TunnelBear Archives - Your Mileage May Vary

How To Log Onto A WiFi Network When You Can’t Get The Login Page To Open

Ever since Sharon and I have started writing Your Mileage May Vary, we’ve learned that having reliable internet access is a necessity when we’re traveling. That’s not such a big problem now that most hotel rooms offer WiFi connections. But even those connections aren’t always the best and occasionally we’ll find ourselves sitting in a hotel lobby updating the website because we just can’t connect from the room.

In the meantime, there’s a whole different problem we’ve discovered, particularly since Sharon purchased a Chromebook. While she loves it because it’s really light and tends to load webpages faster than even her desktop (and was a ton cheaper than getting another MacBook), its main drawback is that it requires an internet connection to do almost anything. More than once, we’ve gotten to a hotel and turned on the computer only to see this:

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We’ve Told You Why To Use A VPN When You Travel – Here’s A Great Price For One!

As Joe and I have written in the past (here and here), when you’re traveling, it’s a really, REALLY good idea to use a VPN (Virtual Private Network). A VPN, (as per Wikipedia) “…enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running across the VPN may therefore benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network.” (in other words, it gives you privacy when you’re online so no one can hack your passwords, banking or purchasing info, etc.).

If you already have a VPN, AWESOMESAUCE! But if you don’t have one, or if you’re in the market for a new one, we just got word of a great price on what has become our VPN of choice…

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We Had To Find A New VPN And We Couldn’t Be Happier

We always use a VPN while traveling and connecting to the internet over a public Wi-Fi network. It keeps our private information, well, it keeps it private. It also allows you to fool your server into thinking you’re somewhere else so we can watch TV shows from the UK and people from outside the U.S. can read the Orlando Sentinel, for example. We’ve been using WiTopia for several years but we recently had to look for a new provider.

See, when we started writing the blog, we needed to look for an inexpensive laptop that would allow us to write articles while on the road. Our MacBook Air was showing its age and we didn’t want to spend that much on a computer we didn’t need to use that often. We decided to get an HP Chromebook. It did everything we wanted, cost a fraction of a comparable Mac product and had much longer battery life.

After buying the Chromebook, I tried to install the personalVPN from WiTopia. Major fail. I checked the help page of the WiTopia website and found this disclaimer:

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