Mobile blogging

Just a note about how I blogged while I was away.

Earlier this year I bought a laptop computer and at home I connect to our normal broadband modem with a wireless connection. Several months ago I bought a mobile modem, a little device that plugs in to the usb port and uses the mobile phone network. It's a Telsta model and cost me about $140. Then I pre-paid $30 and activated it when I wanted to start the month's use (It's $30 or 30 days, whichever you use up first).

I used it every day to do my emails, blog (with lower res photos that I usually put up), twitter and put up photos on the Flickr and found that I didn't have to renew before the $30 ran out - in other words it cost me about $1 a day for the seven weeks we've been away (apart from the initial purchase). And I always had access because I was using the Telstra mobile phone coverage. I didn't use it to do web searches, and I turned off the automatic downloads on my laptop. I also checked the emails to make sure that someone hadn't sent me large files, and if they had I went in to webmail first and either moved them into a folder that I'll open when I get home or deleted them.

I must say that I'm pretty happy with the result, and will use it when we go on holidays - it will be worth activating it even when we go away for a fortnight I reckon.