Squirrels and Data

Bad News: On the one hand? Squirrels chewed through my ISP's lines a few miles out from my home.

Worse: My phone only has mobile data in the most technical of senses. Only about 500 megabytes worth.

So I plug my phone in to check mail, having to open browser and open gmail because woopsie a few of my contacts hadn't been migrated over and gmail is my public facing address.

Phone's data meter spikes to 15 megabytes used between that, and google play asking to update.

I go in and start disabling things so they don't use data when on mobile data, then go look see what the hot-spot data useage is? About a

megabyte after an hour of poking around

Useage after an hour of that? 15.571 megabytes. Getting close to sixteen megabytes after a couple new usenet messages (eternal-september is solid if you don't mind not having access to binaries and other non-text data. Fine by me. I mean free is free right?) Plus IRC and a few bits and pieces of mail.

Then data spikes up to 35 megabytes used right after I get a notification 'no new updates avalible' from my desktop. So, disabled that is too.

There is a lesson there in data efficiency and agency in when data is used and just how often data gets used when people aren't paying attention. Oh sure fine my useage is in the megabytes, so by the standards of 2025? Rounding errors under most conditions. However for me it is the principle of the thing as much as anything else.

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