💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › users › b › whammy.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 21:26:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2020-10-31)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Re: Computing with more focus

by: Ben S.

a whammy

Solderpunk wrote about his approach to having a more purposeful and productive relationship to computing. Offline first, only connecting to internet when you need to; setting goals for computing sessions.

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/computing-less-but-with-more-focus.gmi

gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/progress-toward-offline-first.gmi

I'd like to expand the historical aspect by stating that computer time used to be quite precious.

Strangely computers have now become so omnipresent that we actually need to make an effort to get away from them.

I'm old. We used phone lines and modems to dial each other back in the day: the internet was not yet a thing. The internet of things was not yet a thing.

In a rather quick fashion it became one, and almost everything did move to the internet already in the 1990s. I've quite fond memories of that time also.

For a long time it used to be fun to find access points, and if there was a fast connection somewhere, people would physically gather at that point mostly to download stuff they could not get in a reasonable time with slower connections.

So there were still a lot of nice excuses to actually go out and meet other people back then. Scarcity made everything more precious, but a culture of sharing ensured that everybody got some.

With the very fast long range wireless connections available almost everywhere today, the thought of going to your friends house to get some software on disks is all but history.

Everything has become so ubiquitous and integrated that it's practically invisible. It's super difficult to appreciate things that you can't see or experience. As we are unable to grasp the modem with our hands, it has disappeared inside the router and the smartphone. A lot of people probably don't now realize it's actually there.

Dispelling all kinds of reality distortion magic seems central to the whole solarpunk movement.

So let's cast that double whammy!

EOF