Review: FreedomPop’s free 4G Hotspot

by nc on October 4, 2012 · 7 comments

A FreedomPop Hotspot

I heard about FreedomPop’s new service offering on the radio the other day. Basically, you pay a deposit for a USB or HotSpot device, and they will give you 500mb of free data on that device each month. More data is reasonably priced, and if you ever want to get rid of it, you can send it back and they will refund your deposit. I decided to try it out. If you’re interested in hearing how it went, read on!

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Schecter C-1 Guitar

Repairing a Schecter guitar, and finding a nice surprise

August 5, 2011

So I was practicing on one of my guitars (a Schecter C-1), and all the sudden the amp started buzzing like crazy, and I couldn’t hear any output from the pickups. I realized that I had just shifted, and that the cable had shifted on the guitar’s jack.. so I unplugged it, and saw that [...]

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What not to do when having a baby…

Thumbnail image for What not to do when having a baby… March 9, 2011

(Note: Not geek-related in any way, shape, or form. Enjoy! Alternate title — “How chicken became my mortal enemy”) On Sunday, March 6, our second boy was born! His name is Joshua Xavier Carlson, and I may be a bit biased, but I think he’s a cutie. ;) We’re all doing great.. but that’s not [...]

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Thumbnail image for How CVS lost my business

How CVS lost my business

March 9, 2011

CVS Pharmacy just managed to lose any chance of my future business without me ever actually walking through their doors.

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XenServer Networking: VLANs and MAC broadcast packets

December 27, 2010
Citrix Logo

I recently ran into an issue with newer versions of XenServer that had me really really confused. I recently moved a VM that is acting as a router from a XenServer 5.0 machine to a XenServer 5.6 machine. This machine runs both OSPF and a DHCP server on top of VLAN interfaces in XenServer, and [...]

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Music | The meaning behind the song “Lucy” by Skillet

November 22, 2010
Thumbnail of John L. Cooper talking about his song

If you’ve been a fan of Skillet within the last few years, you’ve probably heard their song Lucy from their album Awake. The song is extremely emotional, and it seems that it immediately resonates with many, many people (I know that it sure did for me.) At previous concerts, and interviews, John Cooper (who is [...]

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For Kinley, from TobyMac

November 18, 2010
Thumbnail image for For Kinley, from TobyMac

Yup, this post has nothing to do with geekery, and is not humorous or anything like my usual posts. It’s a serious post, and involves religion. If this bothers you, please move on. My wife and I went to a Skillet/TobyMac double-headliner concert at the Target Center on November 13 with some friends. The show [...]

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An essential tool in the kitchen.. a blowtorch?

October 22, 2010
Thumbnail of my kitchen blowtorch

One purchase I regret making is a cruddy little ‘brulee torch’ – underpowered, expensive, and just not worth it. It made its way to the trash can a long time ago. I took Alton Brown’s advice and picked up a real torch. At the hardware store.

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To my Grandpa Norm..

October 16, 2010
Grandpa Norm (Thumbnail)

A letter to my Grandpa Norm, who passed away on October 16, 2009.

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Configuring IPMP on NexentaStor 3

September 10, 2010
Thumbnail image for Configuring IPMP on NexentaStor 3

At my day job, we have recently started rolling out NexentaStor 3 for our VM image storage as a trial. If all goes well, our long-term plans are to eventually migrate all storage from Netapp to NexentaStor. As we started rolling out our NexentaStor trial, one missing feature we quickly ran across is the lack [...]

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I think I found a fellow geek..

August 27, 2010
Thumbnail image for I think I found a fellow geek..

I was walking the dogs this morning, and ran across this car up the street.. Minnesota license plate ’1RQ’.. I don’t know anything that this could mean besides ‘IRQ’.. a rather geeky concept.. what d’ya think? Is there another meaning? Inquiring minds and all!

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AT&T Captivate (Samsung Galaxy S) Thumbnail

Android: AT&T Captivate’s wifi networking is broken

August 27, 2010

I’ve finally made the switch from Windows Mobile to Android by way of an AT&T Captivate (which is one of the many Samsung Galaxy S phones.) So far, I’ve been fairly happy – app selection is good, it’s great to have the ability to tinker on it (no, have not rooted it or flashed a [...]

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LSI command-line utility for SAS2 non-RAID controllers

August 23, 2010

If you are using a LSI Logic 92xx (ie, 9211-8i, 9211-4i, 9200-16e, etc) SAS2 controller for your OpenSolaris or NexentaStor storage machine (Solaris-based distributions use the mpt_sas driver for these), you may have had trouble finding the utilities to manage it from a command line (this is useful to force a rescan, bus reset, blink [...]

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HDR photography – around the house and vices

August 21, 2010
Thumbnail image for HDR photography – around the house and vices

I recently posted the results of my first attempts at HDR photography. Since then, I’ve been craving more – what can I say, it’s fun! I had some time to myself at home tonight, so I found some random items and, well, took pictures of them. For better or worse, most of this collection should [...]

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Playing around with HDR Photography

August 19, 2010
Stillwater Lift Bridge in HDR

My wife and I recently took a quick overnight trip to Stillwater, MN for our anniversary. We came out of the Dock Cafe right around dusk, and I saw some opportunities for some pictures that I thought could be cool, but knew that a single standard exposure would not capture the reality of what is [...]

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One of the best company slogans I have ever seen

Garbage truck with a great slogan July 3, 2010

I was driving to work the other day, and spotted this garbage truck with the best company slogan I’ve ever seen.. The slogan on the garbage truck is “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Double Your Trash Back”.

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Lots of rain in a short period of time != good roads

June 25, 2010
Pizza guy's car stuck in the water

A friend of ours was having a engagement party up in New Hope, MN tonight (June 25 2010).. we knew the weather was going to be kind of nasty, but we figured that Tiff’s parents live about four miles from our friend’s house, so Kai could be with a babysitter nearby, and decided that we’d [...]

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Woofdah has a new location!

May 15, 2010
Woofdah's logo on their new building

Our pups (Chimo and Oakley) have been going to Woofdah for a couple years now.. we tried a few different doggy daycares in the Minneapolis area, and this is by far the best one we have found (which is also conveniently located near us in Burnsville.) The staff actually gets to know our dogs, and [...]

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Fun with cameras and Photoshop..

May 8, 2010
Sampler image for this photoblog page

Technology never ceases to amaze me. It’s been a long time since I attempted to stitch images together; last time was probably five years ago and the results were.. mediocre. While I was in the process of writing the post about eliminating the smoke odor in our new 2009 Mercury Sable, I wanted to toss [...]

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Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays

May 7, 2010
SuperMicro SC847 Thumbnail

[Or "my quest for the ultimate home-brew storage array."] At my day job, we use a variety of storage solutions based on the type of data we’re hosting. Over the last year, we have started to deploy SuperMicro-based hardware with OpenSolaris and ZFS for storage of some classes of data. The systems we have built [...]

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Kind of stating the obvious..

Kind of stating the obvious - license plate 'A RED CAR' April 28, 2010

..but I can dig it. (License plate: ‘A RED CAR’. On a red car. A red Honda Civic to be specific.)

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