Your geek cachet can only increase if you've got a satellite dish attached to your laptop. It helps if the dish in question is actually useful--for instance, when it's an antenna to help you get a signal even when you're a few thousand feet from the nearest Wi-Fi.

Hawking Technologies knows this and has offered a Hi-Gain USB-based Wireless-G Dish Antennas for a couple of years. Now, the 802.11n version has arrived to provide faster speed and more distance, and equal geekiness.

The Hi-Gain USB Wireless-300N Dish Adapter has a slightly new look for Hawking's dish adapters, but it works the same: Set it on a flat surface near your laptop, flip up the dish, plug the base into the USB port, and point the directional dish toward the access point you want to reach.

To support 802.11n, the adapters have to support the faster speeds (300 megabits per second) and fancy technology of 11n (called MIMO), so it sports dual antennas to handle the multiple in, multiple out signals, all while still working with older 802.11g/11b networks. Hawking says the dish design helps deliver an extended range of as much as 4,000 feet from you to the AP, which is about 6 times the norm. (The Wireless-G dish adapter could promise just 3 times).

The adapters support the full litany of Wi-Fi security, from lame-o WEP up to the best WPA2. They comes in separate versions for Mac OS and Windows with applicable drivers, each $109.99 list.