The Adventures of Joshua Judson Rosen
(action man)

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Mon, 13 Apr 2009
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23:50: GPRS GPS is frickin' expensive

I drove to work, today, with TangoGPS running on my FreeRunner, merrily downloading OpenStreetMap data as I went... and there's a conspicuous hole in my map where the GPRS link effectively went dead (and Pidgin started saying "authentication error: connection refused")..., because the balance on my prepaid SIM went to zero.

I had $20 on it, when I started. At 1¢/kilobyte, that'd be... how much data did I download?

root@om-gta02 ~ $ cd Maps/
root@om-gta02 ~/Maps $ du -hs
1.9M .

"How many kilobytes is two megabytes?", asks my brother. "Two thousand", I say. So, at 1¢/kilobyte, that'd be....

I open my mouth to say "two-thousand cents"; but my brother interjects, "twenty dollars".

OK. I guess it's worth buying an unlimited-data plan, if I actually plan to use this `download as I go' feature.

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