If you travel internationally for business, and you have an iPhone, you can expect to be paying quite a bit for the right.

AT&T, the lone carrier of the popular phone in the United States, announced new plans this week for those users who travel internationally.  The new plans run $120 a month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. AT&T sees this is a bargain as under the old plans, a 3-minute video on YouTube, approximately 2 mb, would have run a customer $40, so this should seem like a bargain to some. Mind you, these amounts are on top of your normal fees, so this could get quite expensive very quickly.

If you are only traveling for one month, there is another small hitch in that you can not pre-arrange a cut off date for the service, so you have to contact them as soon as you are done traveling so that they will turn off the service and stop charging you for it.  If you forget to inform them, or are a day late (they have said they won’t prorate), then you pay for another month.

This is one of those situations where it shows how lack of competition is a bad thing.  The locked in exclusivity to AT&T through 2010 keeps people such as myself away from it, no matter how much I desire having one of these devices.

The Internet can be used for any number of purposes, and getting information on pending storms is just one of them.

You can look up just about anything online these days, and detailed information to prepare for a natural disaster is no different.  With Hurricane Gustav preparing to hit the United States, there are any number of places to get information that may be important to people in the path of the storm, or those who have loved ones in the line of fire.

General

Flickr.com -Popular photo sharing site that allows you to tag your photos with keywords, making it easy to see images associated with Gustav.

Google Earth Overlay – The popular Google Earth tool for looking at satellite imagery of the world from Google has an overlay that shows you the path of Gustav.  The data is updated every 10 minutes.

Technorati.com – The leading blog index aggregates entries from thousands of blogs and makes it easy to look up those tagged with Gustav.

Twitter.com – People can mark messages related to Gustav with #gustav, and then using a tool such as Twemes.com, you can see all the messages being posted about it.  You can also follow GustavAlerts for automatic alerts from the weather services.

YouTube – People will be posting videos of the hurricane and it’s aftermath as it happens.

Information Resources

FEMA.gov -The Federal Emergency Management Agency site in case it is needed once the storm has passed.

Gustav Information Center – A quickly assembled social network on the Ning network is laboring to bring you information.

RedCross.org – If you are in the path of the storm, the Red Cross can tell you where to go, and if you just want to assist with donations, their site can help you with that also.

Weather Sites

AccuWeather.com – Hurricane center on AccuWeather.com has numerous maps and projections.

Intellicast.com – Has a wide assortment of maps specific to winds, precipitation, storm tracks and more.

MyFoxHurricane.com – A sub-site of the Fox affiliate station in Tampa provides lots of information on incoming storms.

Weather.com – The website of the Weather Channel has detailed analysis and maps.

Weather.gov – The official website of the National Weather Service.

WeatherBug.com – A popular desktop client for weather information offers information on their site and mobile devices.

WeatherUnderground.com – The popular weather site has a page set up dedicated to maps and projections of where the hurrican will land and with how much force.

The largest Internet service provider (ISP) in the USA, Comcast, is set to begin capping bandwidth usage of their residential customers effective October 1st.

The ISP is going to cap bandwidth for their residential customers at 250 gb a month.  This would be the equivalent of 125 standard definition movies, or 50 million emails.  In other words, about 99% of their customers will never come close to that amount of bandwidth in a month.  For those that do use that much, if you go over for one month they will call and warn you, if you go over twice in six month period, you will be banned for 1 year from the provider.

They say this new policy has been enacted to make sure all customers have a pleasant Internet surfing experience, but the truth is that they just don’t want to build more infrastucture to handle additional Internet demands.  More and more devices in our home are demanding Internet usage, and by Comcast capping the bandwidth, they are essentially saying that all that has to stop.  Well, welcome to the 21st century, it’s only going to get worse.

Pretty much everywhere in the world offers faster Internet speeds than we do, with unlimited usage and at a lower price than we charge in the USA.  Something is not right here, and it’s time to tell the ISPs how wrong they are getting this and they are essentially going backwards.

The news that the International Space Station (ISS) has been infected witha c omputer virus pretty much tells you that no one is safe from these annoyances.

Luckily the virus that made it to the space station this past July, Gammima.AG, is directed at only stealing login information for popular online games, and poses no threat to the operation of the station.  The laptops that are infected are not networked to the station, but unfrotunately that is no Internet connection for them to be sent to the station, so they will have to wait until the next mission in November.

This just goes to show that any one has the potential of catching a virus, no matter how many safeguards they have in place.  Apparently these laptops had been cleared before they left for the station, but it seems the virus may have gotten on them via an infected flash drive.  No matter how much you may trust a source, you should always be aware that everything is potentially a virus and handle it with care until you are sure.

Soon your TV will be getting media directly from the Internet, and the world will be a happier place.

