Z has brought home a plate of meringues for the Sage, but he doesn’t know that yet

The Open Gardens went really well.  It rained hard in the night and at 4 am I went into the bathroom where there’s a wifi signal and checked the forecast.  It was due to clear up by 1 o’clock.  Dry in the morning, there was a sudden deluge at noon with a squally wind, but it became quite hot during the afternoon.

All the householders were very welcoming and the gardens were lovely.  Most of them are quite small so didn’t take too long to see each and then we went to the church for tea and cakes.  It might well be done again, I think a whole day would be better if possible and maybe some of us could offer to man people’s gardens for a couple of hours so that they can get round the village and see the others.

There’s a busy week coming up and I’m way behind with my blog reading.  I may take a day or two off from writing and come and visit you all and leave comments instead.  I’ve been very remiss.

By the way, I wonder if any of you can advise – my last phone contract had unlimited data, but when I went to renew in December the basic limit was going to be 500 MB.  They checked my average monthly use and it was about half that so I didn’t pay for any more.  And for the first three months, this was fine.  However in March, only a week past my renewal date I had a text to say I’d used 80% of my allowance and I had no idea why.  Since I was in India for a fortnight in early April, I got by, but it happened again the next month.  I consulted Ro and we decided that it was because I’d been downloading music onto Spotify so that I could listen to it offline – our broadband is so terribly slow that it hadn’t finished downloading and every time I put on the app it was downloading and using up my data allowance.  So I made sure that I only downloaded using wifi and am not downloading any more music and I expected to be okay this month.

I’m not.  A week after getting home, I’d used 350 out of 500 MB.  I’ve hardly used it except for downloading emails and occasionally reading a newspaper or checking the weather.  I have now turned emails to manual checking rather than push and I’ve only used 2 MB in the last day, but does anyone know why I’m suddenly using so much data, presumably on emails?  Not having used more than an average of 250 MB a month for over 2 years and now it seems that I’d be using over 1000 without really trying, I’m quite puzzled.  My usage hasn’t changed recently so it seems that something else has.  Any other smartphone users found the same thing?  I used to listen to the radio, use the map, use the internet etc and now have almost entirely stopped doing any of these because I don’t want to use up all the data I have.  I should say that one can use the internet afterwards without incurring extra charges but it is very slow.

8 comments on “Z has brought home a plate of meringues for the Sage, but he doesn’t know that yet

  1. Rog

    I had a problem last year with mapping data which is very data heavy indeed. I switched off my map tracking app and it was ok after that.
    I can’t believe your data is faster than your wifi – is there no way you could get the wifi sorted out?

    Reply
  2. Z

    No it isn’t faster I don’t think, they’re both horribly slow. I meant that Spotify tracks loaded extremely slowly with wifi so that they were automatically loading when I was out of range if I turned the programme on to listen to some music. I had an email the other day from BT offering ways of speeding up, but of course the download wouldn’t work on a Mac so I wasn’t able to see it. I’ll have to use the Sage’s laptop but I haven’t got around to it yet, I’ve been so busy.

    I do have a tracking app, Latitude, but rarely log in and since I’ve only used 2 MB in the past day and have downloaded the odd few emails to explain that, it can’t be that. I will probably have to go into the O2 shop or the Apple store and ask.

    Reply
  3. Sir Bruin

    I’m thinking of getting a smart phone next year when my current contract finishes. Looking at contracts available now, I’d decided that 500mb would be enough. I will be interested to see how this pans out.

    Reply
  4. Z

    Well, it should be – either I’ve got something using data in the background that I don’t know about or else something has changed and I don’t know what. If no one else has found the same thing then it’s my usage.

    All I have changed since finding out was to turn off push, so that must be the key. Trouble is, if one uses trial and error all my MBs will be used up by the time I track it down.

    Reply
  5. Blue Witch

    I thought these gadgets were meant to make life simpler?

    “There’s always someone looking at you,” (as the BTR said in the late 1970s) if you’ve got one. And it’s hard to find out what they’re looking at.

    Reply
  6. Z

    I think I might have cracked it, BW. And yes, I’m tracked and checked on wherever I go. Still, that’ll come in useful if I get kidnapped.

    I don’t, John – that is, I download my music and listen offline, because even when I had unlimited data, the signal around here is so poor that most of the time was spent buffering.

    Reply

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