Last time I wrote about becoming a broadbandless household for a while. Since then I have set up the Nanobridge permanently, in that it is located in a different room of the house, and is cabled back to the main network switch in a very neat and tidy way. This involved a lot of work to put its cable through a wall and the back of the kitchen cabinets. The bonus was being able to aim it properly and get a much stronger, and therefore faster, signal.
For my data plan I got a Vodem set up with a tablet share SIM onto a Windows 10 computer that isn’t used for anything else much except playing music videos. The Vodem plugs into a USB port on this computer and I decided to install the Windows 10 apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. As compared with the ideas I have had about running Instagram in an Android emulator under Windows, the native app for Windows 10 works very well but doesn’t allow posting. Since RemixOS has its share of issues and I haven’t been much bothered with attempting to get it working properly, I have just stuck with reading Instagram on the PC and doing posting with a phone or tablet – because you can compose a post in advance using Google Docs and then paste it on the phone or tablet – instead of having to type it on the handheld.
So on Windows 10 everything looks really good on this computer. The best thing about plugging in a Vodem is that everything that uses network traffic in the background on the computer stops when it is connected. So it doesn’t suck up my data. Windows 10 is clever enough to realise I don’t have a lot of data to play with on a cellular connection. Actually I burned through my phone data allocation without realising it the first time I tethered one of my computers to my phone because Google Drive was running and I didn’t know it was going to download a whole lot of stuff onto my computer. So that was 5 GB gone in just a few minutes. The answer to that on Wifi (which is what a tether looks like to a computer, which can’t tell the connection is different from regular Wifi) is to set the Wifi connection as a metered network. That works in a similar way to limit unnecessary traffic on the connection.