Tech

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An Update About my GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster

In response to a comment left by Linda last night, I’ve updated my GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster:

This is the booster I need to buy: https://www.repeaterstore.com/collections/home-office-kits/products/surecall-triflex?variant=858334729

The tech who recommended it understands my topographic situation and based on how my current booster is working promises a 30-day money back guarantee that I will see a ‘night and day difference.’

With shipping to Canada, this booster comes in at just over 1,200CAD. It is ridiculous that I need to buy something like that when there is a great signal in the uninhabited hills above my valley, but that’s my situation.

My community is slow to get together on projects like these. I’m the only person who needs internet access NOW. Please help me improve my internet situation in the next couple of weeks rather than months.

How does this help the bigger issue of the Canadian government giving telecom monopolies too much power? It doesn’t. But it could change the life of one person in distress.

I’ll close off by sharing a story Dr. Jane Goodall told me one day that has always resonated with me and which I feel is relevant here:

There was a man taking a morning walk at the beach. He saw that along with the morning tide came hundreds of starfish and when the tide receded, they were left behind. With the morning sun rays, they would die. The tide was fresh and the starfish were alive. The man took a few steps, picked one, and threw it into the water. He did that repeatedly.

Right behind him there was another person who couldn’t understand what this man was doing. He caught up with him and asked, “What are you doing? There are hundreds of starfish. How many can you help? What difference does it make?”

This man did not reply, took two more steps, picked up another one, threw it into the water, and said, “It makes a difference to this one.”

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GoFundMe Campaign For a Stronger Cell Signal Booster

I have  started a GoFundMe Campaign for a Stronger Cell Signal as a social experiment. We are so quick to help those in the developing world, but what about closer to home?

My community doesn’t have cellular service and won’t for at least the next 10 years, so I have to use a signal booster to amplify the very weak signal that passes over our valley. They range in price but because the signal I can tap into is so weak, I need a commercial-grade unit. Your donation to my GoFundMeCampaign will help me towards the purchase of the booster.

I didn’t vote for this government and I sure didn’t vote for the government that gave telecom monopolies power to deny me affordable internet access that can meet the needs of a 21st century user. My internet issues go beyond just me. It is egregious and unconscionable to me that people are dying all over the world today to take away from the governments of developing countries this kind of power over their people, but when it’s happening in a first world country, I just get told to get a grip and move. I will not be displaced!

Please help if you can. Just letting me know you’re listening would be appreciated right now.

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Canadian Telecom Monopolies Have Too Much Power

So this is the bureaucratic hole I am in right now: no reliable internet access at home and no hope to EVER get it. I have been communicating with SaskTel extensively and that is their final verdict: no future plans to develop in my area.

Because I am in such a deep rural area, the only option is cellular internet. That service is absolutely awesome and reasonably priced where it exists. If I could get that service, I would be very happy. Right now, I pay for it, but because there is no service in my community (zero bars), I can only get a tenuous signal using a cell signal amplifier/booster. I frequently have to drive 3KM up a hill to a neighbour’s lentil field just to send an email with a small text attachment.

SaskTel holds the monopoly for telecom development in this province. In 2013, they put up a tower in my area, that in theory, would have connected my community to the 21st century. Only they did not corroborate topographic and population data and so that tower’s signals pass right over my community and essentially serve no one.

SaskTel refuses to investigate this mistake and tell me that they don’t plan to do any development in my area in at least the next 10 years.

Today, I got a flier from Industry Canada (where I used to work, coincidentally) telling me, hey, high speed internet is coming your way! I visited their site, Connecting Canadians and saw that this is FALSE. My community is not on the books to get any infrastructure changes. And according to my ISP (ie. SaskTel), we’re on the coverage map, so why should they have to do anything else? Yes, we are on the coverage map, but this is a mistake. Because we are in a valley, the signal from the tower that was meant to serve us actually passes right over us!

This ‘Connecting Canadians’ initiative is going to supposedly bring high speed internet to 98% of Canadians. SaskTel’s development in the last several years has brought connectivity to about 98% of Saskatchewan. I find it hard to swallow that my community of 500 people, never mind all the tourists who come to visit our petroglyphs, museums, and campgrounds, are part of that 2%.

I’ve been to what I thought was the end of the world, like northern Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Communities there are extremely well connected. They get a lot of attention and money. But no one seems to know about this little strip of land between the TransCanada and the US border, between Alberta and Lake Superior, that is still living in the dark ages. And when they find out about it, they don’t care.

I have no other option for internet except for dial up or satellite. That SaskTel considers these to be a reasonable alternative to high speed broadband internet is hilarious.

I need internet for my business and to stay in touch with the outside world (we don’t have cable TV or radio out here either!). In 2011, the United Nations declared internet access to be as basic a human right as access to fresh water. I live in a non-isolated community in a developed country and I will never have internet access in a place I love and was hoping to make a life.

According to federal law, my fate entirely rests in the hands of one company with an extraordinary amount of power: “Canadians currently without 5 Mbps service are encouraged to contact local Internet service providers to discuss the possibility of extending high-speed Internet access to their area. The final decision to offer high-speed Internet in a given area rests with individual ISPs” (emphasis mine).

