Bloghoggers might have noticed I’m a few posts behind. Reason for that are some time-intensive "real world issues" that have the nerve to cobble up my cyberpipes
and have kept me away from my very important digital social life. A
shame I know ! Even with the Blackberry offering at least some lifeline
to my mailbox there is still a gap between the digital world and the
"other one". So i bit the bullet and marched into the phone shop to get
me one of those 3G usb thingamajigs that I can hook up to my laptop(s). " But WHY Knightwise ? " I hear you scream. Are there not enough hotspots, open wifi routers and stray Ethernet
ports available to make sure you are ALWAYS connected ? Good point.
That is true .. most of the time. Except at those very situation where
they are NOT THERE and you simply cannot get online. For that very
scenario I have picked up this little stick. A fallback scenario to
cling to whenwar-driving fails to get me anywhere. When I’m in the middle of the forest somewhere in the south of Belgium and feel the urge to upload some pictures. When i’m in the waiting room of the dentist but am unable to hack into his wireless router to post the tweet that i’m dreading the needle. Stuff like that. As for the price it was pretty cheap. 69 euros for the modem (i could have gotten a used on online coming to think of it) and the fee is 5 euros
a month + 1 euro for every day you log in ( so no matter how many times
you log in at one given day , you pay one euro per day). Since this is
an occasional lifeline that we can use when in desperate need of of a
WAN ip, its not going to be something we need to use everyday. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the speed. Installation on Windows was a breeze (the application and drivers were stored on the modem-stick) For our Macbook Pro I had to download the drivers from the Mobistar website (our phone provider) and for my Ubuntu–linux netbook, I found a great how-to
that pointed me to two .deb files that I downloaded and installed and I
was good to go ! 🙂 Awesome ! It took an upgrade of my version of Firefox
to get it all working smoothly , but still I feel much better knowing
that I have a "last line of connectivity" in my briefcase should I run
into a situation where I would need such a thing. So pretty soon i’ll be IRC’ing over an SSH connection while sitting on a patch of moss in the Belgian Ardennes ! Or i’ll launch a cronjob on some remote system in Canada as I use logmein to program my Mac to record a Tv show at home. In short ? I am omnipresent !