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. |