This is the second time in my life that I have found myself in this position. The first was when I lived a mere 50KM from Ottawa in the heart of cottage country where politicians and celebrities have homes. If I still lived there, I would still be waiting for cellular and broadband service. So with that knowledge, I know that my situation here in Saskatchewans is truly hopeless.

I would be grateful if you share this story to show the kind of malarkey we get from the Canadian government. The ‘Connecting Canadians’ initiative is a joke . If they really wanted to connect us, they wouldn’t give telecom monopolies all the power.

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Epiphanies

Ooh, today was bad, apocalypse level bad in terms of winds, rain, and property damage in the southern Prairies. I was right in the middle of it and unlike the eye of a hurricane, where it is calm, I was in a real maelstrom. There are trees down all over my hamlet and I had to use a lot of muscle to get a particularly large branch off my driveway so I could park my truck.

My internet service is flaky on a bad day and non-existent on a day like today. I ended up spending most of my day parked in a field about halfway to Assiniboia. That’s how far I had to go to get a usable cellular signal so I could do my work and about as far as I dared to go in lashing rain, gusting winds, and huge amounts of water on the road. It was a very long and unpleasant day.

Working out of my truck for a few hours is fine. I sit in the passenger seat and have a lap desk, so I’m comfortable. But I have no bathroom or means of making a hot beverage (which would have been appreciated on such a cold and damp day). I really don’t have an alternative place to work except taking a motel room in Assiniboia. The library in Assiniboia has weird hours and I obviously couldn’t do an eight-hour shift there or at the bakery that sort of doubles as an internet cafe. So I am rather resentful that I’m being put in this situation because we don’t have cellular service down in the valley, where I have a lovely office.

I am actively pursuing the connectivity issue this summer. I am at the point of seeking a political resolution, having reached an impasse with SaskTel, the telecom company that holds a monopoly in this province. As soon as I am ready to go to the media, I will lay it all out here on the blog. But the short of it is that at this point in time, there are no plans within the next 10 years to bring cellular service, and therefore good internet, to my valley and so I really need to reconsider using Haven as a home base. My flaky internet wasn’t such a big deal when I could schedule going up the hill to where there’s service on especially bad days while being able to work at home, but the new job requires me to respond very quickly to emails and is not compatible with a flaky internet service.

Which led to an epiphany regarding another decision I’ve been contemplating: buying a new (to me) vehicle.

I figured out this winter that I really want a camper van to use as a daily driver and to serve as a mobile motel room and office when I’m traveling. The epiphany I had today is that if I had a vehicle like that, it would mean being able to ride out poor connectivity issues in style. At the first whiff of bad internet, I could relocate to the mobile office, park where there’s a good connection, and work comfortably with access to a bathroom and means to make a simple meal. Yes, my home has wheels, but can you imagine having to pack up and move a 32′ motorhome a couple of times a week, never mind find a large enough place to pull off a highway to work?! There is a reason people like having toads!

Having contemplated the camper van situation for some time now, I’ve figured exactly what I want and why. Mexico has featured heavily into my consideration. I want something that I would be able to import when I move there semi-permanently in three to four years, so that means I need something older since you can only import vehicles manufactured eight or more years from the year of import. So that puts me at a 2009 to 2011 model year, a huge improvement over my current 2000 truck. I also want something that can easily be serviced in Mexico.

Next consideration is fuel economy; I want an improvement over my Ranger’s gas guzzling tendencies. I want something small that I can park anywhere. And I want something that is proven to be convertible into a camper van.

Tall order? Nope. I have found one vehicle that meets every single one of these requirements and it is hugely popular in Europe for camper van conversions: the Ford Transit Connect. It is not to be confused with its larger sibling, the Transit.

Unfortunately, the North American Transit Connects don’t have all the options of their European counterparts, most especially a manual transmission. Going to an automatic would be a huge concession. But we can get the longer body and high roof here, so there’s that. The Transit Connect makes for a very compact mini motorhome. The Transit is much more spacious, sort of like a poor man’s Sprinter in fact, but it doesn’t have the fuel economy of the Transit Connect.

I’ve looked at conversions of the Transit Connect and it would be just the right size for a small bed and work station with room for a potty, a cooler, and a cooktop. Pretty much every conversion I’ve seen has the same basic layout, and with good reason, as it lays out all these elements efficiently.

The conversion is a project I feel I could undertake myself. I would not add propane or plumbing. The most complex part of the job would be electrical, but that’s something I’m competent to do and I would actually pull a lot of materials from Miranda (solar panel, whole house inverter, battery monitor), which would really cut down on costs.

So now it’s a matter of finding my Transit Connect. I did a soft inquiry to see if I could get a vehicle loan and the amount and the answers are yes and enough to buy a recent model (I found a 2013 that fits in the price range). I really doubt that I would buy this summer/fall. I just don’t feel financially secure enough right now to jump into this project, although I am scanning the market. But it looks like my plan for next spring will be to find and purchase the vehicle and then spend the summer working on the conversion.

