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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I was pretty pissed about the whole situation. I checked with two ISPs prior to buying the house and both told me cable internet was available at the address. Turned out the cable terminated half a mile down the road towards the town and they wouldn’t pay to extend the run, or even let me pay to extend it. Then I tried to enable the hotspot and received a pop up saying my plan didn’t support it. I was further upset when I realized I could only share to five devices once I added that to my plan which made me more determined to figure something out. I don’t think I would have stumbled onto the solution if I hadn’t been so upset and determined about everything. I didn’t want to do satellite because latency and all of them having monthly data caps. Being on the internet with dialup is all but useless. Even news articles back in ~2015 would take a solid five minutes to load. Couldn’t stream anything obviously. It was hell. Before I moved out I had setup a yagi antenna pointed at a T-Mobile tower and was getting full bars and pretty respectable speeds considering, comparable or higher than cable would have been. I did end up having to setup a pc fan near the dongle to keep it cool though because it would get really hot. My first one started smoking and died. The second one lasted three years before I ended up moving.


  • Yeah they charge for tethering. When I lived in a rural area with only dial up, only eight years ago, I got an Ethernet dongle I could plug into my computer and setup the connection to an old cellphone then unplug from the computer and plug that into the internet port of my router so our whole house could share the T-Mobile unlimited data and the cell phone only saw it as one device. Just left the phone plugged in where it got the best service. Even with the hotspot addon (+25$) I could only connect five devices. That added up a lot faster than I expected so the dongle ended up being my work around.



  • This is the setup I’m using. I ordered a tablet as a dedicated device and looking forward to it getting here. We’re all iOS phones and tablets so I needed something else. In the Meantime I have an old android phone I tested it with but it has a swollen battery that split the back open so I’d rather replace it and I’m pretty sure a decent tablet would be snappier so it’s been an investment but only a couple hundred bucks total. I’ve cut paramount, Disney, appletv, hbomax, Hulu, and faith & family. I had no reason for all the bs and it just really crept up on me over a few years after I got a good job. I’m keeping Netflix because I like the standup comedian stuff, it’s only $7 with T-Mobile, and I’ve also made a mint on them in stock so w/e.

    The only thing I haven’t been able to find was my kids wanted to watch elemental. I’d love some more categories to find stuff when I’m in a mood but not sure what to watch. Was thinking maybe theirs a website I could find that would do that better anyway though and just search for it once I find it.