Plaidophile

Plenty of updates to FeedOnFeeds since the last time I posted about it. You can of course just read the changelog there. The main changes to care about:

• Item purging should now behave correctly on feeds with missing or broken timestamps
• It now works with PHP 5.4
• The dynamic update estimation algorithm is a bit better, and also has metrics logging to make it easier to experiment with changing the algorithm

As always, the best way to install or update is to just clone or pull from the git repo.

At some point I should put together an actual site for this stuff, and maybe provide actual versioned snapshots too.

My car's been relisted on RelayRides for the last couple months, and this time around things are working out way better than last time. I think a few things have contributed to this:

• The site is now a lot better about providing key exchange availability information, and I can now easily just tell people to please look at that when I decline their reservation (and people seem to actually understand it when it's called out like that)
• There are a lot more owners and renters, meaning there's a wider pool of people to deal with
• A lot more of the renters are either visiting from out of town (i.e. aren't idiot Seattle drivers) or are Seattle drivers who have actually owned a car and understand how to take care of someone else's (i.e. they aren't just trying RelayRides because Zipcar got too expensive and/or banned them)
• For the out-of-town renters, the site makes it much more clear whether the owner is willing to be a taxi service to and from the airport, and people are able to search specifically on that too (so I imagine that the people who are willing to do a pickup are getting most of the really wretched idiots)
• Car2Go has taken off a lot of the pressure for short-term rental needs
• The marketing has apparently gotten a lot better and now makes it much more clear that you are renting from people, not a rental company (at least judging by the number of first-time renters who don't get confused by this, compared to how it was even just a few months ago); I suspect that there was a big marketing push along those lines since a few months ago I was actually asked if I wanted to participate in "a great marketing opportunity for [my] car" (I wasn't interested, since at the time I was still seeing renters as a burden, not a benefit)

I also suspect that their driver screening process has gotten better. I still get occasional ditzy idiots who just plain don't understand how the site works or have no idea how to read the very obvious map that shows where my car is located, but they're a lot easier to deal with now too.

There's still a few rough edges; I wish there were a way to programmatically allow/deny key exchange times, for example, both on a recurring schedule and with exceptions (e.g. I'm visiting my sister next week and I've had to turn down perfectly-good requests that just happen to have key exchanges when I'll be away) and there's still a few other things around scheduling which could be a lot better (for both owners and renters), but at least now it isn't a frustrating headache to deal with anymore, and my car is back to paying for itself instead of being a stupid barely-used burden.

Right now there is a renaissance in digital goods fulfillment options, with plenty of startups hoping to get the long-tail microtransaction stuff going in their favor. Some of them are oriented more towards music, while others are oriented more towards eBooks or other sorts of things. Here's a quick comparison of a few of them (Bandcamp, CDBaby, Gumroad, and Simple Goods) for those who might be interested in such a thing.

So I got my Ting phone on Saturday, and I'm happy with it. Phone-wise it's essentially the same phone I had before (Samsung Galaxy Nexus), only it's about 6 grams heavier and 0.5mm thicker. Oh no.

The voice service is pretty good so far, although I haven't used it much either.

The data service is passable. It's only 3G service for now, because LTE is only just beginning to be rolled out in Seattle (as a stealth beta), and I get around 800Kbps on a good day, compared to 10Mbps on T-Mobile. But that's enough for what I use data for on my phone most of the time, and in the meantime I have a Freedompop access point which I get 6Mbps on.

Unlike most pay-as-you-go/MVNO services, it actually lets you forward your voicemail to an alternate number, so Google Voice works with it with no voicemail conflicts (except that GV can't automatically provision it since it misdetects the number as being Sprint, but that's easily addressed from the Ting website).

So, in a week or two I'll just be canceling my T-Mobile plan and paying the $200 ETF (and reselling my GSM Galaxy Nexus). In the meantime, if you sign up for Ting via my referral link, both of us get a $25 credit, so that helps to lessen the blow. (And with my expected usage, that'll cover two months of service for me.)

One downside is that I really wish that in the lower usage tiers you could pay per unit instead of for the entire tier; I generally don't use text messages at all, and when I do it'll be 4-5 per month. At $3 for the first chunk of 100, that works out to 60 cents a text message for actual usage (compared to the 3 cents per message that it would nominally cost). Which I guess isn't too bad, really, but still, it's kind of offensive from a service-cost perspective. I suspect that most months I won't get any at all though, since I only use my phone's SMS gateway as a backup for my work pager and I hardly ever get paged. So, I expect my normal monthly bill to be $12-15. Which is totally fine compared to the $75/month I was paying before, for the same level of usage.

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Based purely on the cost of the next 24 months of service:

• Sticking with T-Mobile with the service I hardly ever use: $46.07/month → $1105.68
• Switching to T-Mobile prepaid with the more amenable contract term: $30/month + $200 ETF → $920
• Switching to Ting: $15/month + $200 ETF + phone price → $560 + phone price

So as long as the phone costs less than $360 I'd be making out better than T-Mobile prepaid, and as long as it's less than $545 I'd be better off than sticking with what I have.

Phone options available directly from Ting that work out better than T-Mobile Prepaid:

• Kyocera Rise: $163, a semi-decent Android 4.x phone with a QWERTY keyboard (which would be nice). Big downsides: Crappy CPU, no LTE. Not sure those things would really bug me anymore. It's pretty ridiculously thick though (c'est la slider).
• LG Optimus Elite: $193 but probably crap judging by my experience with LG phones (and spec-wise it's worse than the Rise, so uh, no)
• Samsung Galaxy Victory: $294, slightly-decent CPU, supports LTE, has Samsung's crappy customizations but Cyanogen exists, almost as ridiculously thick as the Rise though

Phones which work out better than my current T-Mobile plan:

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus: $404, the exact phone I have already. I can keep using my car dock (as rarely as I do that), known quantity for overall quality and speed and so on.
• Samsung Galaxy SIII 16GB: $450, by all accounts a decent phone, although spec-wise not as good as the Galaxy Nexus so I really don't know why someone would pay more for a lesser phone (unless you REALLY want the Samsung customizations, and I don't know why you would).

So really it comes down to: would I rather keep using the same phone, in which case it makes more sense to switch back to T-Mobile's ultra-annoying pay-as-you-go service (sigh), or would I be willing to take a downgrade in performance but get a physical keyboard (and really the number of times that I've really wished I'd had a physical keyboard vs. Swype over the last few years have been, oh, about three).

Or it could just be worth the $44 to switch away from T-Mobile while keeping the same model of phone (and of course, I can always sell the used GSM phone, duh), and anyway the nature of Ting is that I'd have an auto-adjusting rate based on how much I'm actually using; the $15/month is just an estimate based on how much I use my phone right now, and it can go as low as $6/month, and the key other variable I'm not accounting for is that if I do end up needing more minutes or data one month, Ting's tiering-up costs way less (and is way less of a hassle) than T-Mobile's.

So yeah I'm thinking it works out best to just cancel T-Mobile and switch to Ting, with an LTE Galaxy Nexus. My parents switched to Ting a while ago and they've been pretty happy with it, so... yeah.