I need to decide how far afield I want to look. Importing from the US, which has a much larger market, would be a huge pain, but manageable with a broker. I just need to figure out how I could buy a vehicle there in the spring and drive it home while still having my Ranger and would appreciate suggestions for that. I love my Ranger and want to keep it as a cargo carrier until it rusts out from under me, so abandoning it in some junk yard like I did my beloved Accent isn’t my preferred option.

My fear of the Ranger rusting out is what is what got me thinking about buying a new vehicle in the nearish future. I’ve had three body repair guys tell me that the Ranger is too far gone to save and to stop putting money into it except for the most basic mechanical repairs. Independently of that, my financial planner told me that we needed to adjust my plan to fit in the replacement of my truck within a few years. So this is something I really need to be thinking about.

So to recap, I need a new vehicle, I need a backup place to work when internet at Haven is especially bad, and I need to cut down on costs when traveling between Canada and Mexico. Funny that the solution to all of those things is the same thing. I really do think that things are coming together for me!

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In Sync

Disclaimer: Anyone who has no use for modern gadgets and is going to leave a ‘I don’t have a smart phone and am proud of it’ comment, please don’t bother reading this post as it will be an eye roller for you. 😉

I was balancing the books yesterday and was frustrated by my inability to thoroughly keep track of my cash purchases. I was out a whole $25 that I couldn’t remember spending. When in town, I try to remember to input cash purchases into a note on my iPhone, but it’s clumsy, not quick to do on the fly, and then I have to put the information into my budgeting software. Since I pretty much only use cash in Mexico and want to keep better track of where I’m spending that money this winter since I know that I won’t just be spending on it primarily on food the way I was for almost four months last year, I really needed to come up with a better system.

I decided to investigate their iPhone version of the app, which promised to sync seamlessly with the desktop version through Dropbox. Now that I just about always have internet and unlimited bandwidth, syncing across the ether didn’t sound as scary as it once did, although it has always been a huge disaster with my Apple devices…

Well, I downloaded the iOS version of the budgeting app and tried it out when I was in Willow Bunch yesterday, immediately punching into the app the amounts spent at the pub and thrift store. It was much easier than creating a note in that the app could quickly pull up my payees with just a few keystrokes instead of having to type the whole name, recognize which categories they belong to, and has really big buttons to press to punch in the numbers instead of the tiny iPhone keyboard that pops up with the notes. When I got home and connected my Mac to the internet, my desktop app updated with the new purchases. Wow, cloud syncing could be wonderful!

So today, in between fits of work, I decided to figure out why I have such a hard time syncing between my Mac and my iOS devices. I’ve been trying to figure this out for five years, but never really pressed the issue because it wasn’t a critical issue for me. But now that I have an iPhone, work has really picked up, and I spend half the year out in the world and not staying cooped up at home 95% of the time, I need to be able to better use this powerful little pocket computer. If anything, I wanted to be able to have my calendar on my phone and not have to enter reminders on my Mac and then reenter them on the phone. I also go to bed with my iPad and wish that I could check my day’s to-do list and appointments before getting up, so syncing with it too would be a bonus.

I’m not quite sure how the epiphany came about this morning, but it didn’t take long for the light bulb to go on. My problem was that I have two Apple IDs (the reason for which I won’t bore you with) and have been using them pretty much interchangeably while I should have only been using one. So I took about a half hour (would have been much quicker with non-flaky internet) and made sure that all my devices were hooked up to the correct Apple ID and then I activated iCloud under that same Apple ID for each device. Bingo!

I still wound up with some duplicates and garbage information and it took me a moment to realise that the best way to clean that up is right in the cloud where everything is stored by signing in at icloud.com. But now that everything is synced and duplicates have been removed, I can update on whatever device I want and the changes appear seamlessly on each device (well, as long as my internet is cooperating).

I’ll be getting a new computer in a few weeks, so I’ll make sure to set it up properly from the get go.

Because I haven’t paid full price for an Apple device in ages (in fact, for all intents and purposes every one of my current devices was free!*) I sometimes forget how expensive they are and that I really should be maxing out their potential to get more value out of them. Cloud syncing is going to help me do just that!

Next step, when I have a lot more time to focus on the issue, will be to figure out how to link my Filemaker Pro database to the iOS app so that I can consult my invoices on the go. It happens about once a month that I get an invoice query from a client when I’m away from the desk, so it would be nice to at minimum be able to look up invoice numbers, amounts, and due dates.

I remember life with paper dayplanners and no internet at my fingertips and this is better. I can’t imagine running my little empire without these tools. I’m not a slave to them, but now that work is so much steadier and I’m expected to keep more normal business hours, it’s good to not be tethered to my desk and to feel that I can get away without announcing that I’m away.

(*My current Mac was a straight trade for my older computer, my iPad was mostly paid for with a generous work bonus, and my phone was absolutely free with a two-year contract because it’s an older model and they were clearing out stock)