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I have office internet (cat 5 ethernet for the win) and so does the rest of the office, but the wifi has refused to connect to me for literally ages, not just my 22.04LTS Ubuntu but also to my phone which does wifi at home just fine. I feel like the wifi thing is fucked, but M's husband who "likes computers" and used to work for us back when we had the ISP (ended in 2007) set up the wifi thing and is "in charge" of it even though we don't pay him or anything. He says the wifi thing is "fine" and that my weird ass computer is the issue. Whatever. Anyway, for #reasons I am stuck with the existing wifi thing which has always been kind of unhappy about connecting to ubuntu machines and even relatively weird about connecting to android phones. Fucking Netgear.

I feel like Android phones have pretty legit wifi. Like, it works at home and it works at Sheetz and it works at Burger King and it works most places with free wifi. I don't xfinity, so I do not know about that but it generally connects to wifi without too much trouble. So I think the office wifi issue is the wifi thing and not the assorted machinery that cannot connect to it but I have had zero luck convincing M's husband on that front.



I like the office wifi because I don't carry a major data plan on my phone because $$$ (the phone is grandfathered in to a 2 gig per month plan that is yet still cheaper than the best "all you can eat" data plans offered by the only carrier with decent service here in Greater Rednecklandia). So I like having office wifi for my phone.

Now, this isn't a life-changing problem. It's small potatoes over here and not that big of a deal. It's taken me a while to get pissed off enough about the dysfunctional work wifi to actually DO something about it, but that time arrived last week. So I climbed the mountain of "research about how to make a wifi hotspot out of something OTHER than the fucking useless NetGear router" and traversed the swamp of "Options that work on 22.04LTS ubuntu" and I clicketed buy now on some thing with two antenna that plugs into a USB port. From China.

Did I do research? Kinda. I tried? It got technical and talked a lot about chipsets and shit and my eyes crossed and I nope'd right on out of further research. I promised myself that I'd do more research if the first thing didn't work but it looked like it would PROBABLY work because blah blah chipset mt7921u blah blah and also some rando website said it would and anyway it was only thirty bucks and I couldn't be arsed to do more research than that over thirty bucks.

Did I maybe cross my fingers and hope for the best? Er. Perhaps?

The thing arrived. The instructions were... minimal and for Windows, so no help on that front.

I assembled the thing by screwing on the two antenna ears and then I plugged it into a usb socket.

Nothing popped up or anything on my screen, so I unplugged it and tried again. Still nothing. Okay. Time to actually Do Some Things.

I opened up a terminal window.

lsusb (This is linux for "show me all the USB thingies on this computer")

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:8000 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:8008 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 0e8d:7961 MediaTek Inc. Wireless_Device
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 1c4f:0002 SiGma Micro Keyboard TRACER Gamma Ivory
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 046d:c016 Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

Hunh. Well, I don't know shit but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the "Wireless_Device" thing looks promising. Let me unplug it and try again...

And lo, the "Wireless_Device" was suddenly gone from the lsusb list. Okay, so I think we can assume that this represents the wifi usb thing with antennas that I just unplugged. Let me just plug it in again.

And it's back. Wow, what fun. Now, how do I make it work? Is it working? Is this thing on? Do I need to DO anything? HOW DO I MAKE A WIFI HOTSPOT?

*googling ensues*
*A YouTube is watched*

As per the YouTube video, I opened the network thing and went to settings and there was wifi and I clicked on wifi and then I clicked the three dots and it said "create wifi hotspot" just like on the YouTube video and I said yes and it did.

And then my phone found the wifi right away and I entered the password and everything worked on the first try.

I should have done this six months ago. Like, way easier than I was expecting.

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