When I want to be productive, I like to go to relatively quiet public venues like libraries or bookstores. Since I'm not at home, I'm forced to use the public wireless Internet or hack/steal an innocent civilian's wireless Internet connection (half-joking). Since these connections are normally unsafe to transmit sensitive data, I connect to my home network via VPN-tunneling and encryption. But, usually the public wireless Internet connections I use are pretty spotty. One minute I'm reading an interesting article. Five minutes later, I want to go to the next page. In that five minute interval of no data transfer, I've already lost my connection and I have to go through that long process of reconnecting the wireless network and VPN-tunneling to my computer at home.

Today, I got fed up with the whole situation. I thought, "Surely there must be some way to stay connected!" When I'm continuously downloading and sending data, I never seem to have a problem. It's just that I disconnect when I'm not actively surfing the Internet. I don't know how this phenomenon works. I just think of it as a plumbing system. If there has been no water running through the dried pipes, it will take more time to initially push water through. But if water is already flowing, there should be no problem.

Ping Water
What "water" could I use to keep the connection alive and improve latency? PING! Ping was the perfect solution. It used a negligent amount of bandwidth and processing power but it still kept a trickle of data running through the VPN tunnel. I just ran this command in the DOS prompt window:

The IP address points to my VPN server and the "/t" tells the ping program to continue sending pings until I terminate it.

Bliss
Today, I'm happy because I have not had to reconnect to my VPN since my creative discovery. Try this and use PowerMenu to put the Window in your task tray!

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