Writing with no Ethernet and sketchy WiFi

One thing I hate about writing on the $15 Laptop (currently using OpenBSD, but it really doesn't matter what OS I'm using) is that I don't have Ethernet. My sole means of connectivity is WiFi via an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card.

Don't get me wrong, the Orinoco card works great. It's just that we have no WiFi at the Daily News, nor does it seem like we will get it. I also don't have WiFi working at home. My Netgear router does output 802.11b, but that portion of the router stopped working quite some time ago, and I'm in no hurry to get a new router, although maybe I should be.

Even though it might not have a whole lot of basis in fact, there's something about having a 2.4 GHz wireless connection running 24/7 a couple of feet from my head (which is where the router currently sits -- right next to the bed).

On my old Netgear router, you couldn't switch off WiFi and only use Ethernet, so I just unscrewed the antenna, and perhaps that helped kill the transmitter. Perhaps not, but at any event, it's dead.

A newer router would no doubt enable me to switch the radio on and off, so I wouldn't have to leave the WiFi running all the time. I should probably do that.

In the absence of my own WiFi, yes, I've been piggybacking on my neighbors' WiFi connections. I live near quite a few apartment buildings and condos, and there are quite a few routers putting out signals. None of them is particularly strong. At least none of the ones that are wide open to all users are particularly strong, to be more accurate.

So sometimes I can hit a signal, sometimes not. And I'm not in the habit of doing a lot of major blogging at home. I've got "other things" to do at home. And most don't involve blogging, which I pretty much confine to the other times in my day/week/month.

As a result, entries often languish on this laptop until I can get them posted to the blog. That's probably not the worst thing. It's better than all the entries I've written in notebooks and then superseded by writing an actual entry in the blogging interface, effectively doubling my work, albeit in a very time-shifted sort of way.

Maybe once a week or so I need to take this laptop to the library, where WiFi is free and oh-so-strong, to post these entries.

Or I could just get a PCMCIA Ethernet card ...