💾 Archived View for bjornwestergard.com › log › 2022-02-01-offpunk.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:31:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm not connected to the internet by default. I connect to do specific things. It works well for me, so much so that I reccomend it to others.
I have a little hardware timer with buttons on it for different durations (e.g. 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc.). It's made by "Stanley". I've plugged my router into it. When I press one of the buttons, the router boots up and I get access to the internet about a minute later. When the timer clicks off, I lose access to the internet.
This might sound like an odd, ascetic practice, but it works.
I find that having to select an interval I'll spend on the internet in advance helps me to treat it as a tool to accomplish specific ends. Those ends are as varied as doing my day job (usually two four-hour shifts), ordering food online (15 minutes), doing research on a specific topic (an hour or so), posting on some forum (an hour), general entertainment browsing (an hour).
Going online is great, like going outside. But living online is stressful, like living in a public square.
Seemingly in keeping with this spirit, fellow Geminaut Ploum has been developing a Gemini client ("Offpunk") designed for offline browsing.
The idea is that you curate a list of gemini capsules you wish to follow, connect to the internet to fetch their latest state by crawling, and then browse offline. Crawling and storing whole sites is more practical with Gemini than with the HTTP/HTML/Javascript web because Gemtext sites take up so little space and the semantics are so simple (no concerns about Javascript that depends on XHR calls, for instance).
I played around a bit with Offpunk 0.2 and couldn't quite get it to download what I wanted to. I expected all of the pages linked to from all of the pages I subscribed to to be downloaded after running offpunk with the "--sync" option. This wasn't the case. I figured I'd document that here just as a bit of "user experience testing".
Logs of me fumbling with Offpunk
In any case, I loved the browsing experience otherwise, and see a lot of potential in this idea.
While integration with the browser is very nice - perhaps even ideal - there might also be room for the gemini equivalent of "wget --recursive". That is to say, a tool that given a list of gemini URIs and a depth, downloads those pages and all pages less than N hops away from them, through a depth first search. Gemget is the closest thing to "wget for gem", but does not have this functionality at present.