Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Hell I live pretty close to a large city and don't have fiber optics, at least not right to my house. Probably another few years away at least, maybe more. I assume the cable company may use some from wherever the head end is. Fiber optic or cable company service speeds are comparable. But many are still not within reach of either of these, which means either capped monthly data amounts from satellite internet providers or capped monthly data amounts from cell tower internet providers.
Verizon is capped at 5 Gigs. My husband and I share the connection so we get 2 1/2 Gigs each. Videos and those Google live maps gobble the allotted MBs like crazy. We had Hughes Satellite before Verizon and it was the pits. That company practiced Fapping rather than capping. They may as well have capped because once fapped the connection got so slow sites would time out. I don't know why anyone would assume everyone had access to fiberoptics or even affordable unlimited-downloads with any wireless company.
Quote:
Sprint 4G is supposedly not capped, but the rural availability is not good. I saw one called Zing, this probably just uses Sprint 4G, not sure. Over $100 for an unlimited connection. I'm paying about $50 for a moderately fast cable connection. I don't even know how fast it is right now oddly enough; Comcast has kept the rate the same but upped the speed a number of times.
Neither Sprint or Comcast are available where I live.
Quote:
All that said, the camera (which is where we started with this diversion) would not be using bandwidth 100% of the time; it would only use it when something was actually logged in. I have a camera. One of the better features is that it senses motion and emails still pictures which are rather small and not bandwidth hogging. Even if I log in and look at the live video feed, well, I don't really know how much data that uses but if it's only for a minute then it isn't much.
The cameras can be panned around remotely if you get that kind, but for leaving it set for a while one good place to point it would be the water or food bowl. Also any favorite sleeping spot (but my cat chooses from too many spots), or even, yes, in the general direction of the litter box. Not to see what the cat is doing in there but just somewhere to catch the motion that will inevitably happen when the cat walks to or from these places.
Don't you have to leave your PC on and online to connect remotely from somewhere else to see the cam? What happens when the connection is dropped as happens quite often with Verizon? It doesn't auto-connect. Someone has to be at your home to reconnect to the net. They may as well feed the kitties and scoop the pan while there.....
I leave her alone 11 hours a day and all weekend. I still have trouble figuring out what danger she is in that i can stop.
Maybe you don't have anything in your apartment a cat can get into. I had one trapped behind a nightstand and one who snagged his claw in a tightly woven carpet. His screams brought us running. He was hysterical trying to free his claw. As my husband held him still, I unsnagged his claw. Had we not been home he would have screamed and hung there until we got back. He also got a claw snagged in the carpet on one of the cat trees.
Quote:
Other than the house burning down her biggest danger is that something will wake her up.
So she sleeps 24/7/365. She doesn't sound like a healthy happy cat to me.
Quote:
Those that have to hover around their cat arent pet owners...they are substituting an animal for a child...which you do have to watch constantly
So not leaving a cat alone for days means their owners are "hovering" around them and sees them as substitute children?
I couldn't possibly leave Sushi, the Soul-Sucking Servant of Satan, alone for extended periods of time. Even when I go to work, he gets bored and starts redecorating. He'll drag all the little throw rugs from upstairs and jam them under the couch. Once I came home to find the potato basket empty, with a single potato carefully placed on every available chair and seating surface. He steals stuff from the kitchen and buries it in closets. He's even figured out how to open the very complicated butter dish, and licks all the butter out. I thought I was losing my mind at one point. "I could have SWORN I replaced the butter in that dish. Maybe I was mistaken."
You have to wonder what goes on in their furry little heads. I've bought him every toy under the sun....he ignores them all.
LMAO. Thanks for the chuckle.
How on earth does he carry the potatoes onto the chairs?
My cat can work a doorknob, but yours is truly talented!
Don't you have to leave your PC on and online to connect remotely from somewhere else to see the cam? What happens when the connection is dropped as happens quite often with Verizon? It doesn't auto-connect. Someone has to be at your home to reconnect to the net. They may as well feed the kitties and scoop the pan while there.....
Nah, the cam is a standalone network device, no computer required. Connects via WiFi, although you do need a wired ethernet connection to set it up initially. (I just plugged it right into my laptop I think rather than the home network, I can't remember.) If the connection isn't reliable though, that's a problem. If it has a sort of shutdown sometimes that can be gotten around, although with a cell-based connection it's probably not well-designed for incoming traffic anyway.
Sounds like you must have left for the sticks before the advent of broadband? When you're just a little closer to population centers you really do get reliable always-on internet connection via a wire of some kind. (I say that because honestly you do seem to be repeatedly amazed by this fact. Seriously, you need to consider moving back to some civilization! ) I assume there is nothing that the local landline telephone company offers? The only other person I know who lives that rural (and know enough about their internet connection) has satellite from Wild Blue unless he's changed something recently. The sat has data caps too but higher caps than cell at similar price points. My house is almost rural here, but the area is dense enough to have cable TV. All cable TV providers do internet these days. I also can get DSL from the phone company (which is Verizon) but not their fiber optic FIOS product.
Anyway, the camera cost $80 or $90. I only have one but I thought of getting a second. Now with what's going on I'm thinking of getting a dedicated outdoor unit. The stupid things we do for cats....
Nah, the cam is a standalone network device, no computer required. Connects via WiFi, although you do need a wired ethernet connection to set it up initially. (I just plugged it right into my laptop I think rather than the home network, I can't remember.) If the connection isn't reliable though, that's a problem. If it has a sort of shutdown sometimes that can be gotten around, although with a cell-based connection it's probably not well-designed for incoming traffic anyway.
