Daily Life with the Offline Laptop

Daily Life with the Offline Laptop(dataswamp.org)

73 points by UkiahSmith 6 years ago | 23 comments

cableshaft 6 years ago |

There was a time when I had a computer that didn't have a working network card. I would take it to the library with me, and I would be incredibly productive during it. If I got stuck on something, I'd work on something else instead, and look it up when I got home.

I also tried doing what I called an "Internet Diet", of self-imposing working offline, and as long as I stuck with it I got a good amount done then also. In fact one thing I noticed was that if I didn't let myself have the internet, I'd start to get bored, and would naturally open up a code editor or text editor and start writing, or at least organizing the files on my hard drive or even just reading a book.

My main problem are my jobs, though. If my job absolutely requires the internet in order for me to do my job (and right now it absolutely does), then the distractions are just a few clicks away, tempting me, and I fall into its trap.

Time to get off the internet, at least for a bit.

inakarmacoma 6 years ago | |

...or EVEN read a BOOK.

Aspiring authors offer up a collective sigh.

But there are movies, still.

By the way, has anyone seen the 37th remake of Superman? Sorry, I meant 36th.

Hey, anyone want to invest in a new movie idea. It's gold. It's only been done 36 times before. Don't delay. You won't believe what happens at the end. Lois Lane loses 30lbs with 1 crazy dieting trick that big-Doctors don't want you to know about.

Time is running out. Don't wait. There's no time to read that book, you're missing out.

cableshaft 6 years ago | | |

I do read books. Nowhere near as many as my wife, who's read 16 books already so far this year, but I do read books.

I've finished three books so far this year. The 3rd and 4th books in The Expanse series, and Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (which includes the short story that the Arrival movie was based on). I'm about 4 chapters into Don Quixote also, which I decided I'd finally read this year.

And that's with the following distractions:

* Letting myself enjoy and complete a 25 hour visual novel video game (AI: The Somnium Files, for anyone curious)

* 15 hours of training to be an ESL tutor

* Preparing lesson plans and meeting with my ESL Learner on a weekly basis

* Taking a 6 week travel writing course at my local library

* Polishing up 4 different board game prototypes, writing rules, filming videos and entering them into two different game design competitions

* Coding two different video games I'm hoping to release sometime this year

* Writing a first draft of a short story for an annual short story anthology that my local writing group does every year

* Hosting a monthly playtest night for local game designers

* Having a wife and two dogs that demand time and attention every day

* Working at a company that has 1-2 network outages each week (at least the past month and a half) that requires me to sit for hours after work coordinating with network and server teams to fix the issue

* Getting mentally prepared and brushing up technical knowledge for the inevitable interview gauntlet I'll need to undergo to find a new job.

I'm sure there's things I'm leaving out. This is all since January 1st this year, btw.

I also write novels off and on, I just don't have any finished yet. Lots of first drafts from participating in Nanowrimo for 10 years. It's a lot harder for me to revise and finish them, though, especially with juggling all my other interests (game design and development usually takes priority). Planning to attend a writer's retreat in two weeks to try to get one in a state that I don't mind other people reading it and giving feedback.

Also despite all this, I waste a ton of time on the internet and really need to nip it in the bud if I want to keep juggling so many balls in the air. And I do still see most Marvel movies. Not DC movies though, except Shazam!

james_impliu 6 years ago |

No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline: https://kapeli.com/dash. You can download the docs for most languages/frameworks AND you can download Stackoverflow by section in a way you can read and search.

ericd 6 years ago | |

Dash is awesome, and even more so when you use the Alfred integrations to get essentially a system-wide hotkey for doc search. Alfred hotkey, docset abbreviation you set, search string, and you're there.

andrepd 6 years ago | |

Pity it's mac only

HuShifang 6 years ago | | |

Check out Zeal, which piggybacks on Dash for Linux and Windows: https://zealdocs.org/

d0mine 6 years ago | | |

Dash docsets can be used without Mac e.g., in Emacs http://puntoblogspot.blogspot.com/2014/01/ann-helm-dash-docu...

