{"id":1874,"date":"2016-06-08T22:35:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T22:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/?p=1874"},"modified":"2016-06-15T12:50:03","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T12:50:03","slug":"data-diet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/2016\/06\/08\/data-diet\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Diet"},"content":{"rendered":"

The good old USA is mostly a land of no limits. \u00a0We pretty much have all the electric, gas, water, phone, texting and internet we can use. \u00a0Sure, we get a bill at the end of the month for our water, electric and gas but, if you are like me, unless it is drastically different than last month’s bill we don’t really pay attention to how many gallons of water, kilowatt hours of electricity or cubic feet of natural gas we’ve used. \u00a0Even if we do, we really have no idea what or who is using it and when. \u00a0Can you imagine what would happen if there was an app that alerted\u00a0you with the dollar amount you just used when you flushed the toilet, took that really long shower, dried that load of wet towels, watered your lawn, stared in the open door of your fridge or adjusted your AC\/furnace down\/up a couple degrees? \u00a0Well, its no app, but living in a self contained rolling house is definitely a step in that direction. \u00a0With a limited amount of waste water and garbage holding capacity and finite supply of water, electricity, propane and internet you become keenly aware of your usage. \u00a0And, the cool part? \u00a0You become keenly aware of how little you actually need<\/em> to be comfortable!! \u00a0It has definitely piqued my interest in off-grid living. \u00a0But in this post I will just focus on the data diet<\/em> we adopted while on the road.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As mentioned before<\/a>, we decided to try the 20GB per month plan through Verizon which gave us about 650MB per day of data. \u00a0Couple that with the occasional campground WiFi and\u00a0we were able to get along just fine on this plan.<\/p>\n

I already mentioned the free software GlassWire that I used on our PCs to monitor data usage real time while still connected to the hard wired, infinite data plan at our sticks and bricks. \u00a0With this tool I was able to find some of the big data hitters. \u00a0They are pretty obvious but I found some sneakier\u00a0phantom data users and also began to get a feel for what sort of data images and video used. \u00a0I could watch a YouTube video using different quality levels (adjust this by clicking the little gear in the lower right of the video window) to learn how that used data. \u00a0I found that at a video quality of 240 (pretty bad but still viewable for many things) I used about 3.6MB of data every minute. \u00a0With our 20GB\/month plan that meant we\u00a0could potentially watch 185 minutes of poor quality video a day (as long as we did nothing else that used data). \u00a0For us it made the most sense to\u00a0remove video from our data diet unless we had free WiFi. \u00a0This worked out just fine….while it was a bit hard to kick the habit it has been a healthy move.<\/p>\n

One of my clients uses Google Hangouts for meetings. \u00a0Even when not on a data diet I usually disabled the video part as did many other participants. \u00a0I don’t\u00a0think it adds that much value and I also don’t have to worry if I accidentally pick my nose on camera. \u00a0But even the audio used some data. \u00a0It turns out that you can join a google hangout by phone number thereby using your, most likely, unlimited talk minutes for those meetings. \u00a0I have another client that uses Zoom \u00a0and UberConference and the same applies there. \u00a0Using GlassWire during video conferencing I noticed that Zoom definitely used more data than Hangouts with the former having almost no control over video quality compared to the latter.<\/p>\n

Windows 8 and higher allows you to set a WiFi connection as “metered<\/a>“. \u00a0This is genius. \u00a0Just like you can set the computer’s behavior based on if you are getting power from the wall or you are running on battery, this lets you adjust data usage behavior based on whether the internet connection is metered (you are paying per GB) or not. \u00a0This prevents those big automatic updates and such from using up all my allotted data for the day\u00a0before I’ve even gotten out of my\u00a0snug bed.<\/p>\n

For general internet browsing there are lots of fancy plugins and extensions for browsers. \u00a0I use Chrome and\u00a0installed the DataSaver <\/a>extension. \u00a0According to the extension, it has saved me 12GB of data over the course of the last 60 days. \u00a0That’s pretty good! \u00a0I also made it so plugins had to ask my permission to run. \u00a0In Chrome this is done by hamburger-> settings->advanced->privacy->content settings->plugins and checking “Let me choose when to run plugin content”.<\/p>\n

Images can be a big user of data as well, however I found that unless you are dealing with pretty high quality images you shouldn’t have to worry. \u00a0There are some Chrome browser settings that allow you to disable ALL images but I think this is unnecessary. \u00a0Most images on web pages are pretty small so that they load quickly. \u00a0Now, uploading our pictures to Flickr for safe keeping and use in our blog had the potential to blow through data quickly. \u00a0For this I decided to trade off some image quality for data savings. \u00a0I used an online tool<\/a> to resize my photos in bulk. \u00a0While the tool is accessed online, all of the image resizing occurs client side (that is, on my computer) and does not use any data. \u00a0I would drag and drop a bunch of images in there, set my resize strategy (I always chose to make the longest side of a picture 2000 pixels) and out would pop a zip file of images. \u00a0This typically gave me a 10X reduction of the image size on disk and therefore very manageable on my allotted 650MB per day when uploading them to Flickr. \u00a0I then used the Slickr Flickr<\/a> plugin for WordPress which allowed me to easily share my Flickr images on this blog.<\/p>\n

We disabled all app updates on our mobile devices to prevent these from using up data when we weren’t looking and I also always put the hotspot in airplane mode when I went to bed to make sure no device could try to update in the middle of the night and use loads of data.<\/p>\n

We ALWAYS had unused data at the end of the billing cycle. \u00a0For one, I always tried to stay behind our daily allotment of data so that we had margin to cover an unexpected big download\u00a0or video conference for work. \u00a0Also, the next higher data plan Verizon offered was 30GB which would have been too much and those extra 10GB cost more per GB than the first 20 I already purchased. \u00a0I’m not sure how much “overage” charges are but I wanted to avoid them. \u00a0Finally, I felt that the data usage shown on the hotspot was always about a day behind. \u00a0I really wanted something more real time. \u00a0So, I felt I had to actually pay for more data than I got to use. \u00a0If I could design my own 4g service it would have the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Rollover data or a reasonable rate for going over my data limit.<\/li>\n
  2. Real time data usage shown on the device<\/li>\n
  3. Tools to allow me to set real time data usage alerts and\/or limits. \u00a0This would be similar to a fuse or breaker in your electrical system. \u00a0For example I could set it so I was alerted if I was using more than 1MB per minute over a 5min period. \u00a0Or I can have it completely shut down if more than 5MB per minute is being consumed. \u00a0Of course, I can always override these. \u00a0Verizon has some alerts, but they are comical in their usefulness.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Well, I hope I was able to provide some useful information to you about how you can reduce your data usage while on the road. \u00a0If you have any questions or anything feel free to leave a comment or use our contact <\/a>page to send us a note.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The good old USA is mostly a land of no limits. \u00a0We pretty much have all the electric, gas, water, phone, texting and internet we can use. \u00a0Sure, we get a bill at the end of the month for our water, electric and gas but, if you are like me, unless it is drastically different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1874"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1914,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1874\/revisions\/1914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thewachs.com\/wachsacrossamerica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}