- Switch to Wi-Fi: Easiest change to make. When you are at work, home, or your favorite restaurant, use Wi-Fi instead of mobile data. It’s usually free, usually faster, and usually keeps you off the CFO’s data usage radar.
- Uninstall Facebook app: Let there be no doubt in your mind. In the app world, the Facebook app is considered to a whale turd at the bottom of the ocean. That's about as low as you can go. It is written poorly and consumes more data than any other app. Period. Being #1 here is bad, bad, bad. Use your phone’s browser to access Facebook and stop the madness.
- Turn off Facebook auto-play: There isn’t a pay-per-click charge in your data plan. Nope, the meter is always running. Videos should play when you click on them. Until Facebook figures out a way to save the world one saved click at a time, turn off this ridiculous auto-play feature and realize that letting the machine do what you used to do isn't always a good thing.
- Change your email sync to the last two weeks: I talk about this one all the time and people look at me as if I have a horn growing out of my head…until I use THIS example. You wouldn’t pack all the clothes that you own, into a suitcase, for a one-day trip? So, why are you trying to shove 5,000 messages into a tiny little mobile device? Make this change right now!
- Change weather app updates: Unless you are a meterologist, you don’t need weather updates every minute. Nor do you need real-time radar info all day long. Here is a better solution: change these updates to every 4 hours, get up from your desk, and look out the window.
- Close your Internet cam app: It’s great to have a camera watching your new dog. Leaving the app up and running all day and you will have a new best friend…and it won’t be your dog. Close this app after you check on the pup.
- Check your notifications: Like a caffeinated cheerleader, many apps are constantly phoning home, sending data, and popping up deals. Go into the settings of these apps and turn OFF notifications.
- Turn off auto app updates: The OCD side of your brain wants to keep all your phone apps up-to-date. Left unchecked, your apps check in and update…all the time. Turn off auto-updates and wait until you are on Wi-Fi to grab them
- Links to help you out
Did you miss me? Yea, time did get a little away from me. A
combination of writer's block and some other projects have really kept me away
far too long. I think of my blog like two old friends. Time doesn't seem to
matter too much. When you reconnect, it seems you pick up right where you left
off. Needless to say, it is good to be back. And, I have a lot of writing to
do.
"You only go around once, but if you play your cards right, once is enough."- Frank Sinatra
About a month ago, Rolling Stone released its list of the 50
Greatest Live Albums of All Time. They keep the list
populated with no-brainers as well as what I call "new classics." As
I click through the list, I smile and think about all the different iterations
I have owned. Reminds me of the lost art of taping a live
broadcast over the radio. Many times that was the only way to put these genies
in bottles and listen to them over and over again on your car's cassette deck. It's funny now to see
"U2-Under A Blood Red Sky" is now considered one of the great ones. Don't get me wrong, it's very worthy. I was 15 when it was released and it quickly became one of my favorites. Its arrival on the list makes me think I have reached an age where I have ascended from being a mere fan of great music to a tribal elder of music history. Not because I am some great sage; because people now say to me, "wow, you saw <fill in the blank with favorite artist> back in the day? What was it like to see them that long ago? " Dr. Emmet Brown would immediately say "Great Scott." They have no idea who he is...so why bother, right. You get the idea. Ah, but the payoff shot comes from the next comment that almost assuredly follows. It is some present-past comparison that puts you right back in the Delorean time machine. Something like, "it must have been tough to work out in the gym without iTunes and bottled water." Or, "carrying around that boom box and suitcase of cassettes must have been a bitch!" Or my personal favorite, "Parachute pants, Members Only jackets, leg warmers. What the hell were y'all thinking? So, this elderness I now possess is less about knowledge and more about experience. The experience of bearing witness to what others now call history.
Anyway, I am taking a trip in the way-back machine,
re-discovering old albums and quickly adding them to my Spotify library, when
I come across "Sinatra at the Sands." Whoa. Completely forgot about this one. So here is the deal.This album was recorded
in the summer of 1966 , in the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Now,
back in the mid-50's and 60's, the Copa Room was THE happening place. And the
Sands? Well it was epicenter of cool and hipness in its day. Everyone who was anyone would hang and play in the Copa Room. In his 50s now, Frank impresses. But the real heat in the room comes from the backup band. Try this on: Count Basie and his orchestra, conducted by a 30-year old
music protégé' who was just starting to come into his own: Quincy Jones. In
his prime and in his element, Frank doesn't get much better than this. Click here and get your snap on. It will feel good.