The other day we mentioned Voter Registration Comes To The Xbox that you could now register to vote via the Xbox 360, and how we felt this was a sign of things becoming more interconnected and interactive.  Well, now comes news that Samsung, the world’s largest electronics maker, is abotu to unveil TVs that plug into your Internet connection to deliver information around whatever television show you are watching.

Besides these televisions being high definition, they will also deliver information via RSS, see the weather, get stock quotes and more.  Within 5 years, Samsung sees even regular content being delivered in this way, so that interconected world may not be all that far away.

We have already seen it in DVD players, placeshifting equipment, video game systems and more, TVs were the next logical step, and it seems that time has arrived.

What is a “stumble”, and why should you care?

Just like when we explained What Is Digg and What Is Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon is one of those sites people talk about, but never really explain to anyone.  At the core of Stumble, as most fans call it, it is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save sites to your account with reviews and tags.

The social aspect kicks in as lets say you tagged something with “how-to”, and someone comes to Stumble and searches on that term.  Once they see the results, they will see your page marked with that tag, allowing people to discover new sites they’ve possibly never visited before.  The more a site gets stumbled, the better chance of it being discovered, so website owners love it when you Stumble something they’ve written.

If you choose to start using StumbleUpon, which I highly recommend, you download the StumbleUpon Toolbar so you have quick access to adding sites.  If the site is already in their database, all you will have to do is push the thumbs up to add it to your account, and if it isn’t already int here you will only need to fill out a bit of info to add it.

So give it a shot and start finding pages you never knew about!

In a truly odd move, Microsoft has arranged with Rock the Vote to allow people to register to vote via their Xbox 360 gaming units.

While I have mixed personal feelings on this, as I wrote on my personal blog today in an entry called Xbox 360 And Rock The Vote Team Up, I do think it is an interesting sign of things to come.  While many have theorized we will be able to someday vote from our homes, I think that day is still a long ways off, but this is certianly a tiny step in that direction.

I see it as the first of many tiny steps to more and more parts of our life becoming automated.  Imagine a world where you no longer have to go renew your license in person, pay your cable bill from your gaming console by pushign “A” and so on.

This will probably be happening more and more, but that doesn’t necessairly mean it’s a good thing.  I worry about potential fraud and evil doing, but only time will tell what happens for sure.  Until then, prepare yourself for many more things like this to happen in the years to come.

I’m in the middle of doing some major rearranging of my electronic gear in my family room, and a lot of this involves running the electrical cords again so that they make more sense.

The house is 23-years-old, and we are in severe need of more outlets.  We did wire the house pretty heavily, so running power strips isn’t a problem for us, but if you are going to do it in your own home, do check out how heavy your wiring is before you try running too much through any given outlet.

Going with this in mind, there are two things I have been looking for in power strips, and luckily it seems I am now the only one who wants new features.  Most important is surge protection in case of storms, and second is the ability to rearrange the plugs somewhat because of all the various cords I have to deal with.  Nothing is more frustrating that losing an outlet due to the cord in the next plug being too fat.  As luck would have it, there are more coming out that pivot, extend, rotate and more to meet that very demand.

Again, I stress to make sure you aren’t running more juice than your house can safely handle, but if you need, and can, run a power strip, make sure it has a surge protector built in, the moving parts is just a nice bonus.

The Kindle, the popular ebook reader from Amazon may be coming to college and university classrooms near you.

According to a story on Seattle PI, Amazon is designing a new Kindle that will be optimized for use with text books.  The college text book industry generates over $5.5 billion in revenue annually, and 95% of the books are offered in an ebook format already, but there has been no optimal reader for them. The new Kindle will supposedly be bigger, making it more suited to the text book format.

This hopefully will come to be as this will cut down on the amount of paper consumed, but it could also kill the used textbook industry in minutes as no one will have anything to sell any more.  If the book companies were smart, they would sell the Kindles at a greatly subsidized price, the current versions sell for $395,  like cell phone companies do, and lock the students in to a contract with them for their future book purchases.

The thing I fear the most is we won’t see any reduction in the price for the texts though they will be highly more profitable for the publishers.  The chances of that being passed on to the consumers is slim to none, but you can always hope.

Will it actually take off?  Only time will tell, but having lugged around giant textbooks, nothing would have made me happier to have something the size of the Kindle to carry around instead.

As we told you in the post “When To Purchase Electronics“, the electronics companies tend to drop their prices just before the holidays, and it looks like Microsoft is going down this familiar road with their popular Xbox 360 gaming platform.

Rumors are circulating everywhere that the Arcade pack, the cheapest of the Xbox 360 bundles, will be dropping in price to $199 with a larger focus on being a family friendly version of the system.  This is viewed to be a direct attack on Nintendo’s Wii system, but seeing as you still can’t find a Wii on a store’s shelves, it’s a bit one sided of a fight.

This drop is expected to happen in September, right in time for the key holiday shopping season, so it seems the usual theory of pending price drops is going to hold true.  Keep holding out on those major purchases, the price drops do appear to be on their way.