Last week my little brother had a bit of a delimma, one that he knew could only be solved by yours truly. After a quick diagnosis it was quite apparent that this man was having severe video game withdrawal and needed to pwn some n00bs as soon as possible. I quickly instructed him that Half Life 2 bundled with Counter Strike: Source was his best bet for relieving himself of this ailment, so forty dollars and two hours later he's at his house installing Half Life 2. Unfortunately, he couldn't get Steam to connect and authenticate his install, so I came over to help troubleshoot and lend moral support. So begins the events that would lead up to the design and construction of The Ghettotenna.

First thing I noticed was that he could browse the web just fine, it was only Steam that couldn't get out. Actually the first thing I noticed was that his computer was littered with spyware, but that's a different post all together. Second thing I noticed was that his wifi connection was on the rather Piss-Poor end of the spectrum. Thinking the signal strength may be the cause for this sketchy behavior, I set out to boost his reception to see if it would solve the problem.

Luckily, he was using one those USB wifi fobs on a cord for his wifi adaptor. Being the genius I am, and having read quite a bit about people boosting wifi signals with chinese wok utensils and Pringles cans, I knew I could whip up a ghetto solution in no time flat. Here is where we enter the meat of this post and the explanation of that weird ass piece of crap up there.

I start calling out to my brother for materials: Scissors, check. Shoe Box, check. Aluminum foil, check. Tape. Tape. Tape? No go on the tape so I quickly raid his closet and find a pristine box of Band-Aids. I won't let this mission be grounded by a simple missing ingredient, so I throw all my materials (and the Band-Aids) together in a pile and get to work.

First, I take the lid to the shoe box and cut the angled lip off the edges so that it's just a flat piece of cardboard a little larger than a standard sheet of paper. Next I wrap said sheet of cardboard multiple times in aluminum foil and tape Band-Aid it in place. Now that I have my signal reflecting surface, I roll in into a half-circle and tape Band-Aid one of the strips I cut off in step one across the opening to make it retain its shape. Once all of this was assembled I taped Band-Aided the adaptor to the shape-retaining strip of cardboard so that it would be in the dead center of the semi circle.

Here's a diagram of where my thought processes were going with this. The black represents the semi-circular reflector, the grey spot is the adaptor, and the green represents magic wifi signals that I can't actually prove exist. Or bounce off aluminum. Or remotely resemble crappy green dotted lines. Click on it to get a larger picture of it. Yeah, I know. Drink in its beauty.

With everything together, I plugged it in, pointed the open end of it in the general direction of the access point, and BAM! His signal shot from "Low" to hovering between "Very Good" and "Excellent"(a two to three bar jump on a five bar scale). Once my brother's roommate witnessed this, he sprang into action, his movements a blur of Band-Aids and aluminum foil.

This story is not without heartbreak, unfortunately. As anyone well versed in wifi knows, a low signal, as long as it is steady and doesn't fluctuate, is perfectly fine and doesn't interfere with connectivity at all. He still couldn't get Steam to connect, and it wasn't until I got his neighbor's router login info did I realize what the problem was. Someone had filtered a handful of ports that, for reasons unknown, included the ports that Steam uses to communicate on. So our story ends on a high note, our hero is rewarded with a higher wifi signal and unadulterated n00b pwnage.

PS. For anyone interested, Jason modeled and rendered the beautiful image up there in Blender, an open source 3D Studio Max alternative. Here are examples of the source materials I gave him to base his model off of:

I feel sorry for all those people that threw thousands down the toilet for an engineering degree. Some people are just born with it, holmes.