stickershock
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Sticker Shock drives home the reality of price inflation
If you're one of those who lament that things cost a lot more now than they did five, 10 or 50 years ago, you can keep track of exactly how much your costs have changed using Sticker Shock. Create lists of items you commonly use or pay for, like a gallon of milk or your electricity bill, and then track its cost over time by adding different price points. You can break it down into a graph or a running list of changes. It's a good supplement to your budget if you want to predict how much costs could change in the immediate future, but it's also a useful app for journalists and researchers who crunch this sort of data on a regular basis. Sticker Shock is US$1.99 on the App Store.
Data usage sticker shock: How I learned to freak out when my daughter used my iPhone 3GS
I tend to be a pretty light data user. As the chart here shows, my monthly data consumption rarely exceeds the 200 MB mark. After all the events of this week, with AT&T announcing its new, and quite limited, data plans I decided to hop over to my iPhone account page and see how I was doing in terms of overall consumption. What I discovered over there shocked me. After month after month of limited data use, my June numbers (actually starting May 23rd) were through the roof; about 3GB to date. It didn't take me long to figure out why: it's because for the last few weeks my teenage daughter and I have been stopping by Starbucks in the evening. I play my Mother's Day gift of Field Runners on the iPad while my daughter has been surfing the 'net on the iPhone. We chat, we zone, we compute. Add to that, I've also been letting her surf while we run errands in the car.
