For obvious reasons, I'm quite pleased with my new apartment. One problem, however, is that it is a total nightmare as far as setting up Wi-Fi goes.

One problem, however, is that the apartment is long, thin, and oddly-shaped enough that the points I want to link via Wi-Fi are inevitably separated by at least two external walls. And when the Ghostbusters (investigating the source of the psychic disturbance on the roof of my apartment block) pull out the blueprints, I can just picture Harold Ramis asking "What kind of madman would clad an entire building in a Faraday cage?"

For this reason (and because they're generally cool), I decided to order a couple of Meraki Mini Wi-fi repeaters to dot through my apartment, hopefully connecting all the rooms reliably (with some signal left over for the rest of Kirribilli).

Then I discovered that the shipping cost for my three repeaters (RRP: US$49 each) was a mind-boggling $62.

I'm attempting to harness the power of social networking to work around this issue, but really, if your only shipping option is going to set me back more than a third of what I'm paying for the goods, there's only one thing that springs to mind: