Yawwwwwwn

[altivo]

Can't stay awake any longer.

Nanowrimo word count: 45472 words (1823 today)
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Story draft available here.

Not even halfway through the story I need to tell, and already approaching 50K. It doesn't have half the funnies and jokes I intended, either. I can see this is a long term project.

OK, a question for the computer folks. I know next to nothing about wireless networking, never having had occasion to use it at all. I picked up a little device very cheaply that can function as a tiny netbook, complete with wireless connection, stripped down Linux operating system, and up to 2GB of solid state "disk" storage on a SD chip. I haven't had the best of luck getting connections with it, however. We have no wifi in our house, obviously. Neither does the library where I work. Yesterday, though, we went to lunch in Woodstock where there is free, open wifi advertised on the square and inside the restaurant. It could see the network, identified it as "Open" using the same SSID that is listed on all the signs in the area, but failed to connect even after repeated attempts. Then we stopped at the Woodstock Public Library because Gary want to get some audiobooks, and the gadget did connect easily and immediately to the wifi there. Why can it connect to one open link yet not to another? Repeated this test again today as we passed through Woodstock with the same results. Successful connection at the library, failure on the square.

Comments

[moonhare]

It is possible that their router was malfunctioning. If other customers are having no problem connecting at the shop I would bite the bullet and play clueless, asking someone there why it won't connect.

I updated our six laptops last week to automatically connect to our wireless. Four of them were no problem, but the last two wouldn't connect until I reset my wireless router. Voodoo... these are all cloned off of one system, and should be 'equal,' but the two just refused to do anything.

[altivo]

I think Far has the answer below. The router expects some sort of "I accept" cookie to be created through a browser when it presents a terms of use document. Since the Z2 has no web browser, it can't comply.

[moonhare]

Interesting, and not something I've had to deal with. I wonder if that would that make an iPod or iPad incompatible if not using Safari or would Applications like Echophone or BBC News supply said info?

We have a patron or so a day come to the desk and ask why they can't connect. They usually tell me that they can connect at home or at the local bistro, but even entering our password doesn't help them here. I hate to touch patrons' pc's but sometimes we can luck our way through things.

[altivo]

Well, as I said, I'm far from knowledgeable about wireless protocols. I can tell you that they aren't simple, and that there have been dozens of revisions, upgrades, and added "security" features since the concept was first introduced. This makes it likely that older software or hardware could have trouble making connections to newer routers that have all the latest security features enabled and will not "step back" for compatibility with the older stuff. Encryption levels keep increasing as the hackers find ways to break them, so if a router only accepts, say, 256 bit encryption and the user's device can only handle 128 bit, you get no connection or some other spurious error message.

I have avoided wireless networking for a lot of reasons, and this is one of them. The earlier devices were also prone to radiate a lot of radio noise on frequencies other than the ones they were designed to use. That seems to have been reduced considerably in recent designs. There are also health concerns with microwave exposure, though of course the industry laughs at them. Historically, those who make money from a technology always insist it is safe, but sometimes this turns out not to be so with long or frequent exposure. The history of x-rays is enough to show us the validity of this concern.

It's clear that our new director is bound and determined to have wireless in the library, whether I'm willing to support it or not. In self defense, I'm going to have to learn about it even though I refuse to spend my time debugging it. I know she's been talking to the same outside technical consultant who manages the wireless system in Woodstock (where I just succeeded in using this little toy.)

[farthing]

Might be that there's some kind of captive portal thingie in use there too, which somehow gets lost in the process. Usually it should route the user to a web page which either asks for password or presents the access policy rules for the hotspot.

[altivo]

That's an interesting thought. I don't think this thing has a web browser in it at the moment, though I can add a simple one. The only documentation provided for the public hotspot on the square is posters hung around that say "Free WIFI on the Woodstock Square. Connect to WAVTEK_HOTSPOT" followed by some fine print about who is paying for it, essentially a group of merchants in the area.

