I used to have a Linksys Travel Router that I’d bring with me on trips. It was one I’d bought on eBay and had loaded special 3rd party firmware (dd-wrt) onto it. But it became unreliable. So naturally, I bought another one. But this time I decided not to complicate my life by changing the firmware on it.
Well, this is now the first trip where I’m wanting to use it, and I was immediately reminded why I’d bothered with the alternative firmware in the first place: the original Linksys firmware had a nifty feature that let the router connect to one wifi network, but then offer a different one for its clients. That means that you don’t have to start connecting to new wifi nets on all your devices. Only the router needs to connect to the new one, and everything else connects to it. Problem is, the Linksys firmware only let you connect to open networks. So at some point I’ll have to invest the hours and anxiety to see if I can put better firmware on it.
Our apartment was not advertised as having internet access, so I was anticipating having to find the occasional coffee shop (*not* hard to find here!) to stop in at and catch up on email, etc. Thankfully, it was just an oversight in the listing, because our phones, set to Airplane mode, are basically glorified iPods here in Canada, unless we want to pay roaming charges. Going without makes you realize how much we take for granted, and also how possible it is to do without.