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ROOPHLOCH : Remote Off-Grid Outdoor Phlogging Challenge
Yesterday I stumbled on solderpunk's ROOPHLOCH entry:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2022.txt
Too bad I discovered the challenge a month late, I'll make sure to participate next year.
The challenge is the following:
make a phlog post between September 1st and September 30th (inclusive, in your local time zone), while being outside of any permanent man-made shelter and without plugging a computing device into a wall for power or internet
I don't often phlog/shlog/gemlog but I do work Off-Grid and outdoors sometimes, about once or twice a month.
I thought I could share how I do it.
I use a second-hand Thinkpad T560 and it turns out there is a small slot for a sim card behind the battery.
After a bit of poking around the system, I discovered it's a Huawei ME906s-158 modem, and it's supported by the ModemManager software.
I ran a few tests, subscribed to a 20€/month smartphone dataplan. I don't own a smartphone and I plan on cancelling my ISP contract if this work well so it's not an extra expense, it'll just replace the house modem.
Since I'm a remote worker I like to work from different places.
Sometimes at friend's place sometimes elsewhere.
When the weather is nice, I can walk the dog, find a nice place to work and just sit down and proceed.
I prefer being in the middle of the fields rather than in the forest so I can get some sunlight and keep an eye on the dog.
On the tech side it was surprisingly easy to setup.
The modem was detected by mmcli so I ran:
`mmcli --sim=0 --pin=8078 --disable-pin` so network manager can turn the connection on and off without being prompted for the PIN.
And now `nmcli device connect ttyUSB2` turns on an internet connection.
As simple as that.
In my case the limitations are actually welcome ! It forced me to think about what my internet-usage is, and create two small scripts.
What I don't like about some resources (internet, electricity, water…) is that I don't have any feedback about how much of it I use, or how much is left.
As opposed to my chimney: I get a clear sense of how many logs I use per day, and have a clear visibility of many logs are left.
So the limitations forced me to be more aware of thoses.
In my usual locations I get something slightly faster than ADSL, wich is enough for my usage.
If seen the speed exceptionally reach 20Mbps. It happened when there was a good network coverage and few users actully use the antenna because of the early morning time.
The usual download speed is more between 1 and 3 Mbps.
It's enough to do video calls with colleagues and/or stream videos or music.
Which I usually don't, and wouldn't do now anyway because of the next limitation.
My dataplan covers 80Gb per month, after that the bandwidth is throttled.
I don't know at what speed because I didn't use the 80Gb in the two months of my test yet.
It's interesting to know that there is a limitation though.
I installed the 'vnstats' software that does statistics on network usage per interface.
Wifi, ethernet, modem, everything is logged.
It allows me to inspect the bandwidth consumption per month, day or minute and have a clearer feedback.
As I said, I don't watch streamed video nor listen to streamed music.
When I want to do so I usually call youtube-dl on the URL so I can save it for later.
If I want to watch or listen to the music a second time, it's already there.
No need to pay twice for the same !
The additional benefit is that I don't get to hear or see advertisements and can use my own software to play it.
Think about it: the usual youtube song needs:
- a full browser opened, eating RAM and CPU like there is no tomorrow
- an active internet connection to download song parts on the fly
- to use space on your screen to display a useless album art and video window
youtube-dl allows me to have just what I need. An mp3 file, and nothing else.
So, anyway, most of the data I use is from video calls with my colleagues and I usually en up in the 1Gb-2Gb/day range.
When working outdoors, power is a concern too. My battery can last for a full 9-to-5 working day outside but I have to be conservative.
Video calls are the offenders again here imposing a massive load on the CPU and modem.
If I expect lots of calls, I just stick close to my car so I can plug the laptop for an hour or so.
The modem draws 3 to 5 Watts depending on the activity.
Considering the whole laptop usually eats 9 to 15W, that's quite a lot !
Last but not least, being outside usually means bright conditions, so the screen is likely to be at 100% brightness.
I can change the theme to use brighter colors, but that's still a bit hard to read sometimes.
I really can't wait for e-ink screens on laptops.
I added two infos on my status bar: current watt usage, and total data used today, the syntax is fish-shell but that's trivial to adapt to your favorite shell:
set gsm_iface wwp0s20f0u2c2 # Replace by the name of your gsm interface set rate (upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 | rg "energy-rate:" | sed 's/energy-rate://' | string trim) set today (vnstat $gsm_iface --oneline | cut -d';' -f6) echo " : $today / $watts"
Having a modem on the laptop is also a fun opportunity.
I made two side-projects to toy with it:
- a deamon to run arbitrary commands from SMS (ex: I text my computer "shutdown" and it shutdowns remotely)
- a weechat plugin so I can chat via SMS from my IRC client
But that will be discussed in other gemlogs !
As usual, any feedback or comment is welcome at <ahub@riseup.net> !