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2022-01-09 - Offline, sweet offline

I'm not a big fan of New Year resolutions, to be honest - to a point that I specifically start new journals / diaries / notepads or whatnot specifically on 29 of December, or on 3 of January, mostly to avoid doing it on a clean New Year's day of January, 1. Heresy!

But this time, the New Year's break is over, first working week of the year is imminent, so I'm done binge internet-ing, which is how I spent my first days of the year.

As time goes, I feel that I need to return to pursuing a balance. I drew a lot of inspiration, by the way, from Ploum's capsule: his writings about offline Gemini browsing and basically the "offline-first" approach are really, really worth reading.

Looking for offline-first tools by Ploum

I'm currently writing down a lot of decisions on what, how and why to do in the new year. But one thing I just did is what I wanted to share: I configured an "online" and "offline" mode on my laptop, which differ visually.

I use Arch+QTile and 2 screens. My idea was that I would like to have a primary mode of operation where my laptop is offline (Wi-fi turned off). The two modes differ visually: they have different wallpapers and different colors of the taskbar, which should be sufficient to visually discern whether I'm in an online mode or not.

This way, I hope, I will manage to be simultaneously more conscious of my online usage (I will need to specifically turn on the online mode to browse anything at all), and I will feel more calm and less... guilty? - while doing things offline, like studying maths or wrestling with code or whatnot.

My solution boil down to two scripts called "onlinemode" and "offlinemode". All they do is:

Step 1: alter the "~/isonline.txt" file by echoing either "online" or "offline" into it
Step 2: restart the QTile (my QTile config looks at the file and chooses wallpaper and bar color accordingly)
Step 3: turn Wi-fi on or off, depending of which mode was required.

That's all. Simple to a point of dirtiness, but it works. I will see how it feels in practice and let know about the experience.

Cheers, and a good 2022 to everyone!

Keith.