Fry’s can be a dangerous place. Wi-Fi hardware is getting very affordable these days – in fact, Lisa’s laptop had it built in already.  (At the VFP DevCon in Palm Desert there was a local Wi-Fi net that Lisa probably could have tapped into, had we thought about it.)

So, what with our moving around with our notebook computers more than ever, we decided to add our own little Wi-Fi cloud to the neighborhood. After we set up the hub in our closet, we sat down with our laptops and – in my case – plugged in the wireless PC Card, and started installing the driver and scanning for networks.

Interestingly, it seems our neighbours to the East next door also have a wireless network, because the net scanner in Windows XP shows three available networks: “default”, “Spacefold”, and “hishamay”. We’re pretty sure “hishamay” is next door. “default” may be a new one, or it might be Toni and Linda across the road who also have a wireless hub. “Spacefold” is us of course.

It’s all rather exciting. We’re using MAC filtering rather than WEP for security, if anyone cares.