broabprobe 6 years ago |

much respect for keeping a PowerBook in use! I keep my 12" PowerBook around for similar uses: Music (iTunes), email (Mail), writing (TextEdit), development (also TextEdit haha). Amazingly TenFourFox (Firefox fork) is still being maintained! It's impossibly slow but that can also be an advantage. I'm still thinking about that post recently where someone said they add a few seconds to a page load. Well, an easy way to do that is to just use old hardware! It's nice to have the internet if you need it, but it's slow enough to not be addictive...

nonamenoslogan 6 years ago | |

I'm also in the PowerPC keep-alive program. Mine's an iBook G4 and I use it for writing (Pages, nano, TextWrangler), coding (DreamweaverMX, TextWrangler) and VNC to my other computers if I need them. I tend to play a lot of ancient games on it too if I'm not doing any thing productive, SimTower I'm looking at you. TenFourFox is a beautiful thing, though SSL pages are a bit slow so I'm pickier about what I read.

ohithereyou 6 years ago | |

What sort of development do you do on the PowerBook?

broabprobe 6 years ago | | |

Mostly basic plain HTML/CSS pages for teafry.me but sometimes some python I run on a raspberry pi over ssh.

afaik69 6 years ago |

A month ago i canceled my broadband internet at home.

I survive now with 7GB LTE data and public WiFi.

That was the only solution for me to get out of the habit of mindlessly browsing the web, watching YouTube etc...

So i have 230MB Data per Day, that's enough for me to get work done and some casual browsing.

If i wanna watch a YouTube video i have to get out out of the house, walk to the next WiFi, download it, go home and watch it.

rchaud 6 years ago | |

I have often considered doing this myself. My current browsing habits are a disjointed, site-to-site flitting mess that leaves me less informed and more annoyed.

- Open Reddit/FB/IG, browse briefly

- Switch to a news site, scan headlines, get irritated with almost-clickbait headlines

- Switch back to Reddit/FB/IG by reflex, even though I know nothing's changed.

The last time I lacked near-24/7 internet access was when living abroad in 2007. I'd go to an internet cafe daily, where once I was done with emails, IMs etc, I'd save a folder of HTML pages (mainly message board threads) to my USB drive for offline reading. It made my browsing experience much more time-efficient, as my Internet use had a clear starting point and an ending point, sort of like a newspaper.

eric234223 6 years ago |

There is an awesome pdf manager and web page capture softwar https://getpolarized.io/ . It supports offline mode, but as of now there is a bug that needs to be worked around by logging out. It supports taking anki notes and syncing too.

mikekchar 6 years ago |

I like working offline and do it frequently. In fact, if I would just turn off my tethered 4G right now, I would get a lot more done and be much happier with myself. Will be doing just after I finish typing this :-). Because I use my computer primarily for programming, the biggest thing I need are docs. In that respect, I've found that working with Rust is amazing. Installing all the normal documentation you need and then going offline is so incredibly easy. Anyway, massive shout out to anyone that pushed to make that dream a reality!

Polylactic_acid 6 years ago | |

I use a tool called Zeal on linux which makes using docs even better than in a browser since its pretty much instant.

mikekchar 6 years ago | | |

I have used this in the past with Ruby. I liked it well enough, but I was frustrated trying to get the right versions of things (I world on some older code bases -- including Ruby 1.8 :-P ). Getting all the ri docs for things that are 10 or more years old is incredibly painful. I could potentially build them myself, but that is also surprisingly painful.

The thing I like about Rust's setup is that things just work out of the box. `rustup doc` opens a page containing the Rust book, Rust by example book, all of the API documentation and more -- all for the version of Rust that I currently have installed. `cargo doc` builds all of the documentation for all of the crates that I am using in my current project. All of the documentation is for the versions of the crates I'm using. It's just very seemless.

The really cool part of the Rust docs is that all of the API documentation (and crate documentation) has links to the source code. So if I can't understand what the documentation is saying, I can read the code. It's incredibly helpful. I must use that feature 5 or 6 times a day.

But, yeah, Zeal is quite useful and I really should set it up again for my Ruby stuff.

lostgame 6 years ago |

Holy crap, I thought I was the only one in the world still using a PowerBook as a daily driver to keep myself away from the temptations of the Internet...I’m a huge fan of 1999-2005 PowerPC Macs.

lea4c6561 6 years ago |

I find https://devdocs.io/ very useful for offline access to Python documentation (and many other languages too)

zenlot 6 years ago | |

Or just download official documentation for offline usage: https://docs.python.org/3/download.html