Life hack: how to share your Wi-Fi with guests easily

These days lots of people have Wi-Fi routers at home, let alone at the office, to con­nect all sorts of wire­less gad­gets or the more famil­iar laptops. I assume many of them some­times invite some­one over for a cup of tea (it happens).

So when friends come over, be tech-hospitable: share your Wi-Fi. Let them casu­ally tweet some­thing, like “having tea at Vasya’s, his place is cool and he even has Wi-Fi” :)

There’s a way to stop hunt­ing for wher­ever you wrote down your wire­less pass­word every time, and then spelling it out letter by letter. “S as in dollar”: you know what I mean.

A two-dimensional barcode, or QR code, will help you with this.

  1. Open a QR code generator.
  2. In the “Content” field, choose “Wi-Fi network”.
  3. In the SSID field, enter the name of your network. For TP-Link routers, for exam­ple, it usu­ally looks like “TP-LINK_SOME_LETTERS” (unless it was renamed during setup).
  4. Enter the password.
  5. Choose the net­work type. If you don’t know it, ask who­ever set the net­work up :)
  6. Create a QR code for your net­work with the “Generate” button.
  7. Save the result­ing bar­code as an image.

Voilà! Now you have a short­cut for con­nect­ing to your home or office Wi-Fi. Print it out and hang it by the door. To con­nect, your tech-savvy guests just have to scan the code.

UPD. A ques­tion came up right away: “What if the guests come with a laptop?” You can scan the code with a laptop too, if it has a camera. But it’s very unlikely to have scan­ning soft­ware installed. So the life hack only works if guests come with a smart­phone or another gadget with a camera.

UPD2: Decoding the code doesn’t need an inter­net connection. Only a recog­ni­tion app installed in advance.

P.S. I was sadly sur­prised when Vladislav Flaks, if I’m not mis­taken, said at the OWOX conference: “At first we thought of using QR codes for reg­is­tra­tion…” (per­haps hint­ing at this summer’s 8p.ua, where Netpeak pulled that trick) “…but we asked around who uses them and real­ized QR is still too uncom­mon a thing”.