Verizon Peak Minutes Hack
After an unpleasantly large Verizon Wireless bill arrived this morning, I decided to write a program to let me know if I’m burning too many peak minutes in a given month. If you run this script daily (as a cron job, for instance) it will let you know if you’ve gone over a preset threshhold, either by email, or by writing a message to a file (my RSS reader, feedonfeeds is hacked to display the contents of that file), or both.
If you wanted to, you could even set the email address to your vtext.com address, so the program would send you an SMS message if you went over. (You might want to run the program less often in that case, because SMS messages are billable.)
This sort of thing would be trivially easy to build into the phone, but that would interfere with the business models of cell phone carriers – don’t hold your breath.