I’ve blogged before about replacing my expensive SprintPCS plan with something more reasonable. It looks like I’ve found “reasonable.” The company is called Net10 and the plan is pretty unique. Net10 is a prepaid service, an MVNO that uses T-Mobile and Cingular‘s GSM network. The service costs 10 cents a minute, period: no daily charges, no other fees other than the usual taxes. Plus, minutes don’t have to expire in 30 or 60 days. You can buy minutes which don’t expire for a whole year, making service cost as low as $12.50 a month.

I did an analysis of my calling habits and figured out I could save money with pay-for-use. We’ll see. I ordered a reconditioned Motorola phone for $40 which should get here any day now. With it comes 300 free minutes (that alone’s worth 30 bucks). Thus, it’s an amazing value.

Oh, and my favorite thing about Net10? No contract! If I don’t like them I’m not on the hook (no pun intended).

I’m going to use both services side by side for a while to evaluate them. I’ll let y’all know how it works.

The News and Observer’s John Murawski had a nice feature about local folks generating their own electricity. That hack. I swear he steals his ideas from MT.Net.

Fortunately, I never talked about the cool wind turbine available from Amazon.Com. For 800 bucks you can crank out 400 watts! Wind power gives you the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to getting off the grid. If you live in a windy climate, a wind turbine is definitely the way to go. In fact, I can think of at least one person who might love to put one on his beach-bound RV.

Amazon also sells a much bigger turbine that kicks out 900 watts for $2,300. And of course the best thing about buying from Amazon is that the shipping is free.

I’m in a class going over our serial products. All this talk of baud rates and other serially-type stuff made me curious about what “classic” modem hardware was still out there.

I found this amusing article about the Hayes Smartmodem 1200, a high speed, 1200 baud modem at a bargain $700 price!

I’ve got this MythTV box I’m building, only it sits in another room of the house. Since I need all the coax going to that room for inputs to my tuner card, I am left with CAT-5 wiring for my video output.

After some poking around the Internets, I found some stores selling video baluns just for this purpose. Only problem is I didn’t want to spend $300 to do this.

More digging and I found some specs for building jacks for sending S-Video and stereo audio over CAT-5. I bought pair of S-video connectors and two pairs of male RCA jacks to add to my existing CAT-5 cabling and connectors. A half-hour of soldering the RCA jacks onto the CAT-5 and I had my jacks. Cost was $20.

I was quite surprised at the quality of the video. I’m pushing composite video over 25 feet of UTP CAT-5 cable and it looks great (I had to drop the S-video since my output card didn’t support it). Problem solved. Next time, though, I’ll skip the male RCA jacks in favor of female ones, since I can buy jacks which don’t require soldering.

I’ve heard of people putting all kinds of things on their CAT-5 cable. Looks to me that its true.

During my checking up on insulation progress, I came across an excellent tool to help judge where our electricity is going. Progress Energy has a wonderful tool to show how you spend your electrons. Create an account, log in, and you’re presented with the last 12 months of bills, including kilowatt usage, monthly average usage, and the high and low temperatures for the day.

I once worked for a local commercial weather forecasting company that among other things sells temperature forecasts to power companies. The power companies use those forecasts to know how much electricity demand to expect, which determines if they have surplus to sell or if they have a need to buy. Even so, I never really appreciated how closely temperatures are tied to electric usage until I saw my own electricity use mapped to temperature on Progress’s website. It shows that my recognizing the need for a better air conditoner is right on target. When you’re looking at your own power bill there’s little doubt about where your electrons are being spent: air conditioning. It’s mind boggling to think how much power could be saved if air conditioners didn’t need compressors.

If you haven’t created an account on the Progress Energy site yet, you can find the log-in details on your latest power bill. Check it out!

I was poking around the Internets today looking for marine products to blow money on when I came across this Solar Panel Kit at Harbor Freight Tools. Two hundred bucks gets you 3 15-watt solar panels and a power center to charge batteries. You add a deep-cycle battery or two and an inverter and you’ve got yourself a nice little solar power station.

As a geeky kid in the early 80’s I had a fold-up solar panel that would power a transistor radio (transistors, remember those?). I always thought solar panels were interesting to have around for projects. As a grown-up geek, I can imagine some cool uses for 45-watt panels.

I wonder if the new electric meter that we got is hackable? Not to adjust the power readings or anything illegal, but to remotely read the power load at any time?

Progress Energy provides a handy graph with each power bill, showing power use on a monthly basis. I’d like to monitor the load on a hourly basis (or better) by querying the power meter from my computer.

Anyone know of anything that does this?

I picked up three surplus DBS dishes today with an eye on picking up a couple more FTA satellites. I can’t wait to hook them up to my MythTV box to see what I can tune in.

I got my Fon Linksys WRT54G access point Tuesday. Not a bad deal for five bucks plus shipping (total: $13). I hope to hook it up this weekend.

Fon, for those of you not in the know, is a service where you agree to share your internet bandwidth with others in exchange for similar privileges on others’ networks. Once I’m sharnig my Fon connection, I can use other Fon connections for free. Pretty cool, if you ask me.

I was going to do this anyway by building a community network, so to get a box preconfigured for 13 bucks is a deal. All I have to do to keep the access point’s price at $5 is to agree to keep it running for a year. So this weekend will be week one of my community network experiment.