So our apartment complex recently has had terrestrial cable installed. This has brought along all sorts of great things, including hd tv, digital phone service (whoopty-doo!) and high speed internet. Since I’m currently locked into a contract with a satelite provider (and that’s a whole other story all together), I didn’t have the option to add high speed internet to my apartment. So with this propagation of high speed internet in the apartment complex has come numerous people with unprotected wireless internet beaming out for the whole world to see and use. My PowerBook has some not-so-great antennas built in (but they sure do look pretty), so I can only pick these signals up when sitting next to my sliding glass door. On top of that, I’d constantly lose the connection whenever the wind blew or someone walked between my computer and the AP.

A side note about unprotected internet: I’m convinced that using someone else’s unprotected internet is completely legal and moral, provided you do not degrade the service of the subscriber or cause any sort of harm to his or her equipment. With the speeds available today (3 Meg service is really, really beefy), using a bit of unused bandwidth to surf the web, check email or download a torrent or two will cause absolutely no noticeable effect on their service.

So to solve this wireless issue I had on my hands, I headed to the internet to build a wireless repeater. A quick agooglin’ brought me to find out about this great wireless router: Linksys WRT54G. The WRT54G is a run-of-the-mill wireless router running Linksys’ own factory firmware. But the cool thing is that its system is open source, meaning that people are free to write their own firmware to run on the same router, offering all sorts of new features. DD-WRT is one of many such projects out there that offers a great little tool called “client mode”, which allows the ROUTER to pick up internet wirelessly and spit it out of the wired ports on its back.

So four hours, four firmware flashings, and plenty of Google searches later I ended up with a router running the full version of DD-WRT. I brought it home, and hooked it up to pick up the weak wireless network near my door, put my old wireless router next to it and hooked them together to re-beam the same wireless network, under a new name. Now I’ve got full reception of this new signal and can surf anywhere in my apartment!