William Lower

kangadoodle:

Hannah Harto - My Drunk Kitchen ep1: Butter yo’ shit.

Hipster Lincoln

Yep, that’s us

Human Statue of Liberty

The Turtle Fence desktop picture

You shall build a turtle fence!

Lunch?

All the weird creatures… this time, a funky caterpillar.

An excellent article in the Herald today about looming VSM. This is just a terrible idea.

Decide for yourself.

hipsterlibertarian:

This is from a Mises Institute fundraising email.  Not typically the most quotable sort of document, but I thought this was good.

More Oatmealy goodness. Well worth a look.

A few months back, I performed a very unscientific trial of Apple’s new FaceTime service on mobile internet connections; comparing the cost of a FaceTime call on a data connection with a traditional voice call over the mobile network. What I found was quite surprising.

Okay, so I made a 43 minute call which used 74MB of data. That works out at less than 2MB/minute (1.72MB), sent and received.

What this means for us Kiwis on the Telecom XT network…

On the prepaid 500MB Telecom XT plan, after you have used the 500MB of data, you could call unlimited for $0.115/minute with FaceTime.

Or $0.026/minute on the prepaid 4GB plan at $61.51/month after bonus credit, then the above rate. This works out at about 39 hours of video calling! After this, the per minute rate goes up to $0.17.

So, that’s two-way video calling to another FaceTime user anywhere in the world from any iPhone, or Mac with mobile broadband, from less than 3c/minute!

I haven’t actually tested the data efficiency of Skype video calls, but I expect they are not far off. I will make sure I keep an eye on the data usage next time.

All this sounds good to me. Carrier-based calling and text services will inevitably decline in favor of VoIP solutions, but it looks that the transition is closer and more cost-effective than I initially thought.