online in a public transport bus in Berlin with a router in my pocket

I am amazed! No USB device sticking into the computer …

4G-Systems XSBoxGO – UMTS WIFI router, battery driven

product page at 4G-Systems

My new "away from home office" Internet access equipment. Certainly a lot more lightweight than an AVM FRITZ!Box 7390 or 7270, but it may do its job.
The specific requirement was "battery driven". Outside (e.g. on a bus (yes!!!), in a customer's office, in a friend's living or sleeping room – wherever I feel tempted to do something over the Internet), I don't want to deal with a UMTS USB stick attached to the notebook on my lap, instead I want to have the device anywhere in my bag or a pocket of my clothes, helping me without attracting other people's attraction to a fancy or huge device.

It's so tiny, you can easily put it "somewhere" and forget, where you left it. For the time being I will keep it in my tiny iPod cloth pocket, so that it doesn't catch a lot of scratches. Of course, I won't necessarily use them together.

Update 2011-07-01

• Wearing it in operating in a pocket is not a good idea, it needs fresh air.
• Restarting through pressing a button does not always work, removing the battery always works.

Update 2011-08-04

I tried to connect to it via WIFI again, and the SSID did not appear.

I dug into it, and I found, that WIFI was disabled. After enabling it again, all was fine.

I have no idea, how WIFI got disabled. That makes no sense to me.

my wifi access point TP-LINK TP-WA901ND

I am employing another wifi access point (that's the device, whose name I am using here in the tittle) and a different WPA encrypted wifi network (SSID) for my neighbours, and today I thought, I should have a look at it again.

I got intrigued to do a firmware upgrade on the device, not really the latest one, but one of this year, and after rebooting

1. I noticed, the "System" LED kept blinking slowly,
2. and I also couldn't access it any more.

I feared, these 2 symptoms would be related, and that made me a little nervous.

I enforced a reset by pressing the reset button for 5 seconds, and applied the settings again, that I had applied severals months ago. Everything is fine now.

The "System" LED is still blinking slowly, but the manual doesn't handle this case and I also can't notice any real problem, that this might indicate, so I simply ignore that.

Just to make sure, that my lovely neighbours do not successfully invite anybody to my wifi network by themselves, today I enabled MAC address whitelisting on that wifi network, and I added the MAC addresses of all of their computers, that I am aware of. MAC address whitelisting is not the last security feature I apply to protect myself and my own computers. I also route their IP packages through a different VLAN on a managed switch, a Netgear FS526T, but that actually belongs into a different blog article.

Actually this device is not only a wifi access point. You can also operate it in several other modes, but right now I am not in the mood to describe that.