Title: The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 1

	Title: The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 1
	Author: Solène
	Date: 10 July 2022
	Tags: life offline oldcomputerchallenge nocloud
	Description: Today I started to restrict myself to 60 minutes per day
	of Internet access, as part of the Old Computer Challenge second
	edition.

	# Introduction

	Today is the beginning of the 2022 Old Computer Challenge, for a week I
	am now restricted to one hour of Internet access per day.

	Old Computer Challenge V2 announcement

	# How do I account time?

	For now, I turned off my smartphone Wi-Fi because it would be hard to
	account its time.

	My main laptop is using the very nice script from our community member
	prahou.

	The script design is smart, it's accounting time and displaying time
	consumed, it can be described as a machine state like this:

	```trying to describe a machine state

	+------------+ +----------------------------+
	\| wait for \| \| Accounting time for today \|
	\| input \| Type Enter \| Internet is enabled \|
	\| \|------------------->\| \|
	\| Internet \| \| display time used \|
	\| offline \| \| today \|
	+------------+ +----------------------------+
	^ v
	\| press ctrl+C \|
	\| (which is trapped to run a func) \|
	+-----------------------------------------+
	```

	As the way to disable / enable internet is specific to every one, the
	script has two empty fuctions: NETON and NETOFF, they enable or disable
	Internet access. On my Linux computer I found an easy way to achieve
	this by adding a bogus default route with a metric 1, bypassing my
	default route. Because the default route doesn't work my system can't
	reach the Internet, but it let my LAN in a working state.

	My own version of prahou's script (I made some little changes)

	# How's life?

	So far, it's easy to remember I don't have Internet all the time, but
	with my Internet usage it works fine. I use the script to "start"
	Internet, check my emails, read IRC channels and reply, and then I
	disconnect. By using small amount of time, I can achieve most of my
	needs in less than a minute. However, that wouldn't be practical if I
	had to download anything big, and people with a fast Internet access (=
	not me) would have an advantage.

	My guess about this first day being easy is that as I don't use any
	streaming service, I don't need to be connected all the time. All my
	data are saved locally, and most of my communication needs can be done
	asynchronously. Even publishing this blog post shouldn't consume more
	than 20 seconds.

	# Let's go for a week

	I suppose it will be easy to forget about limited Internet time, so it
	will be best for me to run the accounting script in a terminal
	(disabling Internet until I manually accept to enable it), and think a
	bit ahead if I will need more time later so I can be more conservative
	about time usage.

	So far, it's a great experience I enjoy a lot. I hope other
	participant will enjoy it as much as I do. We will start gathering and
	aggregating reports soon, so you could enjoy all the reports from our
	community.

	# It's not late to join

	Despite the challenge officially started today (10th July), it's not
	late to start it yourself. The important is to have fun, if you want
	to try, you could just use a chronometer and see if you could hold with
	only 60 minutes a day.