Use your router's SSID, not Twitter, to whine to your neighbors

Neighbors. What can you do about them? To those of us in homes, neighbors are a relatively easily defined group of people. There's the police officer that lives next door, there's the police officer that lives across the street, there's the judge who lives three doors down.

True story. That's actually my neighborhood.

But I haven't forgotten the days when I lived in apartments and dorms. Of course, when I lived in consolidated housing, we didn't have WiFi. We didn't even have the Internet. Yes. Sigh. We did have cars. It wasn't that long ago.

Today though, most of our neighbors are Internet-savvy. Most of our neighbors have WiFi (some day, when you're out, make sure to thank the guy down the street who keeps his router unprotected).

So what do you do if you want to tell your neighbors something? Say you want to describe something in a few words (like a short tweet), but address it only to the few people who live within shouting distance of you?

It turns out some Swedes have figured out a new way to communicate: using their router's SSID. Yep, according to a report in The Local, when a Swede wants to tell his neighbor "Thank you for not smoking on the balcony," "Pay for your own Internet, you stupid neighbor", "Remove the fluff from the filter" (as in laundry filters), the way to do it is changing your SSID.

So there you go. If you don't want to talk to your neighbors, but still get your message across, consider changing your SSID to something pithy like "If you have extra chocolate, please leave it in the lobby."