Don’t ever change your wifi

So I inadvertently opened a very large can of worms yesterday when I tried adding a new wifi range extender to my network.  The purpose was to give my Ring Spotlight Cam a stronger signal.  With my current set up connection to that device was inconsistent and the video stream wasn’t great.  The Netgear repeater is supposed to act as a middleman, you connect it to your existing WiFi and plug it in somewhere in between where your router is and where you want to reach.

So without boring you with the technical details, while I was in my wifi router admin interface I applied the latest and greatest firmware update.  Well the end result of this was my wifi config getting wiped out.  Even though I went back in and changed things back to how they were, as far as my huge collection of wifi enabled devices are concerned, the network they were connected to no longer existed.

It was too late for me to fix it all by the time I realized that pretty much EVERYTHING in my smart home was now dumb.  Unfortunately tonight, which I hoped to spend working on assembling my 3D printer kit will instead be filled with going around the house and reconfiguring wifi on a couple dozen devices. It’s sort of crazy that there is not an easier way to address this but it surely makes me very hesitant to want to swap out my wifi router anytime soon.

Last night I did my second YouTube live stream.  Cindy was home so she jumped in as well during parts of the broadcast.  It’s sort of fun directly interacting with some of my channel subscribers from all over the world.  I hope to do it more often.