7:20 PM: SMS Recieved:
You up for some late nite wireless leeching?
The obvious answer was yes. As it happened, TC had stumbled across an "open" Wireless Access Point. Narually, his first course of action was to SMS us.
So, there we are at 10:30 PM, sitting in the back of a 4x4, leeching at 330kb/s .. What more could we ask?
12:15 AM: A laptop starts beeping.
Of course, the problem with leeching over wireless, using laptops, is battery life.
1. Laptop + Wireless == short battery life.
2. + Azureus (download program) == even shorter life.
Azureus, a bittorrent client, has the annoying habit of using 100% of available CPU. Any of you who have a laptop will know battery life is inversely proportinal to CPU usage.
Backup plan: We'd cleverly brought an inverter.
Problem: Inverter only has one powerpoint. And at this stage, all our batteries were hovering about the 20 mins left mark (They tend to automatically shut down around the 10 minute mark). As you can see, we were getting desperate.
Ingeneous plan: Get on IRC, see if Rob's awake!... And, of course, he was.... It went something along the lines of
"Rooobbb!! We need a powerboarddd!!!"
Problem: Rob doesn't have a car, and lives 40 mins walk away.
12:30 PM: All laptops dead. It's about this point we decide to go and pick up rob.
Okay, back in the car, and we have a powerboard.
Now, mason's laptop could power a small ethiopian city.
It has two batteries, two hard disks, and two jet fants on the back for cooling. Not taking any of this into consideration, we hook all our laptops up to the powerboard (which is connected to the inverter, to the cigarette lighter in the car).
All's fine.. for about 30 seconds, at which point, it seemed the 4x4 had died. Lights went off, music went off, and almost more importantly, laptops stopped charging. Yep you guessed it, we'd blown a fuse. Turns out the ciggy lighter is "protected" by a 15A fuse. (Don't worry his car still started, and there's spare fuses in the fuse-box). But that said, we weren't willing to attempt that again.
Plan B: Run around the area looking for powerpoints. Because everyone has powerpoints on the outside of their buildings... right?
The things we do for bandwidth....