Category: High Tech

Easy Way To Improve Rural Cell Phone Reception

The only cell phone tower near my farm is slowly getting masked by trees as the forest next door grows up, and the cell phone reception in my house is dreadful.

I just bought a Verizon Network Extender and couldn’t be happier. This is a device that looks like a wireless access point but acts like a miniature cell phone tower, using your DSL or cable modem to reach the cellular network. Our phones went from zero bars to four! Woo-hoo!

This is a zero-config device: I plugged it in and it self-configured within about 20 minutes. I didn’t have to set a single parameter.

And it not only covers the whole house, but extends quite a way beyond it, even to the mailbox on the other side of the road. Generally speaking, reception in the house is worse than anywhere else, so it completely covers the problem area.

The retail price of this technological wonder (called a “femtocell” in the biz) is a wince-inducing $250, but I found a “$50 off All Accessories” coupon online, and, much to my surprise, found a $50 rebate form inside the box that’s good through most of January, so it really cost me only $150. There is no monthly fee.

It doesn’t handle 3G traffic (though your 3G devices will fall back to the “1X” standard, which it does handle, though slowly). and I don’t know if non-Verizon subscribers can roam through it or not. But sure solved my problem!

There are similar devices out there that work with other carriers, plus a wide variety of cellular signal boosters that use an outdoor antenna to talk to the cell phone tower, and an amplifier and an indoor antenna to talk to your cell phones. The main difference is that boosters don’t work in areas where you have no signal at all, while network extenders that use your cable or DSL links do.

These devices will probably turn out to be a must-have for rural residents everywhere.

[Update, March 24, 2010: After more than two months of use, I’m still very pleased. The higher signal quality means that our cell phone batteries last for many days rather than just one, and I no longer have to hunt around the house and farm for Karen if I need to talk to her: I can always reach her by phone. That wasn’t true before. The only downside is that the extender adds a noticeable time lag when both ends of the conversation are going through it! This only happens when both parties are on the farm, of course.]

Wrestling With Google Groups

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can’t change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is “send me every posting as a separate email message,” which — because the group has become lively — is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the “invite new members” feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won’t have any trouble. And set your subscription to “Daily Email Digest.” It’s the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.

Got High Blood Pressure? Buy One of these Monitors

If you have problems with high blood pressure, as I do, you’d probably like to have one of the spiffy high-tech monitors like the Omron HEM-790IT Automatic Blood Pressure Monitor with Advanced Omron Health Management Software

This doohickey runs off four AA batteries and gets an accurate blood pressure reading in less than a minute. This particular model comes with a USB cable and software that will keep track of the readings over time. This is the top-of-the-line model and cost about $75 on Amazon.

I found this particularly useful because I’ve lost a lot of weight over the past year and I suspected (correctly) that my blood-pressure medication was excessive for my current weight, and my blood pressure was actually lower than desirable. My doctor is a great guy (Dr. Shawn Foley at Philomath Family Medicine), and he more or less turned me loose to tune my medication so I’m within his guidelines.

Another thing I found out was that I was a little intimidated by the process of having my blood pressure taken, and this tension made my blood pressure rise! So my medication had been tuned to deal with an anomalously high blood pressure. Taking reading a zillion times with this automated machine got me used to it, so now I get a truer reading.

Having the machine lying around allows you to check things like, “I wonder if this decongestant really is spiking my blood pressure like the warning says it might?”

The machine is a snap to use. Put on the velcro cuff, press the START button, and relax.

Thirty Years of the HP 41C Calculator

Classics never go out of style. I still use the same type of programmable calculator today that I did thirty years ago.

It seems hard to believe, but thirty years ago I plunked down $299 for an HP-41C calculator, which had just been released by Hewlett-Packard. I was a penniless college student at the time, and for the life of me I can’t remember where I got the money.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, attending Oregon State University. The HP-41C had been designed across town at the Hewlett-Packard campus, and many of my classmates were HP employees.

The 41C was seriously programmable, had the then-revolutionary ability to display text, was indestructible, and had a nearly infinite battery life. Friend used its alpha display functions to create cheat sheets, but I never bothered. Setting up handy programs before midterms was a lifesaver, though.

Karen also had a 41C, which died about ten years later when her backpack fell off the luggage rack of her motorcycle and was run over by a motorist. Much later, my original 41C developed a crack in its display and became generally flaky. So we bought several of the slightly newer model, the 41CV. We got them used on eBay. They’re still going strong in spite of being around 20 years old. They stopped making the calculators in 1990, sad to say.

I use these calculators at the farmer’s markets, and people are constantly noticing. “Hey, I worked on that project!”

To commemorate these durable bits of local history, I’ve created a T-shirt, available through Zazzle.com below. Keep those 41C’s running!

The Three Stages of Feature Development

When I worked at Activision, one of the vice presidents told me that when he suggested a new feature to a game designer, there was a three-state process:

  1. “It’s impossible!”
  2. “It’s too hard.”
  3. “It’s on your desk.”

Note that the process doesn’t have anything to do with getting a commitment out of the game designer. Just plant the seed and occasionally ask if he’s figured out how to do it yet. If the idea is a good one, it will gnaw at the designer, and eventually a solution will appear as if by magic.

That was great management. The designer’s own desire that his product be cool was the only tool required.