Today was a two-döner day

Yes, I really did have two döners today. Rumors of frequent-döner-eater cards were confirmed, so I proudly acquired my first stamp and chomped beamingly upon my tasty döner as I strolled downtownwards.

Jesse was along for the trip, as I’d let him know that I’d found word of a 60€ router for sale somewhere downtown. It’s indeed fairly cheap for a router, especially in this city, it seems, but the real clincher was that it was Linksys and so therefore it was entirely open source. This is a very good thing.

Its being open source meant that I was able to take the thing home and flash the firmware on it with an open source alternative, enabling quite sophisticated functionality for a user-grade router. Specifically, I was able to plunk the thing down next to my window and tell it to act as a bridge between my computer and the signal broadcast from the university building 50 meters across the courtyard over which my balcony looks.

This stuff is really, really freaking badass. Check out this article for a brief rundown of neat stuff you can do with it.

So, in short, I have internet now. I’ve dropped once so far from the connection, but that’s in about an hour of use. I usually get disconnected around once every five to ten minutes, so things are looking awesome so far. And by tinkering with the position of the router, I should be able to find a spot with a decent signal. It’s made easy by the dynamically updating “signal strength” graph on the client bridge setup page in the router software. Thumbs up!