I'm not an addict, honest guv

[julesjones]

watervole and I went into Poole yesterday, the better to do some shopping. In the course of said shopping I acquired a half-price generic laptop power supply from Maplins. It is big and heavy and not as sexy as my Thinkpad's own power supply, but it does enable me to turn the laptop on without thinking "only three and a half hours of use until I get a power supply". Alas, it transpires that waveney has set the Chez Waveney wifi network to a high channel, that it might be invisible to passing American laptops, and cannot work out how to tell my American laptop to use a Euro-channel. So I have my own machine back, but only for offline use. If I want net access, I have to steal watervole's machine. I am peeved. How can I work without constant access to Google?

I'm not actually that desperate to sit down and start writing the next book, but I did have some overdue paperwork to do on the last one, and it would be convenient to have my own machine online to do so. I'll just have to resort to dial-up to shove out my Demon email and suck down the incoming. The intended work on putting more of my fanfic and my zines online will have to wait. Either that, or I drop stuff onto the USB drive and transfer it to watervole's box.

Comments

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

Nowhere you can plug in an ethernet cable? Bah!

[julesjones]

Nowhere that doesn't involve "laptop" being rather more literal than I'm willing to put up with for longer than it takes to dial in and grab my email. I'm not sure where the router actually is at the moment, but I do know that it is not within easy plugging-in distance of any table it is possible to put the laptop on without having to evict a desktop first. Cables would have to be trailed across halls, and possibly down stairs. Always assuming that there's a spare port on it.

Having done some digging around, it appears that this is in fact a region-coding type problem -- the firmware knows that it is a US machine and tells the software that it's only allowed to use US channels. It is possible to bypass this by hand-editing the drivers, but not easily and not without risk to the wifi unit. *Stupid* bloody idea in a machine specifically designed to be used when travelling...

The solution is probably going to involve telling waveney that he has to change his router settings, so that I can sit at the lounge table and gossip with watervole while I'm dropping fanfic into Googlepages. But I'll let watervole do that. :-)