious careers and persons. This would honestly be very difficult to do, since the hate crime legislation was set up in supposed opposition to churches, however, with such protections we would enable our fellow brothers to feel somewhat protected by secular government, which we can truthfully no longer consider our own.

It is time government and religion found a common ground once again in the West, and making Religious Freedom a reality could be the foundation.

Introducing My Idea for Sustainable De-Ionizing Electrical Production

I have come up with an idea for a renewable power generation technology that does not require a source input other than the environment itself. The genesis of the idea was a book on speculation as to Nicolai Tesla’s power transmission ideas as well as basic concepts in electricity as it relates to electrical charge in the ambient environment.

The concept is simple, take electrons or other charged particles in a given natural environment and store them in a capacitor (battery) for use in a certain region, from your home to a large energy grid system. The essence of the idea is simple… Air carries a charge, whether through interaction with the magnetosphere or from atmospheric events, and thus would provide a generation envelope similar to hydroelectric power in terms of both extracting energy from a basic environmental resource and also, unlike pure wind generation, would at the very least continue to provide a minimal generation capacity even during days of calm, since electrical fields often change due to factors other than just wind.

The micro and macro environmental effects would have to be studied to discover how de-electrifing a portion of a wind channel would have on plants and people in our daily lives. The number, frequency, and size of the power generating plants would ultimately be determined by environmental impact, thereby enabling the technology to be considered “Green”. As we all know, even green energy power generation has a negative footprint from, say, the production of a wind or water turbine to the environmental impact of the turbine itself, including loss of avian and other wildlife due to site location, etc. Therefore I believe on a micro scale the technology can be considered Green, especially if sited near human made places of electrical activity or where de-ionization at a certain scale would not produce a substantial impact on regional electrical activity, say in a location prone to frequent electrical storms.

This technology is not limited to air, any medium with an electrical charge could be used for generation purposes, but I intend for the technology to have as little impact on the natural environment as possible to avoid the pitfalls of our early 21st century reliance on energy production which rely on fossil fuels.

I fully intend on this technology being licensed to current fossil fuel companies and avoid the trap Nicolai Tesla fell in to, when he challenged the existing powers that were in place and lost.

I feel that I do not have the industry connections to profit from my device so I will be posting some basic untested schematics and principles the device would operate on. These devices are initially very high energy input to produce for very low short term gain of electricity but I feel that if certain areas of geography can be found they would benefit places or peoples that simply have no other way to generate electricity. They would also be useful for locations where a person or small group of people would live, far off-grid, where small amount of steady electricity could provide for a livable environment, such as light at night or a water heater. Non human outposts would benefit in that electrical production could be provided where solar power would not be an option but abundant ambient electrical energy exists.

HTC EVO V 4G Virgin Mobile phone, $150 ( HTC EVO 3D)

I am now the proud owner of an HTC Evo V 4G through Virgin Mobile. I manage to get 1 to 2 bars of 4g Service in my apartment , even though the coverage map shows no 4G in my town, which was a pleasant confirmation of my experience with my VM MiFi device. I half expected the phone to not register with the 4G coverage, and initially it didn’t, but once it received its service updates everything was fine and in working order.

The UI is amazing, I am not a fan of the pure Google UI since I really feel it lacks style. HTC I think manages to capture all the finesse of both worlds, and while not perfect , is a treat to use. The weather/clock widget is, I think, one of the major pluses of the phone, along with its other widgets. If I remember correctly this is Sense UI 3.6, so this is the heavy HTC experience… I find it to be very serviceable.

Battery life is terrible on this phone. I am going to upgrade to a double capacity battery, HTC phones seem to lack in this one area and I’m afraid to say it is going to make me think twice about buying HTC in the future (Ed: The new extra battery capacity is phenomenal). I love HTC style and technology, but really I can’t much use out of this phone unless it is fully charged. Other than this problem it is a great device overall.

4G service in my apartment reaches 5 Mbps down and a few hundred Kbps up, which is more than adequate for what I intend to use the phone for, but obviously WiMAX can do much better than this. I suppose Virgin Mobile simply doesn’t get the full speed of the network, which would make perfect sense given the small amount of money I pay for the service every month.

4.0 Android was very welcome since now I have Flash, which is missing from my Nexus 7 Chrome  browser. Hopefully soon websites will start coding and encoding for non flash enabled devices, it can’t come too soon. The day I can use my mobile devices on all of the same sites I can visit with my Windows PCs will be an ‘appy day…

Trying to climb the moral hill… Again

 

There seems to be an odd curse over living a Christian life, and where it really sinks home is when you realize that you have become as bad as many nonbelievers in your daily decisions regarding morality.

The worst part about this last wandering was the fact that I was acutely aware of the problem but had no way of stopping the slide into anarchy. Someone once told me that God rewards the effort if not the result however when taking sage consolation like this to heart you can easily set yourself up for failure.

I suppose that there is a spiritual dimension to all this that I am missing and to understand it would benefit me so I pray for understanding. At the end of the day I wish being a moral person was as simple as making the decision and putting the effort in to clean up and maintain your self. It would help if people were similarly engaged in this pursuit but finding them is tough going and speaking to churchgoers feels like talking in code.

I sometimes wonder if some of the spirits of the church haven’t become insular and make learning Christianese a way to wall off the church from the rest of society. The phrase “stand in the gap” has little meaning to someone outside the church and is immediately off putting to anyone not of the fold (pun intended. )

I digress…] I find myself starting to wonder if there is any real point in trying to get along with society when all it seems to do is corrode one’s moral fiber into digested crap. Anyway, here is to another year of fighting the good fight and hoping to conquer my desire to fit in at any cost. Death to the tyrant… Oh wait :p

Cellphones and Bills, A Few Words

I find the state of cellphone bills to be a little beyond the pale in 2012.

In order to have the latest and greatest phones a person has to have over a $100 per month contract for 2 years and pay up front up to $300. The smart buy is to purchase the phone outright and go off contract, but let’s face it, $300 is much easier to come up with on the spot than $700, and you really aren’t getting your service any cheaper. While I suppose we can expect this sort of thing for a must have item where it is a seller’s market, it prices many average consumers out of the market or creates a real burden for the user, especially if they are tied into a 2 year contract.

Fortunately, the state of affairs in the prepaid market is much better than even a year ago. I can find a dual core, 4.3 inch qHD phone running ICS (Android 4.0.3) for $300 up front on Virgin Mobile. To top it off the basic plan is $35 a month for 300 minutes, but honestly most people will need more than that, so it is fairer to say that you can have decent phone service at the $45 1200 minute plan or $55 for unlimited. The saving range from hundreds of dollars to thousands verses a two year contract, plus Virgin Mobile uses the Sprint tower network so you have a good coverage area to work with. However, you do not have roaming, so on those odd occasions in the boonies you may end up with no service. For most people this is simply not a problem thankfully.

So what do you get for an Unlimited plan at $55? Unlimited minutes are really unlimited. Text SMS and MMS are truly unlimited. The only spot it gets hazy is with data. The first 2.5 GB is full speed, but beyond that limit you are taken down to a fairly slow speed until your next month or you pay for another month. This is very little data but all the cellphone carriers have decided to limit bandwidth to very small caps, so using your cellphone as a mobile media consumption device isn’t going to happen any time in the near future, and they all cap at roughly the same limit in similar plans. My guess is the next network to offer 5 GB before throttling will gain many users, and being a happy customer of Virgin Mobile I hope it is them. To go out on a limb I would say that the first carrier to enable it’s users to use data without having to think much about WiFi will be the future market leader if they can manage not to price themselves too high. Most technophiles I think would pay an extra $10 for a 5 or 10 GB limit above a $55 prepaid plan given how cheap it would be compared to the competition, and there is no reason to assume that many technorati are not using a prepaid service already. Granted the best phones are on postpaid but the majority of people passionate about cellphones and the digital age are also very intelligent and can see the benefit of having a cellphone bill one third to one half as large as less literate consumers. Phones like the HTC Evo V 4G make a prepaid operator a viable option for people who want an upscale phone while maintaining a low financial footprint on their wallet.

The biggest mistake VM makes is to have generally low end phones, the more high end phones they have the more they will stand out from the competition. Some other prepaid carriers are offering the Galaxy S II at $350 and this is the future of prepaid I believe: high end phones with high initial upfront costs but a very low monthly bill.

Given the option many young people will pay to have a phone they can show off to their friends, and this same demographic that is just entering the workforce or going to college are looking for any way to cut costs, making prepaid a contender for their patronage. The same hold true for many middle class Americans who in the last few years have had to deal with the new reality of lower wages and higher consumer prices, and as they work their way into cellphones just as they did computers, carriers will have to satisfy cunning and experienced consumers who will easily see the benefit in long term savings.

Being disabled myself I think I should put something in here about the lowest income earners who generally cannot afford postpaid phones or plans. Many of us have quite a lot of disposable time and one of the few bright spots in our lives is our technology we use. We also tend to be a little spendy on luxury items when we put our minds to it. I have purchased many feature phones and 2 VM smartphones alone both costing over $200. While I am a confessed technophile I know of a number of friends who are either smartphone users or planning to order one once their contract runs out. Yes: even disabled people on a fixed income have postpaid contracts, so any prepaid carrier that can offer trendy phones will win a significant number of disabled subscribers ,who are more likely to pay for the top tier of service.

We have to deal with social workers over the phone and many of us are highly supervised so even 1200 minutes could be too little for a disabled person, not even counting the personal use of the phone. This, by the way, is the most ignored demographic in America: the disabled community. It is quite sizable, and tapping into this market is perhaps the most fulfilling way to guarantee long term customers, since disabled people are very loyal to entities that treat them well and help them with their need to communicate as much as normal persons.

