I bought a little black thing that plugs into the back of my recently purchased laptop I got from The Poor Man’s Shop. This little wireless LAN will allow me to connect to a wireless network but also allow me to create a wireless network of my own, sharing all the information on both my computers as well as the external hard drive I am currently using to archive a great deal of information. I plan on setting it up the Ginger network once more stuff arrives from eBay.

On plugging in this magic black thing, it imediately brought up my neighbour’s connection which I could have logged on to and it kind of got me thinking. Theres 8 flats in my building surely one could set up a wireless network for the whole block for us all to use. That way when we split the cost, we’ll only end up paying a fraction of what we pay now. Worth more consideration I think.

I have also heard about WiFi projects going on all over the world. Central Park in NYC for example is expanding its free wireless network (Read it), ideal for when we’re over there in a few months time. My one fear when going on a long holiday is losing photographs or running out of room on the card as I do tend to take a great deal of photographs. Now with the laptop I can send the pictures home at the touch of a button without having to take time out to nip into an internet cafe or someplace - what an amazing yet scary thought. Looking around the internet it would appear that other countries are experimenting too. In Spain, domestic routers are being subsidised in a bid to turn domestic WiFi networks into public wireless hotspots (Read it) and with London playing around with similar ideas too, I doubt it’ll long before the cities in this country all become free wireless areas.