The Little Things

My PowerBook is the first Mac I've ever really used. Since I got it, I've found lots of really neat things that Apple thought of that really takes advantage of hardware. For example, when it is booting I can hold down the 't' key and instead of booting into OS X it will become an external hard drive. I can connect my laptop to another computer via the firewire connection and transfer files between the two computers.

Well Bryan and I are house sitting for a coworker. She has dialup on her computer at home. While I can check my email through the gmail interface, it's much more useful for me to use my computer. No worries, I've got a modem and I can use her dialup account to connect. However, Apple discontinued internal modems in their laptops, so Bryan is out of luck. I thought about it, and I was pretty sure I could set my computer up as a wireless router sharing the modem connection. I've done stuff like this in Linux, but it normally involves me poking around on the Internet for an hour or so to "remember" how to do it.

I thought, Hum I wonder if I can do this easily. I started poking around in the system preferences (like the control panel in windows). I type in 'NAT' (network address translation) and the 'Sharing' icon is highlighted. I select 'Sharing' and notice that there is an 'Internet' option which looks to do exactly what I want. I just tell the computer I want to share my connection from the 'internal modem' to computers using 'Airport'. There I have it, I have a computer setup to do wireless NAT.