An interesting piece on Mobitopia about the now-ubiquitousness of wifi. As the piece said, it’s one of those things that I’m starting to take for granted – it just works. I’m sat here at the dining table with a 54g card blazing away, which has completely liberated the place I choose to work. Two years ago I’d be hiding in the back room, because that’s where the ethernet is.
But I’ve not really been concious of wandering around in an electromagnetic soup until fairly recently – while I was setting up the wap for the incubator, there was half-a-dozen or so signals I picked up while I was wandering around the hallways with Netstumbler, but even though we were living in an apartment block in the centre of Leeds, there was never even so much as a sniff of any other signals. Now we’re in York, next door have obviously just bought an access point, because I was cursing the settings having picked up a strange IP address when I suddenly realised that it wasn’t my access point I was locking on to.
Presumably anyone sitting on the bench in the park outside would also be able to pick up both of our signals – part of me says quick, bolt it down, but then the other half says help yourself. It could come in useful next summer, assuming we’re still here – I quite fancy the idea of working out on the balcony once the weather gets warmer…