The gadget is a Zipit Z2. They were marketed as IM and Texting devices that weren't cell phones and therefore required no cell phone contract. The idea was good, the timing was bad because cheap sell/cell phones and pay as you go plans hit the marketplace just a few months later. Now the Z2 can be had for pocket change. It's a stripped down Linux system running on an ARM processor. Includes wifi networking, USB (if you can find the weird connector needed) and serial port (if you open the box and solder a connector to the right pads on the board.) There's an MP3 player, a Jpeg viewer, and an IM client that also sends SMS provided onboard. The IM client does AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. It has a 320x240 color backlit LCD, rechargable battery (3 or 4 hours depending on usage and display brightness settings,) and a full QWERTY keyboard (that is very tiny.) The whole thing is about the size of an older clamshell phone. If you jailbreak it you can run Debian or Ubuntu on it. Or you can boot it from an SD chip without jailbreaking if you accept some limitations on hardware drivers.

I bought it for $10 out of curiosity, and I'm still curious. It seems to have a lot of potential for such a tiny, inexpensive device. I had been thinking about a Linux-based netbook but they have suddenly become very hard to find.

[farthing]

Yeah, I guess that it then... found this with that SSID:
"WavTeK HotSpots will work with any computer with 802.11b that supports DHCP and has a web browser that allows cookies."

Curious little device though, that would be a fun machine to tinker with. Been wondering about those tablet machines, mostly for reading PDFs, but they're still hovering on the 300 euro mark. Price is certainly nice for that Z2.

[altivo]

Ah. It never occurred to me that WAVTEK_HOTSPOT might be a generic name. So it's built on the false but unsurprising assumption that one always uses an internet connection in order to browse the web. Dumb, but I guess that's typical these days. Probably I can make it work once I get a Mini-SD loaded up with the right additional software pieces.

Yes, the price is right. I got this one for $10 plus postage off EBay. Various sellers have been offering them for that price if you hunt around a bit. I've seen them listed at valexonline.com for the same price. If you look for one, probably you shouldn't pay more than about 25-30 euro for it. There's a lot of information on the web about hacking the things, how to add connections for the serial port, where to get the connector and how to wire it for USB, how to jailbreak them, etc. The cross-development environment is available for download, too, but it's huge. About 10 GB so I haven't gone that far. Probably I'm not going to develop code for it at that level.

Using it as a cheap (very cheap) netbook is almost practical. I'll not be writing the next novel on that keyboard though. I guess you can add bluetooth and use a real keyboard and even a real monitor if you insist, but that sort of defeats the pocket sized portable aspect.

[farthing]

Wavtek seems to be pretty local to McHenry county, rare to find something with a unique name these days anyways. The website doesn't mention anything further about the web page thing, but it's pretty skimpy on information anyway.

I guess those captive portals tend to be a bit troublesome for other devices as well, don't really see the reason why to use them at all. Might be easy for entering the password, but wouldn't help with security at all, especially with the latest Facebook account hijackings. Leaky tech for leaky websites. :-)

[altivo]

Yup, you've got it figured out. Wavtek is actually a computer service group based in upstairs offices facing the square. It looks like they originally had some idea of offering wifi for a subscription fee, but they gave that up and switched their test location over to free usage.

My bet is that they didn't remove the "captive" feature from the thing, so you still have to agree to terms of service through a browser. I'll find out eventually, as I intend to add the enhanced software to this Z2 by booting from SD memory. Trouble is, it requires a "Mini SD" and those are hard to find. I've mail ordered a couple, but they won't come for a few days yet.

[hrrunka]

It's possible (I guess) that there's a WEP/WPA/WPA2 type issue. I've got an old laptop (running Ubuntu) and it needs a WEP access point. It sees but can't connect to WPA ones.

[altivo]

See my reply to Far above for details on the hardware. In this case it's not WEP/WPA. I can view a list of the detected networks at any given location and they are clearly marked with "Open" or "WEP" or "WPA" or "WPA2". The device understands secured nodes and if you try to connect to one of them it prompts for the passphrase or key. I'm getting errors from some supposedly "Open" nodes, where it tries to connect and then reports "Failed to join..." or "Unknown error from..." or occasionally "DNS error on..." I thought perhaps the firmware was obsolete or the individual device was batty but it works like a champ at the public library, so that's not it. Documentation, as you might expect from such an inexpensive gadget intended as a teen toy, is nearly non-existent. I suppose it's possible that the signal isn't strong enough to make it happy, or the signal it transmits isn't strong enough to make the node happy. I wasn't paying attention to the signal strength indicator but it does have one that shows from zero to four bars in the style of cell phones.