Wednesday, September 15, 2004
After a short hiatus, I am back with more silly adventures in domestic geekery.
Been running the Dialogue Flybook for a while and it has worked beautifully. Get sidelong looks wherever I take it, as it is quite... well, unique. Especially when I turn it lengthways to run it in tablet mode.
What can I say, I am a show-off sometimes.
However, the wi-fi antenna has been bugging me. I get great reception in Starbuckses and train stations but for some reason I drop signals a lot in Surbiton. This bothers me especially as I have found a great deal of APs while on my sole wardriving expedition up and down Maple Road. There's a fantastic mesh setup in the area which my house is just outside the coverage of...
So, it was off to Google a solution, and I found this amazing Poor Man's Wi-fi. Apparently the wifi revolution has inspired thousands of alpha geeks who were born 20 years too late for Ham Radio. This is especially poignant because my dad was ONE OF THOSE HAM RADIO GEEKS.
* * *
When I was a kid my dad had a mild attack of radiofreakery, and we had a 20m antenna affixed to the top of our modest house in Lagro. (If I remember correctly, it was kept steady by guy ropes down to our water tank / pump) My dad had the whole shebang, down to radio units in our car so we could radio in when the garage doors had to be opened. (In the philippines, there were no electric garage door openers, instead there were maids...)
Work on the growing radio mast was stopped when my dad fell twenty feet from the top of the antenna, through our kitchen roof and into the bodega, suffering a mild heart attack in the process.
* * *
If my luck in Ebay holds, then I will have just bought a Wifi "kit" with a router and two USB adaptors. I'll use one to build a Chinese Cooking Scoop Antenna and the other for Van to use in her IBM laptop. More on this later (if I win the auction)...
Been running the Dialogue Flybook for a while and it has worked beautifully. Get sidelong looks wherever I take it, as it is quite... well, unique. Especially when I turn it lengthways to run it in tablet mode.
What can I say, I am a show-off sometimes.
However, the wi-fi antenna has been bugging me. I get great reception in Starbuckses and train stations but for some reason I drop signals a lot in Surbiton. This bothers me especially as I have found a great deal of APs while on my sole wardriving expedition up and down Maple Road. There's a fantastic mesh setup in the area which my house is just outside the coverage of...
So, it was off to Google a solution, and I found this amazing Poor Man's Wi-fi. Apparently the wifi revolution has inspired thousands of alpha geeks who were born 20 years too late for Ham Radio. This is especially poignant because my dad was ONE OF THOSE HAM RADIO GEEKS.
* * *
When I was a kid my dad had a mild attack of radiofreakery, and we had a 20m antenna affixed to the top of our modest house in Lagro. (If I remember correctly, it was kept steady by guy ropes down to our water tank / pump) My dad had the whole shebang, down to radio units in our car so we could radio in when the garage doors had to be opened. (In the philippines, there were no electric garage door openers, instead there were maids...)
Work on the growing radio mast was stopped when my dad fell twenty feet from the top of the antenna, through our kitchen roof and into the bodega, suffering a mild heart attack in the process.
* * *
If my luck in Ebay holds, then I will have just bought a Wifi "kit" with a router and two USB adaptors. I'll use one to build a Chinese Cooking Scoop Antenna and the other for Van to use in her IBM laptop. More on this later (if I win the auction)...
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