StraightTalk Phone Service

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Two weeks ago I moved my wife’s iPhone 4S from AT&T to StraightTalk’s bring your own device service. StraightTalk, a TracFone company, re-sells access to T-Mo or AT&T wireless networks. As such you get the same signal quality and speed that you’re used to.

I haven’t tried using StraightTalk with an LTE phone, so I will not comment on that. However on HSPA+ phones (My wife’s iPhone, My cousin’s SII) it performs identical to AT&T in my testing of data network performance. The sound quality and texting seems about the same as well. There really is no observable difference, which makes sense since it is the same network. My advice is to do the math and see what makes sense. For example here’s what the math told me:

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Gadget Month…Try 2

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I originally tried to do this entire post on my Nexus 7 using voice recognition. The voice recognition was quite accurate, unfortunately my brain is used to pushing written words though my fingers. Conversational English vs written English sound different enough in my head that I am just unable to continue with that experiment until I play with this technology further.

As a geeky bastard I can’t help but buy gadgets whenever one sufficiently tempts me. In the past 30 days I probably went overkill. I figured I’d share the three devices I bought and really briefly how I feel about them.

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Blog Reboot!

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Having my blog hosted on Tumblr just never felt right to me. As a systems guy, I can’t help but want more control than hosted solutions can offer. I decided it was time to bring it back onto a server I run. I grabbed a VPS and set it up from scratch. Hopefully this blog will get a few more updates than my prior attempts.