Phil online

This carputer is wireless. On the internet, anyway. I have a WiFi antenna mounted under the dash where it gets a remarkably good signal in my garage.

It also gets pretty good reception at coffe bars, restaurants and hotels that offer free internet. There are a few places that list intentionally-free and for-fee WiFi “hotspots” online. I’ve tried a few with pretty good results. It’s pretty sweet to be surfing the web in the parking lot at lunch sometimes, downloading email, installing new programs to try out.

I’ve been experimenting with roaming internet. I stumbled upon NetStumbler the other day. (Actually, I downloaded it while parked at the Hilton in Duluth.) It’s a program that scans for WiFi access points (APs) and logs their details. It apparently will also log their location via the GPS antenna, but I haven’t made any use of that yet. It does play nice midi tones whose pitch indicates the strength of the signal. I drove across town listening to all the WiFi APs calling out to me in sweet harmony from various shops and neighborhoods. Pretty cool!

Last week I was in a neighborhood houseshopping. The sign in front of the house didn’t have any “Take One” info sheets, but it did have a web address. So I drove down the street a ways until I got a hotspot, logged on, and looked up the house online. I even got to do a virtual tour inside the house, sitting in the street in front of it. How cool is that?

I’ve since found out that this sort of thing is probably illegal. Of course, I called the owner of that hotspot to apologize for using his services without permission and to point him to some resources that will help him secure his AP. It turned out that I didn’t interrupt any life-critical internet usage of his own, and he didn’t feel the need to prosecute me for this little theft of service.

Meanwhile, my AP is wide open. I think I’ll add a 2nd WiFi AP outside the firewall to let others surf for free without exposing my local network. Maybe we should make up an SSID that indicates an intentionally-free WiFi AP…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2004 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Carputer. 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.