Writing group notes

[azurelunatic]

"After Blak & Dirt, we're going to have Smut!" --M (Her ginseng beverage smells like the dirt component of BPAL's Rose Red.)

*bright idea* Hmm, I wonder if I could set up my own remote ISP, especially if calls between home phone and cellphone are free. (Are they?) Keep a box on at home, connected to Ye Olde Broadband. Set up the box at home to accept incoming calls & share network connection. Set the laptop up to talk to the cellphone.

It would tie up the phone line something fierce, but it would give me connectivity anywhere within the Qwest network.

(This, apropos of trying to get meacu1pa's laptop connected via mine.)

Vampire games -> I vant to suck your BLaK -> blood of the master

Cat sound effect. (mrrr?) Chicken sound effect. (Bgerrrk!) Dog sound effect. (Aroo?)

A female is still a master. Transgendered vampire crossover craziness.

"You're somewhere weird with sushi and vampire penises. You squicked the slash writer."

"Blog of shadows."

Ack, allergies. Sneezing brains out is not a good thing.

Comments

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

(1) expressly violates your broadband ToS (99%sure)
(2) cellpone companies tell data calls from voice and charge diff rates. Even people with unlimited local calls will pay for data calls.

You'd have to dig up an audiocoupler.

[wibbble]

There's data, and there's data. You can use a mobile phone as an analogue modem, and as far as the telecom company cares it's a voice call - it's given the same QOS as a voice call, and it's charged as a voice call.

Now, there's GPRS, EDGE, and UMTS (and so on), which give you a much better kind of connection for data, but which don't make sense in the context Azz is talking about. IME, most telcos charge per MB on those kind of connections.

I once talked to a guy (in the breakroom in Redbus Meridian) who used an O2 plan that allowed up to eight hours a day free calls to do exactly what Azz is suggesting. Of course, he had the advantage of working for a big hosting/datacentre company so the broadband ToS wasn't an issue and he had the experience to set it up.

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

Try it. I bet you won't even be able to activate the analogue modem feature of your cellphone without signing up for a data plan. If you can, you've got a carrier more decent than mine (T-Mobile).

Course I get unlimited GPRS for $20/mo, so I am not complaining.

[wibbble]

My GPRS was unlimited until Friday, when the special offer ran out. Now I get 1MB a month, which is painful. No more reading my friends page when I'm out and about!

I've gone online, using the dial-up feature of my then Sony-Ericsson K700i (now I've got a P910i), several times on a previous contract with BT Mobile. It was charged as a voice call (but to a non-geographical number, so I got billed for it - if I'd bothered to find a geographical number to call instead it would've been counted in my minutes). I've used this to go online from a ferry in the middle of the river Clyde, and from a car doing 70 MPH down the M8 motorway, in the dark, while it was raining.

(I used GPRS to go online for most of a train trip down to London, and while in London since the hotel didn't have wifi.)

Until my contract with BT Mobile, I didn't have a phone I could connect to my computer, but I don't think this would be a problem with any telco here. All they see is a voice call to some phone number, and the telcos here tend not to cripple the phones as much as is done in the US. (Although blocking the analogue modem feature seems backwards: if you sign up for a data plan you wouldn't be using it /anyway/, you'd be using GPRS or the 3G+ equivalent.)

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

Azz and I both live in the US, unfortunately for all things cellphone-related.

I've had the $20/mo unlimited GPRS for several years now. I used to play WoW over GPRS all the time, back when I played WoW at all. That scares me.

[wibbble]

Only /after/ signing up for an 18 month contract did I discover that for roughly the same money I could've got a business account with unlimited GPRS. I'd not even thought to look at their business offerings.

GPRS is awesome - it helps that my 'smart' phone has Opera, so while it's great for use with the laptop, I can do stuff with just the phone by itself.

I'd love a 3G data package with unlimited usage.

Playing games over GPRS? That must've been horrible - wouldn't the latency completely ruin your game?

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

oh and the ToS isn't really a problem -- any comcast customer who clones her PC's MAC on a wifi router is breaking their ToS.

[azurelunatic]

I'd be far more worried about ToS were I trying to, say, provide connectivity to others in this fashion.

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

you said you were -- connectivity to your friend's laptop. did I misunderstand?

[azurelunatic]

That's what I started out trying for, but while poking around online attempting to establish if I could or could not make a direct cable connection from her modem to mine, I started wondering about making a connection from my laptop's modem through my cellphone through the phone lines to the modem of some theoretical always-on machine in my apartment to the LAN to the Greater Internet. All thoughts of her machine disappeared as I began to mentally build my virtual empire.

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

Completely understandable. May your great empire live!

[azurelunatic]

Even though it will contain dial-up.