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theandrewbailey

Vistor: Ok, I took a picture of it. Now what? Do I send it to you?

Me: Is it doing anything? What did you do?

Vistor: No. I pointed my phone at it like you said. Then I took a picture.

Me: What app are you using?

Visitor: The photo app I always use.

Me: Can you be more specific?

Visitor (showing where the icon is): That one. I always use it.

Me: That one sucks. Do you have any others?

Visitor: I don't know. There's photos in the Facebook app. Should I try that?

Me (grabs a piece of paper from the fridge, exasperated): Here. This is my wifi info. Use the 5ghz one. If that doesn't work, try the other one.

Vistor: Oh, ok, whatever. Thanks.

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Has this really happened to you? I got the WiFi QR printed and hanged in my living room, and to this day nobody has ever had a problem. QR might seem too techie, but they are so pervasive that everyone knows how to use them.

> but they are so pervasive that everyone knows how to use them.

Nope. I know people first-hand who don't. Hell, even I don't know how the average person does it. My own phone's camera app doesn't detect them so I had to find a random 3rd party app and trust that it's not stealing the info. In fact I'm not sure I've ever used the stock camera app on any phone to scan a QR code before. For some folks it might be "press Camera and scan", but for others it's way harder than it looks.

Wow, people like to shit on Apple, but this is yet another example of something that just works.

Android phones might all do this now for all I know, I have no idea. My phone is a few years old so hard to say.

I've a QR app because I need advanced options, but just tested that my stock camera app when presented a barcode or a QR read them without any action. It offers to open the link in the browser, to connect to the wifi or to search the numbers of the barcode.

My guests doesn't ask for the WiFi pass, they see the QR hanging and ask "what is this QR for?", "It connects to my WiFi", and they immediately try it (succesfully) out of curiosity, "It's cool, how is it done?". The don't understand the magic behind, but don't need a guide to use it.

I'm in an Airbnb and the access point has the same name for 5ghz and 2.4ghz. Apple doesn't let you manually switch. The only way I've found to switch when one is not working is to toggle the wifi on/off fifty times.

I think there must be some sort of crazy interference going on because I can literally be sitting right next to the router and 5ghz has about 5k of bandwidth available.

In my experience, Apple devices tend to connect to whichever seems stronger at the time of connection, and then only ever change to a different AP when the connection gets extremely weak. Or randomly, just to mess with you.

That's unfortunate. I've tried to reset the router but it still loads the old settings. Next time I go back to the US I'm going to bring back mesh routers.

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