We've never once had a reliable connection. We started with dial-up in 1996.
Quote:
Sounds like you must have left for the sticks before the advent of broadband?
Yes, we left town for the countryside in 1992.
Quote:
When you're just a little closer to population centers you really do get reliable always-on internet connection via a wire of some kind. (I say that because honestly you do seem to be repeatedly amazed by this fact. Seriously, you need to consider moving back to some civilization! ) I assume there is nothing that the local landline telephone company offers?
Nothing! The telephone company offers nothing where I live. The only choices are Satellite PC or Verizon wireless at this time. There is a small private company that offers dial-up that's so slow webpages time-out.
Quote:
The only other person I know who lives that rural (and know enough about their internet connection) has satellite from Wild Blue unless he's changed something recently. The sat has data caps too but higher caps than cell at similar price points. My house is almost rural here, but the area is dense enough to have cable TV. All cable TV providers do internet these days. I also can get DSL from the phone company (which is Verizon) but not their fiber optic FIOS product.
We also had Wild Blue for awhile. No caps but fapping was worse. It was no better than Hughes net. And service with both was lost when it rained or snowed or there was heavy cloud cover. We still had to pay even if there was no service due to these atmospheric conditions.
Quote:
Anyway, the camera cost $80 or $90. I only have one but I thought of getting a second. Now with what's going on I'm thinking of getting a dedicated outdoor unit. The stupid things we do for cats....
Good grief! Think what it would cost someone like me with all the rooms in my house. One or two or even three would be useless.
How on earth does he carry the potatoes onto the chairs?
My cat can work a doorknob, but yours is truly talented!
This beast learned to work the doorknob a long time ago. I've lived here a long time, and it's the first time I've actually had to lock the front door. I suppose it's only a matter of time before he takes the keys out of my purse and lets himself out. Or takes the car for a spin.
Truth be told, they weren't large potatoes, but still! Who does that?
He has a plethora of shiny toys, furry toys, catnip toys, feathered toys and glittery balls, but he wants to play with food. If I'm making breakfast and can't find the bread or English muffins, I have to go searching behind the furniture or under the couch. If I'm lucky, he will have left me a gnawed-up crust or two. He always acts like he's starving, and I can't leave food unattended for a second. He can't be hungry...he weighs 20 pounds. Tonks are solid, with dense muscle mass, and I can barely lift him.
(Yes, I had him checked out at the vet. He's healthy.)
Last week he stole a bag of sesame seeds and was using it to play hackysack, gleefully throwing the bag up into the air and slashing it with his claws on the way down. Seeds were raining down everywhere! Do you have any idea how hard it is to clean up sesame seeds? They were lodged in the pages of books and even in the petals of a vase of pink tulips. I wish he would play with his toys.
This beast learned to work the doorknob a long time ago. I've lived here a long time, and it's the first time I've actually had to lock the front door. I suppose it's only a matter of time before he takes the keys out of my purse and lets himself out. Or takes the car for a spin.
Truth be told, they weren't large potatoes, but still! Who does that?
He has a plethora of shiny toys, furry toys, catnip toys, feathered toys and glittery balls, but he wants to play with food. If I'm making breakfast and can't find the bread or English muffins, I have to go searching behind the furniture or under the couch. If I'm lucky, he will have left me a gnawed-up crust or two. He always acts like he's starving, and I can't leave food unattended for a second. He can't be hungry...he weighs 20 pounds. Tonks are solid, with dense muscle mass, and I can barely lift him.
(Yes, I had him checked out at the vet. He's healthy.)
Last week he stole a bag of sesame seeds and was using it to play hackysack, gleefully throwing the bag up into the air and slashing it with his claws on the way down. Seeds were raining down everywhere! Do you have any idea how hard it is to clean up sesame seeds? They were lodged in the pages of books and even in the petals of a vase of pink tulips. I wish he would play with his toys.
Your cat is awesome. I mean...I know it's a pain...but it's so entertaining, right?? My guy is like this too. Acts like he needs to eat all the time and comes after our food...if he doesn't want to eat it, he'll be happy to play with it. If there is anything in a bag, anywhere (even if not food) he will try and tear it apart, drag it off, etc. I have been woken at night to the sound of plastic bag being demolished and had to go find out what someone had left lying around that the cat was now into. On top of that, we store the grocery bags (that I use for lots of things) in the bottom floor level of our pantry, which has a proper door the cat hasn't yet figured out how to open. But he is able to snake his paw underneath of it and has succeeded in snagging out plastic bags to play with in the past. I need to move them...I really don't want him shredding bags all over the place, and I'm sure that bits of plastic aren't healthy for him to eat (not that he does this on purpose...but in the process of demolition, you never know.)
The potato thing cracked me up.
Weirdest thing Nimbus has done so far has to be the socks. He spent a night stealing socks from my son's room and piling them very neatly in the middle of the floor in the basement. There was the most perfect pyramid of white socks there...
Nimbus likes his toys, but he destroys them pretty fast. In particular he finds it important to remove the bells from any toy with a bell...
We have left our cats overnight before and what I do is put several bowls of food and water in different areas of the house so they have more than one source for nourishment.
I do the same. I also put some canned food in bowls and freeze it ahead of time and then take it out when I'm leaving. Usually I leave them way too much and a lot of it is still sitting there when I get home, but I'd rather leave too much than not enough.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Seriously, you need to consider moving back to some civilization! 
