Digital Home Thoughts: How To Run Your Wireless Network Like a Coffee Shop Does

"Want to open up your Wi-Fi network to easier access for visitors, block the web's nasty stuff from young eyes, and maybe regain some bandwidth, too? Go ahead and unleash your inner coffee shop owner. With free software and no extra hardware, you can manage content and bandwidth on your home network, or even manage a semi-public "hotspot," without feeling like a despot."

If you have a WiFi network - or, really, a home network at all - that others use, be they family or friends, this is worth reading if you want to help keep your sanity. From the basics of using the free OpenDNS service to apply family-friendly Web filtering to using a Hotspot system to create a system whereby WiFi access is handed out on a controlled basis. The Hotspot system in particular is slick; I'd never heard of it before this article, and it's very clever!