Sure, I can stay connected with better signal farther from my own access point. And when on the road, it's easier to find an open network to use. But now I have a new problem: sometimes the laptop sees the neighbor's network before mine, and automatically connects to that. If I'm just at home surfing the net, that's really not so bad. But if I'm trying to communicate between the laptop and the rest of my home network, that's a no-go. And even worse is when I'm not physically at home, but connected in from somewhere else (like at work). When the laptop connects to the neighbor's network, it's effectively inaccessible until I get back home. I feel helpless!
Of course, I could set it up to only connect to known, trusted networks. Then it would always ignore the neighbor's network and wait for mine to show up. But I don't want that. In the rare event that it gets lost or stolen, I want it to connect to any available wireless network and phone home. I have a little script that'll snap a picture of the thief using the built-in camera and send that, along with a screenshot, every 5 minutes.
So here I sit, away from home, after having remotely rebooted the laptop, unable to access it because again it connected to the neighbor's network. I know this because even when not stolen, my script still checks in with my webserver every 5 minutes. The last several pings came from a different IP address than mine. And I have no way in!
Why do I care? Because all day I've been using the laptop's built-in camera to capture images of the dogs which will be used to put together a time-lapse movie of what bad things they did today. The details of this are the subject of another blog post.
(bad dog, looking for things to chew!)
(hi, cat!)
Since the reboot, they could be destroying or peeing on everything in sight, and I won't know until I get home! Give me my crappy wireless back.
