I love free Wifi. We all do. Except when we can’t get on. Sometimes their default login page stubbornly refuses to appear.

Your friends will tell you, “Oh, just type in Google.com, or any site and the page will pop up.” Except that doesn’t always work. And restarting your browser works about 80% of the time.

It’s that one time you really need to get online that the login page refuses to load, right?

I have a simple trick that works on any browser for getting online. Use localhost. Localhost is sort of a default IP address for your computer. Its your computer’s home. [Learn more about localhost here] It’s easy to access it. Just type in http://127.0.0.1. That’s one-two-seven-dot-zero-dot-zero-dot-one. Easy.

On some machines, using 127.1.1.1 will work just as well. On FreeBSD and some Macs, the default mapping is 127.0.0.1 for reasons too technical for my feeble brain to grasp.

On newer machines, you can also simply type http://localhost and it will change it to the numeric values. The main thing is, this always calls up the login page in a Wifi environment (not just Starbucks; use it anywhere Wifi is being finicky).