I've Got A Crush On You
As I ease back in, I thought it was time for me to put out a
PSA regarding mobile data. I get asked about this very thing all the time. And it
would be easy to let the voice in my head take over and shout out "of course you know why
your data usage is so high! How
could you possibly be surprised?"
A friend of mine once told me you should say the third thing that comes
to your mind…never the first. Let's just say it is a constant in my life. Anyway, the problem with mobile data centers around the simple premise that it hurts afterwards and not during. Here is what I mean. When you've eaten too much food, you list to one side and feel full (at least
you should). When you drink too many cold ones, you…well…list to one side and
feel full (and dizzy and need to go to the bathroom a lot). If you are paying attention, you will know you have overindulged and will pay for it in a series of pleasant and unpleasant ways. Yet, you know exactly what you did (at least how it started). So the pounding head and sour stomach are not a surprise. They are unpleasant and unwelcome...but not a surprise. Data consumption
isn't quite the same. No, as life experiences go, it is more like
getting pulled over for speeding. You weren't paying too close attention to your speed until the authorities made you aware. As it happens, both examples carry similar fines. And, depending on what you were doing, both could lead to
jail time. Unfortunately, there is no sweet-talking the broadband companies.
So, if you are thinking about calling Comcast and telling them you exceeded
your monthly data quota due to YouTube videos you are watching in order to
become better at rescuing kittens from a burning building… let's just say you
stand a better chance at empathy from the cop.
So, we are collectively held hostage by less than a
half-dozen companies. That's right, a very few select companies control those pipes. And trust me when I say they don't go out of their way to say,
"hey, you are surfing a bit too much this month." Or, "perhaps
you should lay off NetFlix for a few days so it doesn't cost you more."
Nope. Know this, as your data package thins out like a depressurized aircraft cabin, you can absolutely depend on these companies dropping an oxygen mask in front
of your face…complete with a usage meter and a slot to swipe your credit card.
Come Fly With Me
So how are you rifling through data when you don’t subscribe to NetFlix and you
don’t use social media…gulp…that much? Perhaps you aren’t looking in the right
place.The first signs that you are chewing through lots of data is
a device that feels hot enough to cook an egg. Next you will notice your
battery doesn't last beyond your 10:30 cup of coffee. A hot device means the internal radios are
active and either pulling data or becoming exhausted trying to pull data. Remember, most of you have three of them: cellular,
Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Did I mention they are all "on" pretty much
all the time? When you get in your car and your phone links up? It isn't because your vehicle is The Matrix and your phone is Neo.
Bluetooth is the reason. At work, where you get "No-G" cellular
service, your phone keeps trying and trying and trying to pull in data. Some of that usage is expected for things like email and Google Maps. It's the vampire apps that get you every time. Vampire apps you say? Yes indeed. the ones that are running in the background of your device...always checking in...always grabbing data. The ones that treat your mobile data connection
like the light in your kid’s closet: always on whether you know it or not. All
this time you thought high data usage was limited to those people who watch
movies on their devices! Nope. Here are the apps that suck…literally…all your
bandwidth and are not NetFlix or YouTube:
Let's consider this lunchtime ritual: last night's
leftovers, NetFlix, and “Sons of Anarchy.” This common practice isn’t a crime
but the overage charges are criminal. At 50MB per minute (or 3GB per hour),
you and Jax Teller will no longer eat lunch together. And that quick update to
Facebook? You remember last year when that feature appeared that magically
played all those embedded News Feed and Ice Bucket Challenge videos? Yea, that
“feature” pre-loads all of those videos onto your mobile device, quietly
sucking data all day long.
Then there is picture/video uploading. Don’t shake your head
and say, “Ha, I don’t use Pinterest or Instagram. You’re wrong!” No, I’m not,
and here is why. You happily go through life shooting pictures and hi-def
video. Within seconds of landing on your device, they get automagically backed
up to the cloud, thanks to Dropbox, OneDrive, and iCloud. After all, dropping
your phone may shatter the solid-state memory card inside, right? Don't get me
wrong here. I am glad people use these services to back up their pictures.
