Turn Your Laptop into a Hotspot

Happy National Wi-Fi Week!

Actually, it’s not really a national thing yet, but here at berryjooks headquarters we like to kick off the summer vacation season by celebrating those little invisible radio waves that bring us all of that Internet goodness we crave when we’re unplugged and roaming.

We’re going to share a couple of tips with you this week, and we’re going to start with something simple, wirelessly sharing a single Internet connection between multiple computers.

There are two types of Wi-Fi connections; infrastructure and ad-hoc. An infrastructure connection is when you connect to the Internet via a Wi-Fi enabled router or a WAP (Wireless Access Point). An ad-hoc connection is a peer to peer (laptop to laptop) wireless connection that runs solely over the laptop’s Wi-Fi radios, no external hardware is involved. This can be a great tool for file sharing amongst a group when there’s no network available, or if there is a wired Internet connection available, you can take it a step further and enable Internet sharing on one of the laptops and use it as a WAP or Hotspot.

I had a friend ask how to set this up at their vacation cottage the other day, and rather than try to give them a tutorial, I did a quick Google search and found the excellent video below on CNET. It walks you through set up on Windows XP, Vista and Mac OSX, and it even discusses how some PC’s are set to shut down their radios when a wired connection is present and how to get around this.

Note: This video was made before the release of Windows 7, but the Vista instructions will work for 7 also.



Pretty neat, huh?

That's it for now. Later this week I’m going to show you how you can dumb down wireless routers and use them as WAPs to increase your wireless coverage in a large home or office, so stay tuned!

Weekend Mashup

Check out the Buzz Report on CNET. Molly Wood is very good. I especially like the out takes from her tech reviews.

To effect the quality of the day is no small achievement. I got this in a fortune cookie recently and it made such an impression on me that I googled it. Seems like its a very common fortune as I found quite a few blogs and websites where people were referring to finding it. I also found that it's a subtle variation of a Henry David Thoreau quote: "It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day--that is the highest of arts." Here's the thing. I like the quote because I've found that there is hardly anything more rewarding than changing the quality of someones day. For the better, that is.

Brady and Manning have a shot at the same record this week. Being the first QB to beat all 31 opponents. Brett Favre has a shot at it next week. Also, both the Pats and Colts will be trying to remain undefeated.

Daisuke Matsuzaka ( 松坂 大輔 ) is on the mound for the Sox tonight in Colorado and I think he's going to give us another good outing. I saw a press conference with him today and he said that after holding a replica of the World Series trophy he's anxious to hoist the real thing. Could be just the motivation he needs. We'll see...

Go Sox, Go Pats!

That is all.