• by Ryan , September 10, 2009

I recently moved to a new house… same town, same zip code… only about 7 blocks from my old house, really. But the house is much larger than my old one, and I’ve now got two roommates, one of which is quite knowledgeable about web programming, networks, and computers, in general.

So why is this worth writing about? Because I now get to bask in the glory of the home network my roommate set up in the house.

It’s fantastic: we have 3 desktop computers (with probably a combined 2 or 3 TB of storage) connected to the wireless router. I can now access anything on anyone’s computer (usually video content) via my laptop downstairs.

I know this isn’t really new technology or anything. And I think it was fairly easy to set up. I think all my roommate did was hook the computers to the router (which was going to happen anyway), played around with a few sharing/privacy settings, and started connecting wirelessly from his laptop.

It’s become a huge convenience for me, in addition to remotely accessing content. I can download large files on my laptop, and quickly and easily dump them on my desktop without having to use an external drive as an intermediary.

And oh yeah, my tech-savvy roommate (let’s call him “Micah”) also took an old FireWire external drive of mine that had burned up ports and installed it in my desktop, giving me an extra 200 GB that was, for a while, inaccessible. So in turn, I’ve been able to free up a lot of space on my laptop and my other two external drives.

So in summation… tech-savvy roommates = good. Go get one.

Oh and by the way, he’s also a cool dude to hang out with, as well.