For those of us who with a very poor quality ADSL connection and NBN still years in the future, mobile data has seemed like a tempting alternative. Price has been the sole limiting factor -- running to $10 per gigabyte. A recent package released by Optus represents a dramatic improvement in affordability. Home users in approved areas can now sign up for a $80 per month plan that gives users 200Gb of data. If this trend continues, landlines might be a thing of the past, even for power users. And NBN will find itself up against competitors with much lower infrastructure costs.
Takeout Your Google Data
As the self-appointed organiser of the world's data, it makes sense that Google/Alphabet would have good data management tools for its users. And thankfully, it does, the form of Google Takeout. Anything users do on Google (photos, gmail, youtube, drive, fit, plus, etc) can be exported. Google's bots prepare your data and then email download links, or transfer the files to a linked service such as Dropbox. Download sizes can run into the multi-gigabytes.
Ending the Year on an Optimistic Note
While parts of the world have endured a litany of horrors, 2015 was (perhaps surprisingly) the best year in history for the average human. Multiple indicators (income, health equality, life expectancy) continue to trend upwards. Many challenges remain, but the world in general is far from the dystopia suggested by disaster-biased news services.