A wireless repeater

 My old AMD based laptop, the one I tried Bunsen Labs on, due to some quirk doesn't have terribly good network connectivity on my bench in the outside studio. Basically wifi is slow - and it's the machine, the old Ubuntu based iMac next to it manages a 40Mbit/s connection - good enough for web browsing and file uploads.

So I started hatching plans to improve performance, the more intricate one involving a pair of old powerline adapters and an old wifi access point.

However before I got round to hooking them up I remembered that I had an old Vonets unit somewhere that can be configured as a wireless repeater

USB powered and about half the size of a mobile phone, deploying it seemed a lot easier than playing games of hitech Lego with powerline adapters.

Installing it seems to have solved the problem

speed is not lightning (10Mbit/s ±2), but good enough for the basics, be it web browsing, email, or file uploads and downloads, after all in the late 1990s, a 10Mbit/s network was something special, and the university I worked at at the time had an amazing 2Mbit/s connection to the internet!