An Update to "Offline"

So about a week ago now I wrote a post about an approach I was taking to the offline challenge that has been circulating around geminispace for roughly the last month. In this post I established that in my approach, the following limitation would be placed upon me:

• Mon-Fri I can access the internet from 6AM until 9AM
• Sat,Sun I can access the internet from 6AM until 11AM
• All days of the week I also get an hour from 8PM until 9PM

The funny thing? I've decided that this is actually still too much time to access the internet! I still find myself wasting quite a lot of time during my windows. So moving forwards, for the next week, I'm actually removing the 8PM-9PM block! Yes, that's right, I'll be restricting myself even further.

The Challenge So Far

So far, the challenge has actually been not much of a challenge at all! The only thing I've really struggled with, which was only perhaps one time this entire week, was... *ahem* adult entertainment. Generally, I'm fine without this however, as I am a happily not-single person.

Noticed benefits

I have noticed a plethora of benefits so far!

• Increased productivity at work (practically doubled!)
• I have read more, both fiction and nonfiction!
• I have actually sat down and enjoyed playing a videogame distraction-free for the first time in probably years! (Terraria :))
• I have been going to bed earlier, and notably, when I actually get tired, instead of meanderirng on the net until I physically can't keep my eyes open.
• I have been waking up earlier, likely as a result of going to bed earlier. My sleep schedule prior to the challenge was usually 12AM-7AM on weekdays and 12-2AM until 8-9AM on weekends. Since beginning the challenge, I have been consistently going to bed around 10-11pm and waking up at 5:30-6AM. Definitely a change I like (I love early mornings before the sun rises!)
• I have greatly refined the subsection of the internet I actually use, for example: I no longer browse random messageboards, I no longer use any kind of social media, I have switched email providers to one that gives me less fuss aboust just providing me with the emails I have received, and I have signed up to more interesting but less time consuming places, like ctrl-c.club!
• I now have an increased appreciation for software that provides offline documentation, especially libraries! In fact, moving forward, it might be a new thing for me to only use software which provides offline documentation. I feel like this should be mandatory!
• I have been making greater use of the man program on Linux - and have written my own scripts and tooling instead of immediately cracking open a web browser and Googling the "correct" approach (experimentation is good!) e.g. Pipewire requires a /run/user/1000 (or similar) folder to exist and belong to the user starting it in order to function correctly. On a systemd-enabled system, and most people who use elogind, this is taken care of for you! But I use void in a ludicrously minimal way, so I dived into the runit documentation and learned how the various runit stages work (1 - initialization, 2 - runtime, 3 - shutdown), and by reading the scripts for these runlevels I saw that rc-local was a thing where you are supposed to put custom commands which run at startup - which is exactly where I put a call to my script which creates the run folder with the necessary ownership and permissions. And it just works! (And I LOVE the simplicity of runit and can actually appreciate it now!)
• I have had more ideas for small mini-projects, e.g. a modular cowsay!
• I have had more motivation to work on my small mini-projects.
• I have had more ideas for large projects, e.g I have considered taking up the gemini protocol on its claims of being able to make a client in a single weekend (and I very much intend to do this!)
• I have had more motivation to learn things that I generally had little interest in before, e.g. I am currently working a bit on a book about writing games with SDL.

Obviously, with anything like this, YMMV! These are just the benefits I have noticed so far in respect to my own goals and desires. The main point here is, I waste less time doing things I don't care about, and boredom causes me to care about more things! It's great, I love it.

Other Things of Note

I made a post recently on ctrl-c.club's internal iris messageboard about this challenge, and found it quite amusing that one user found it astonishing that I was possibly making something like this work! They thought it inconceivable, probably! This gave me a nice chuckle.

P.S. A kind user recently pointed out to me that all my mailto links were done wrong and that I am in fact a moron (they didn't call me this, I called me this!) This has now been fixed and all my mailto links should now function properly.

Questions, Comments, Concerns? Just want to say hi?

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