💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 03 › 20 › offline.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 00:59:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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(Someone on #openbsd was asking about offline computer use, and kept wandering off on tangents like downloading "all the packages" or going to Mars...when was the last time you installed all the packages? I guess some people try to travel with all the suitcases...)

Offline

Offline computer use can work, or not. The best way to find out whether it works for you would be to drop your internet for a day or a weekend or whatever. Repeated, this should eventually reveal most of what, if anything, you are missing, besides the withdrawal symptoms. Most software should be fine, though if you've been offline for a while the very first thing to do after reconnecting is to check for security patches, especially if you actually need to entangle zero-day prone chunky chortleware with random interweb sites.

Probably some software requires the internet, but

"Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without"

how required is that software?

Really Offline

There are folks who do their computing from the, say, middle of the ocean. This is slightly more extreme than not having internet access at home and walking to a coffee shop for an internetcaffeine hit. Out there battery use apparently becomes rather important, so one might look for small devices that are easy on the power draw; things like "Lisp-powered laptop with a battery life measured in years" may be of interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074233

Something common might also be good, to more easily find replacements should something break or get washed overboard on the Niobraran.

Oh Come Ye Merry Coders

Building software can be problematic; one may learn of build systems that at each step along the maybe not so well documented way need to wander out to the internet, resulting in yet another trip to the coffee shop to run the next command. Probably try for complete builds and to actually run the thing before you go offline? I'm going to assume if you build software you remembered to install the compiler and whatnot; some operating systems are weird and ship without this. And the documentation, which hopefully isn't online-only. Probably you do not want to try out some new language just before heading out. This is similar advice to try out those new boots for a while before the trek.

Oh, and be sure to download any inspirational coding videos before you go offline; yt-dlp may help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WZLJpMOxS4

tags #smol #offline