Chapter 10. Web Connectivity and Your PSP

Back in the golden years of technology fascination, when movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space and other Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder were somehow actually making it into theaters, predicting the future of technology was in fashion. The predictions rolled in: By this day and age, we were supposed to have flying cars, robot housekeepers, teleporters, 3D holographic television, picture phones, colonies on the moon and Mars, and computers that could take over massive spaceships and flush people out the airlock. We were supposed to have been visited or conquered by aliens (depending on whom you listened to). We were supposed to have food pills, antigravity skateboards, and replicants that look exactly like people and can be detected only by asking them what they'd do if they saw a turtle flipped upside down.

What of that has come true?

Flying cars? I don't see any at the Dodge dealership down the street.

Robot housekeepers? Hmm ... does the Roomba wandering vacuum cleaner count?

Food pills? The closest things I've seen are smallish energy bars.

Space aliens? I have a few distant relatives whom I suspect of being from Mars or something, but I have no actual evidence.

Teleporters? I still have to wait for couriers to deliver stuff I order on the Web.

Ah, the Web! Did anybody predict the World Wide Web? Did anyone in 1953 foresee a network of computers, accessible by powerful PCs that sit on or lurk beneath our desks, that contains enough information to fill billions of books?

And did anyone predict that you'd be able to use a little black multimedia device to zip from Web page to Web page, gathering weather reports and stock updates and news from all over the world? I think a time traveler from six decades ago who arrived as you read this book would be pretty disappointeduntil you showed him the PSP.

Your PSP can take you to any Web page to which you want to go, provided that it can find its way there. To get to the Web, it needs an on ramp in the form of a shared Web connection over a wireless local area network (WLAN).

I talked at length about WLANs way back in Chapter 2, but there's still a bit more to know. What if you don't have one, but you want to get your PSP online? What do you need to set one up? How can you go from being just a guy with a PSP and a computer to a guy who rocks Web pages anywhere in the house on his PSP?