A Hotel Wifi Hack

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AVc/~3/253719935/a-hotel-wifi-ha.html

For those who haven't been following me on twitter or my tumblog or friendfeed, I am on vacation with my family in Hawaii.

Our hotel offers wifi, but no ethernet option, in the rooms. It's $11/day for seven days, or a total of $77 for hotel wifi for the week we are here. Not terrible, but what about the fact that all five of us have laptops and want to use them this week? $385 for the week for internet for the family is not an option.

So I came up with this cool hack that I though I'd share with all of you who might find yourself in the same situation. We signed up the Gotham Gal's macbook to the hotel wifi. Then we shared that connection via ethernet using the sharing feature in system preferences. Here's a sreen shot of my laptop's sharing options:

You can share a lot of resources on a mac, but in this case, you only need to share Internet and you need to share it via Ethernet.

Then I pulled out our trusty Airport Express which you can buy for $99. I never travel without it. It has come in handy so many times.

I connected the Gotham Gal's macbook ethernet port to the AIrport Express' ethernet port and we now have open wifi for everyone on our two hotel rooms.

It works great. The only thing is we can't disconnect Gotham Gal's laptop or turn it off or put it to sleep. Everyone is happy. Which is a good thing on a family vacation.