Month: June 2009

iTouch

The gadget lust was finally too much and I’ve purchased an iPod Touch.  Way back I was a fairly early adopter of the Palm Pilot 1000, however its been years since I’ve bothered to carry a PDA with me.  Cell phones have mostly closed that gap and the internet is more ubiquitous than it was back in 1996, these two technologies which have radically changed the information landscape around us.  While I do tease some of my friends with the iPhone (I charge my Nokia 5310 once a week), I’d have an iPhone if I could justify the cost of the monthly plans.

I’m a big fan of the Apple store online, specifically the refurbished section.  They offer “as new” products for a significant discount.  The refurbished iPod Touch has a new battery and outer shell, new earbuds, USB cable and it comes with the same 1-year warranty that a new unit would.  The only real difference is price (8Gb iTouch $199 vs. $239) and a plain white box.  If you can stand to wait until the latest model starts to be available refurbished, why pay full price?

I ordered monday, it arrived thursday.  Shipping was free.  Surprisingly it came from Shenzen, home of Foxconn (I found Bunnie’s description of Shenzen facinating, worth a read).  To give you a sense of the scale of the voyage that this lowly iPod Touch made over the past week – here is a map showing the voyage:
fedex_ipod

As I already have a video iPod, getting setup was very simple.  Using the latest version of iTunes, I just plugged in the new iTouch to let it charge and sync.  The initial sync was very slow, apparently this is somewhat expected.

As to exactly why I went out and bought an iTouch?  Well, it was a Fathers Day gift (Thanks Jenn!) – but I’ve been oogling at them for a while.  This LifeHacker article could serve as a good set of reasons to pick one up instead of holding out for an iPhone.  The 2nd generation iTouch is more compelling than the 1st – it has a faster processor (faster than the iPhone 3G, but not the 3G S), the headphone jack supports microphone input, there is also an external speaker.  In comparison to the iPhone – the 2nd generation  iTouch is missing: a camera, GPS, and of course cell phone functionality.  It does have almost every other ability.

So far its been very cool.  With only 8Gb of storage, I can’t get all my music on it – but iTunes seems to have done a fairly sane job of putting the right selection on without any interaction from me.  The App Store is really cool (but there are far too many apps out there).  If you need more convincing to jump on the Apple train, Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting commentary on the significance of the iPhone.

Beware the Browser

I tend to use my browser state (and plenty of tabs) as lightweight bookmarks.  This means leaving a couple of browser windows open perpetually.  Often my machine is configured to sleep after about 20mins, but in the case of my work laptop it doesn’t sleep if plugged into the wall (intentional on my part).  I don’t think my usage is atypical – I would not be surprised if several of my friends have similar usage patterns.

A picture tells a thousand words:

traffic1This graph is from DD-WRTv24.  You might think “Ah, Roo’s just been doing some torrents” – but the truth is that almost all of the traffic from June 10th-16th and then the June 21st spike are due to a couple of open browser windows on my laptop (overnight).  This was my conclusion last night at 2am when I closed 3 browser windows on my laptop and watch the bandwidth on my WAN port drop to zero bytes.

Let’s look back a bit to some more typical usage:

traffic2You might have noticed the scale is vastly different.  In fact, the usage for the entire month is basically the same as what I was pulling down in a single day.

Granted – I’m claiming it was the browser (some page auto-refreshing?) doing this.  Checking my web logs indicate that visitors to the websites hosted on lowtek hasn’t massively spiked this month.  It could have been something else as well, but the coincidence of my closing the browsers and seeing the traffic drop is good evidence. [Edit – I may have been wrong (yes, it happens) see comments]

Consider the possibilities here.  If you wanted to be evil, and you were say an ISP – you’d ensure that your customers default home page was a nice friendly AJAX enabled launchpad linked to webmail etc..  and you’d put something to cause a slow trickle download cost as long as the user has that page open.  This would likely cause a fair percentage of your customers to consume more of their bandwidth cap sooner.