fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog » 2006

YouTube vs. Blip.tv March 31, 2006

A bit off topic, but might be interesting anyways. I am into videoblogging lately and generally we want to visualize more thru video than images here on fontastic.org. That's why I uploaded the 2 short videos seen in one of my last posts. As I am a big fan of blip.tv I used their platform which I think is really great. So far I had only used it with vlogs made on a Mac (iMovie) and this worked fine. The short .avi clips of the Fon box, though, did not work well on blip.tv. As a backup I also use to try YouTube and this worked just fine. Now you find the updated post below and the links should work. The overall quality of YouTube is not as good as blip.tv but at least for .avi files I would recommend YouTube for the time being.

FON movement around the world

It's amazing, we have been online for just a couple of hours and even in Germany another FON blog picked us up. It is great to be a part of this exiting community. We will try to add all of you to our link list in the sidebar. Just comment here and introduce yourselves.

PS: we also encourage FON users from all over the world to comment here and let the world know what you think about FON and free WiFi. Just like Gerhard from fonblog.de. Germany Wir sprechen auch Deutsch und deutsche Blogger sind immer herzlich willkommen! Spain Tambien damos la bienvenida a todos los bloggers españoles que quieran formar parte de nuestra/vuestra 'fontastic(a)' comunidad.

The FON box arrived - we are foneros! March 30, 2006

Hey, what a day! After only 10 days or so the Linksys WRT54GL router arrived. We ordered it on the fon.com website for $25 plus shipping (a little over $30 total). That's about half the price of retail. The only catch is that you are obliged to run a FON hotspot for a year which is something you want to do anyways, right? So no problem here (you might want to check what your ISP says about sharing WiFi, though). See what's in the box here.

Set-up and installation was a breeze. You can actually logon for a limited time as a registered fonero even without being an active fonero (you would be an Alien). Anyways, we wanted the more advanced firmware to play around with it and after all the good things we read about BrainSlayer and DD-WRT. So we downloaded the FONadvanced firmware from the homepage and flashed the software to the router. This is definitely not for everyone as there is no step by step guide. You actually follow the DD-WRT online guide but they speak about a bunch of different versions of firmware (with more or fewer features) but not about FONadvanced. This said, you may want to only do it you are sure dealing with a failed update. Refer to the forum above, there is a how-to-guide in case something went wrong.The new firmware is really super cool! We made a little experiment and walked all the way across our office (about 100 feet away from the router). There we placed a laptop and ran NetStumbler. We changed the routers output power from the default 28mW to 200mW (you can do even more) and almost doubled the signal strength. It's really great what you can do with the router running the FONadvanced software! More about our learnings to follow shortly but here is another short video.

Clip 1: Quicktime stream

Clip 2: Quicktime stream

Hello free WiFi world, hello FON! March 27, 2006

Welcome to fontastic.org. Hey, you say, yet another WiFi blog? Yes and no. Yes, this is a blog all about (free) WiFi but we are more than that. We are foneros and fontasticos! We love the free WiFi movement which has gained quite a bit of momentum since FON has started their initiative four, five months ago. FON is Spanish free WiFi company, financially supported by Google and Skype (simplified). They offer you a membership whereby one can access free Wifi everywhere in exchange of offering your own hotspot to the community of foneros. To get there, you either download a piece of software to put on your router or you order a router from fon.com. We have done the latter and will share our experience with you. But wait, there is more: we also want to help spreading the word faster and offer a free blog for everyone. Sign-up now our check back soon, we are currently preparing our server.