Anyone who is serious about their personal technology will have a cellphone, and many of these are looking for a cost effective way to look and be smart. I recommend Virgin Mobile but have reservations on their top line of phones with the exception of the Htc Evo V 4G. Please take the time to look into this service since the quality is comparable to Sprint’s postpaid service and at the price can’t be beat. Make sure to ask someone who uses VM in the place you live if they have 4G, since the coverage map for my town, at least, doesn’t show 4G when in fact the service exists here. I can’t remember having a dropped call, and with 4G and recent high end models of phones I am not missing out on any major technological advances.

So why pay two or three times as much money for the same service? It just doesn’t make sense.

Fighting inner demons and the quest to stay sane

Evangelion is a show about demons come to life. While I am not much of an expert on the show I’ve learned a few things about fighting demons. The first thing to realize is that whether real or imagined, demonic oppression comes about due to internal deficiencies or judgments for external actions. Regardless on how they occur, these two processes require a willing participant in you. Any negative or sin can be a back door to a demon. Think of it as a castle, if even one spot isn’t watched well, the enemy can get in, and their daggers can be at your throat soon after. To deal with this, you must get your house in order, of nothing more than to know the lay of your own self better. Once you know yourself well enough to gauge your actions versus those of an evil spirit then you are much better prepared to understand why the demon is there in the first place, how it got in, and how to chase it out. While a priest or a pastor is very helpful in dealing with spirits, dealing with demons of your own making is much the same, and both of these can be present, and dealing with each of these requires patience and a willingness to challenge yourself and ideas you have about yourself. You will likely find aspects of your personality and mind frightening and depressing, which leads to the last part of my little note here. To remove a demon one must become stronger than the demon. In whichever way it is affecting you, work towards building positive strength in that area. If you love little, learn to love more. If patience is a virtue to you, become virtuous. Greed, hate, sloth, envy are all problems that can be handled if you are sincere about living a better life. Don’t be afraid to ask God for help. Don’t assume that a demon will just move on, and expect them to roll over and play dead. It can take a significant amount of time to remove something older and wiser than you, but if you arm yourself with knowledge, wisdom, and gain a basic understanding of spiritual warfare then you have the tools to gain your freedom and a right mind again. If you are losing control of your actions then seek out a hospital. Many drugs given for psychological problems can help you in your quest to rid yourself of your occupiers, and it is better that you are in a setting where you cannot harm others. Above all, however you know God you should take the time to get to know Him better. My personal quest to be free of demons has often required God to make ends meet where I fail, just make sure you put the work in as well or you leave yourself open to demons once you are cleansed. Take care and I hope this little text has you at least wondering why it is you react in certain ways irrationally when your own reaction would have been much different, and what to do about it. You don’t have to live with a perverse mind, and there is help if you ask. Happy trails.

Some thoughts on the ‘free’ software

I want to be the first person to say that programmers have to eat too. And live somewhere, and obviously have electricity. Driving a car is a plus for most people as well. Then you have to consider all the devices and software they need to do their job. You are talking around 2000 dollars a month minimum to do all these things with enough breathing room so the person doesn’t have to live on food stamps. Pile in all the forum fees, coffee, beer, social life and what not as well and you begin to realize that free software has a price.

Some people code for the fun of it and release of their software open source. I get that and if they wish to do it, it is their perogative, but the development isn’t free. It took money to develop it. Which is why I get so irate at people who is think that they should be able to get software for free, almost as though they are entitled. Nothing is further from the truth, and if someone comes out with free software then you should be very grateful if you get your hands on it.

Unfortunately most people are so used to warez and free clients that they see nothing wrong with becoming thieves or being rude on support forums, or both. I shudder at the thought process of someone who simply expects the world to stop moving and deliver whatever they want at the drop of a hat, as though existence was planned out for them. And pay nothing, plus gripe about bugs on top of that.

There are many software models that display ads, but if you remove the ads with blockers then you are effectively stealing. There is no sense in removing ads from a service you don’t pay for, but so many people have browser plugins that remove banner ads and flash animation that you begin to wonder if the majority of surfers on your content even see your revenue generation stream.

I won’t go into people who warez much except to say that people like you are the reason my bike gets stolen. That’s what you are, a common criminal who should be taken off the streets and put behind bars. For every program made, developers have to assume their work will be pirated to some extent, and every copy pirated is money out of the pocket of the creators of your new favorite app. You don’t care, you don’t want to care, so to the dogs with you.

On the other side of things, developers should be aware that there is a karmic process in life, if you are using stolen software to create your masterpiece, you can safely assume your masterpiece will be pirated. You can’t escape divine law. When you code with stolen software, even if you don’t charge for your work you have incurred negative karma on yourself and yourself, having stolen from someone, their children, family, company, and can expect to be held accountable for this theft at some point.

Please, everyone, take the time to realize that while money doesn’t make the world turn, it does feed, clothe, and shelter us in very real ways. Make the effort to pay for your software, it is the right thing to do.