After drilling a hole in the wall, my electrician informs me he does not think we’ll get that cat-5 all the way down to the basement. That’s not what I wanted to hear…
Perhaps it’s time… Yes, time for us to enter the early 2000’s and actually look into wifi. The first thing we realized was that prices have dropped. Quite a bit. I mean, that Linksys WAP11 that cost well over $100 three years ago can be found on ebay now for around $30. So I actually got one, plugged it into the old router, and had a wireless network. (Well, after screwing around with Virtual PC, which sucks, but such is going the cheap route.) Of course it did me no good…
See, none of the dozen or so computers strewn throughout the house had wifi adapters. Since I was going the auction route, my plan was to get another Linksys WAP11 and connect them ala wireless bridging. Because I wanted to match the hardware rev for compatibility reasons, and not pay a lot of money (I’m cheap, remember?) I bid on a few, but did not win any… then along comes Other World Computing, and Belkin.
Other World Computing had this Belkin 802.11b Wireless USB Network Adapter on sales for $19.00. Did I mention I’m cheap? Well, I am, but this was a bargain! Cheaper than the Linksys WET11‘s I found on ebay, and it says it works on Mac OS X 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and even Mac OS 9.2 and something called Windows! This wireless thing just might catch on.
So now we’ve got a wireless access point, and an actual wifi adapter so that we can connect to that access point… It’s all so very exciting, isn’t it! Oh, just wait until Wifi Adventure #2 for more crazy 802.11b madness!