Very brief/drafty blog post coming to you from the Clare public library.
I’m just about to set off for an afternoon bike ride down the reisling trail armed with a bottle of red, an iPod touch, Nokia N80 pencil and paper. Tried to connect to the wifi in the motel where we stayed and was confronted with a login screen for ‘NomadNet’ – complete with instructions to simply re-wire my outgoing SMTP server to mail.bigpond.com if I want to send e/mail and to make sure I disable any popup blockers in my ‘computer browser’. You can guess the level of confidence this gives me for frutifull access on my iPod touch and nokia N80.
Hence, I set out to find a library and see if they had free public wifi. Sooooo close, no cigar! After finding the library and pushing thru several unfriendly looking doors, I found a reception desk and was greeted with a friendly smile. When asking about internet access I was told – sure grab one of those compters and go for it. If there is nobody around in 1 hour keep going, otherwise let others use the computer. (there are at least 4 in view). Asking further about wireless internet for my iPod, the officer pointed to the ceiling and said there ya go. Excitedly I connected to the ‘Public-Library-RF’ ssid which was gloriously free of ye-olde padlock. But alas, nothing worked so I asked if there was a process. 10 minutes (and no cash) later, I was armed with a ‘LINK’ card bearing the url www.lowernorthlibrarylink.sa.gov.au and my username ‘c17.x0187928337′ to which I added my password (the slack 4 letter one + 01). Fired up safari on my iPod touch and sure enough I was presented with a government looking web-page with a TON OF SEVERE WARNINGS – scary!! Un-peturbed, I tapped in my username (are they upper or lower case letters? – and O or 0 ??) and password and viola! I was in. – Allegedly I can repeat this process for any library in SA. Jumped on to twitter, updated e/mail from my 3 accounts and sucked down a cache full of NewsGator RSS feeds.
Then I got adventurous and tried to login in my Nokia N80 – impossibly small font but pressed on and – success. Back to the iPod to update twitter ‘Captive portal session expired (or you logged in from another window). Please load a new web page to log in. There you have it kiddies – what would seem to be a reasonable error check to a programmer turns out to be a pain in the arse to a travelling wilberry with two portable wifi devices. And this is my point – if it ain’t free it aint free.
http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=internode&u=
1 response so far ↓
1
Declan Brennan
// Sep 18, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Isn’t this just an issue of not being able to connect from two devices simultaneously?
The card is for one address on their network. Makes sense as far as resource planning goes.
If you went to Hertz, hired a car, drove off in it. Then returned and tried to drive off in another, you would get more than an error message. (try a criminal conviction!).
Only difference here is that you did it for free.
If somebody was handing out free t-shirts on the corner, you would be happy getting one, and not complain when they said, “one each, mate!”
Ps: The card was free, go and get another if you must! (or disconnect/release the first device)
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