Homemade WiFi reflector

My house is a fairly old brick house. It is basically a two-bedroom home, and the interior of the house is split, front and back. The frontside consists of the dining room/kitchen and a room that once functioned as a third bedroom when my dumbass stepson lived with us, but it is actually the "old" living room. This room is now an office and occupies the NW corner of the house. The previous owners had added on to the house and built a den/living room in the SW corner of the house, which is where the family hangs out. The backside of the side has the two bedrooms and two bathrooms with a small hallway.

Anyway, now that you know the layout of the house, I will talk about my computer networking. The office has the "main" computer, an Acer desktop. Attached to this is the cable modem and the Netgear wireless router. At the opposite end of the house is my chair, and next to my chair is a small table with my laptop. I originally had a basically direct line of site, blocked only by some thin sheetrock, between the router and the laptop. The signal was rated at "good," so I created a parabolic antenna out of folded aluminum foil and tried to follow the radius of curve that I found at several websites. Once in place, the signal was rated "very good." The only problem was that the ceiling fan would move and wiggle the foil when on high. Well, we rearranged the office last week, and it was no longer feasible to use my very ugly, large aluminum foil parabolic reflector. To make matters worse, there was now a large bookcase between my laptop and the router, and my signal varied between "poor" and "good."

I persevered for several days, and then had an epiphany. I emptied out a Pringles can and then cut it about six inches from the base. I then removed half of the cylinder, leaving the base intact. I pierced a hole in the base, placed the antenna through the hole in the can, and Viola! My signal, despite the bookcase and sheetrock, is now "excellent." It literally took me two minutes to create this reflector. If you are having weak signal problems from your router, give this a try.