When a friend moved to a new house, her son-in-law set her up with Wifi and cutting the cord with for her TVs. I forget what they're called and I think he had gotten them from CostCo, but there are three Wifi hot spots throughout the house, including in the casita where I stayed. I thought that the one in the casita was an Alexa, but it kept ignoring me when I tried to speak to it.
My own Wifi is mostly line-of-sight (my wireless router is under the TV which I can see from my dining table where my computer is set up) and a tablet I keep upstairs can connect. But I've heard of houses with dead zones (eg, behind a brick wall) where they had to set up extra wireless access points (WAP).
A fellow student in my UNIX/networking classes was divorced and he had applied what we were learning in class to set up a LAN involving several PCs and lots of cabling (that was two decades ago). Despite having been divorced since then, I've not been motivated to do anything elaborate -- I just want everything to work -- plus I tend to view a lot of the IoT as a "gaping security hole" (I have the source code for
netcat and I'm pretty sure that it has a #define called GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE -- the code for doing sockets (ie, networking) is surprisingly small).
My current travail is my desktop. It was only about 11 years old, so when it died I took it to a repair shop recommended by my sister where they sold me a rebuilt with a solid-state drive and they transferred everything from the old hard drive so it was basically a pin-compatible replacement. After a couple months, that new drive crashed, so they replaced it and "repopulated" it with my old drive. OK, the data appears to be there, mostly, but
all my tools are
gone! MS Office, gone! No compilers, no FTP client, all my accounting (Quicken), my file comparer/transfer (BeyondCompare), my text editor. All support for my printer and my scanner.
All gone! I can't even find any way to correct the time display to 24-hour. It's like I handed them my computer and they gave me back a big brick that I couldn't do anything with. I'm taking it back in this morning.
Hardware-wise, my old desktop had Wifi built in, but not the rebuilt so they added a USB dongle which worked. Now the "repaired" computer has no clue that it has Wifi, so that's another thing that needs to be repaired. I could use a CAT-5 cable, but that's 25 feet away plus it would be a definite trip hazard.
In one programming team I was on, we did a lot of quoting. One was from "Cheers", a play on an old standard male complaint about women, but we applied it to computers: "Computers! Can't live with them, ... pass the beernuts."
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