Yet, solving this problem created another one. See, most phones take 12-16MP
(megapixel) pictures by default. That is nearly 5MB (megabytes) per picture. HD video is about 200MB per minute. Makes you think twice about those
selfies, doesn't it? Last I checked, you like to pop off pictures like eating
Tic Tacs: ten or so at a time. Remember the opening scene for the first Star
Wars movie? You know, that slow crawl of yellow words that told the story of
the Rebel Alliance and the Empire? That sequence of film last about 1.5 minutes. What if I told you that uploading those ten
pictures from your phone to the cloud uses the same amount of data as if you
were streaming just the opening crawl of Star Wars. It's true. And then
there is that five minute hi-def video where, after consuming a vat of
tequila, you claim to have irrefutable evidence that aliens routinely visit the Krispie Kreme
store across from your apartment. You will sober up quite quickly when you
learn that uploading that video will chew through about 25% of your monthly
data plan. It just clicked didn’t it…no pun intended.
All Of Me
Our always on society seems to know no bounds when it comes
to sending and receiving information.
That is until they learn how much it costs for all those texts and emails. So
many people feel compelled to always check their phone, all the time, even
when nothing is going on. Every time you hit that sync button…data is consumed
as your email program exchanges information back and forth to make sure it is
in sync…even when you have no new mail. That's right, you are actually paying
money for nothing. And when an email does arrive, you feel compelled to handle it right then an there. See if this sounds familiar. You are checking, checking, checking your email all night...waiting for a reply from your team. Then, it arrives. It's the 25MB PowerPoint deck that will be used at the company's annual sales
meeting, complete with…you guessed it…video. Downloading the email takes
forever thanks to the ridiculously large attachment. You try and cancel the attachment but your
phone gets stuck in this weird loop where it keeps trying to download it over
and over and over again. Just so you know, the bandwidth meter is pretty much pegged at this point. You try and multitask, ordering dinner, talking to
your girlfriend, and checking your phone in a clockwise, spinning motion. Your
movements resemble a cross between a Ferris wheel and a bobble head. Finally,
as your phone feels like it will spontaneously combust, the attachment arrives.
You hastily click through each slide on your 4-inch screen, only to say
"screw it" when you are half-way through the deck. You saw enough. "It's probably fine," you mumble to
yourself while spilling beer on your shirt since the top of the bottle missed
your mouth by a mile. Meanwhile, your food is cold, your beer is warm, and you
realize your girlfriend isn't in the bathroom; she went home because you were
ignoring her. With your battery half shot, you lob this electronic grenade over the fence to your team...all 20 of them. That's right, in a dramatic demonstration of your mad phone skills, you
forward the message (and the attachment) to all of them. As you place you phone on the table which, due to its proximity to your glass of ice water, causes the ice to rapidly melt, that funny little Verizon guy wanders over to your table, with his entire
network, and shakes your hand. He formally recognizes you for burning the data
equivalent of The Lord Of The Rings in HD. And to preserve the moment, he
grabs your phone, takes a selfie, and uploads it to Facebook. Ugh.
You Make Me Feel So Young
If you
are sick and tired of being sick and tired of those surprise data charges,
here is a list of ten things you can do right now to change the status quo. Folks,
this is the real deal. You make these changes and the difference will be
profound. I did say ten things, didn't I? The last one deserves a bit of an explanation. Stick with me. It will be over soon.
The Lady Is A TrampA few months back, Comcast (without the blessing of its customers) turned up a guest WiFi network on every one of its Internet gateways, consumer and business. The idea was to clandestinely create a Comcast wireless network...with consumers bearing the cost. As you can no doubt imagine, their customers are furious. In fact, Comcast is getting sued over the whole thing. Needless to say, it is on...literally...everywhere. So, if you're a Comcast customers, you can connect to any of the hundreds of thousands of other Xfinity customers (and their networks) for free. They appear with an SSID of XFINITY and are open access points. Yes, I said open. Put another way, you can connect and consume the bandwidth on someone else's Internet connection, while they pay the bill.
Some of you are doing your WiFi victory dance right about now. Screw the 4G companies; I can
Which brings us to the last suggestion:
10. Use a Wi-Fi manager. Wi-Fi Matic is a really cool app I use that learns the location and names of the wireless networks you want; then it turns on the WiFi only when one of your saved networks is detected. It does this without using GPS! Yea, baby.
My Way
Sent from iHop
