I was stupid and didn’t keep track of my downloads this month, resulting in a ’shaped’ (slowed to 64kbps) internet connection. It would have been easier to keep my sanity if there wasn’t a certain someone in my household constantly using the voice chat feature of Live Messenger. That voice chat seems to take all the crippled bandwidth for itself and doesn’t let anyone basically do anything on the internet. Unless you count 5 minutes to load CNET News ‘using the internet’.

So, I went in search of alternative internet connections, in the form of wifi access points. It was the last day before the end of the month (when my download limit resets), so I wasn’t going to bother cracking someone’s wireless encryption. But luckily I found a new unencrypted wifi access point with my laptop. The only place I could get a connection was near the front window of the house, with the laptop raised above my head.

So I shut down my spare computer which was running linux hosting all this web goodness, put an XP hard drive and wifi pci card in it, put it on top of a chest of drawers in that room and connected it to the wired network.

I wish I had taken a photo of this; it looked ridiculous. The computer at the window with no screen, and a huge stack of books on top of it with an antenna sitting at the top.

I used VNC to remotely configure the XP machine and set up a proxy server on it so I could use my neighbour’s wireless from my computer out the back. Unfortuneately, after all this effort it turned out that my neighbour appeared to have gone over his/her download limit also and their internet was no faster than mine.

I could have taken the time sans internet to catch up on some HSC study, but I instead elected to do something I hadn’t done in a few months and watch commercial TV for more than 10 minutes.

Tags: waste of time, wireless

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.