When you’re travelling a lot, hotel Wi-fi can easily become the bane of one’s existence. You leave to do some work for the day and come back, turn on the TV and the wifi is fighting you because it probably has trouble remembering your connection after agreeing to the terms and conditions on their captive portal.

I constantly have to fight with forgetting the connection, reneweing my DHCP lease and I’ve even resorted to chanting incantations for wifi. It’s almost like the Wifi is getting the same design choices as some hotel bathrooms nowadays.

While I don’t have the solution for those bathrooms, I have the “silver bullet” for your Wi-Fi. http://neverssl.com . That’s right, an uncertified website that shows displays some simple HTML.

If you’re stuck on a connection waiting to get the captive portal, this link will “wake up” your Wi-Fi connection and remember it’s supposed to protect you against this kind of stuff! This places you in the captive portal(again) and you can connect again. All is good in the world.

Of course, I immediately hop in my VPN. I hope this helps with your battles of public Wi-Fi because it solved a lot of my headaches.