Title: The Old Computer Challenge V2: day 2 | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 11 July 2022 | |
Tags: life offline oldcomputerchallenge nocloud | |
Description: Second day of the old computer challenge v2 (limited to 60 | |
minutes of Internet a day), it's harder than expected! | |
# Intro | |
Day 2 of the Old Computer Challenge, 60 minutes of Internet per day. | |
Yesterday I said it was easy. I changed my mind. | |
# Internet feels natural | |
I think my parents switched their Internet subscription from RTC to DSL | |
around 2005, 17 years ago, it was a revolution for us because not only | |
it was multiple time faster (up to 16 kB/s !) but it was unlimited in | |
time! Since then, I only had unlimited Internet (no time, no quota), | |
and it became natural to me to expect to have Internet all the time. | |
Because of this, it's really hard for me to just think about tracking | |
my Internet time. There are many devices in my home connected to the | |
Internet and I just don't think about it when I use them, I noticed I | |
was checking emails or XMPP on my phone, I turned its Wi-Fi on in the | |
morning and forgot about it then. | |
There are high chances I used more than my quota yesterday because of | |
my phone, but I also forgot to stop the time accounting script. (It had | |
a bug preventing it to stop correctly for my defense). And then I | |
noticed I was totally out of time yesterday evening, I had to plan a | |
trip for today which involved looking at some addresses and maps, | |
despite I have a local OpenStreetMap database it's rarely enough to | |
prepare a trip when you go somewhere the first time, and that you know | |
you will be short on time to figure things out on the spot. | |
# Internet everywhere | |
Ah yes, my car also has an Internet connection with its own LTE access, | |
I can't count it as part as the challenge because it's not really | |
useful (I don't think I used it at all), but it's there. | |
And it's in my Nintendo Switch too, but it has an airplane mode to | |
disable connectivity. | |
And Steam (the game library) requires being online when streaming video | |
games locally (to play on the couch)... | |
So, there are many devices and software silently (not always) relying | |
on the Internet to work that we don't always know exactly why they need | |
it. | |
# Open source work | |
While I said I wasn't really restrained with only one hour of Internet, | |
this was yesterday. I didn't have a feeling to work on open source | |
project in the day, but today I would like to help to review packages | |
updates/changes, but I couldn't. Packaging requires a lot of bandwidth | |
and time, it requires searching for errors if they are known or new, it | |
just can't be done offline because it relies on many external packages | |
that has to be downloaded, and with a DSL line it takes a lot of time | |
to keep a system up to date with its development branch. | |
Of course, with some base materials like the project main repository, | |
it's possible to contribute, but not really at reviewing packages. | |
# Second day review | |
I will add my counter a 30 minutes penalty for not tracking my phone | |
Internet usage today. I still have 750 seconds of Internet when | |
writing this blog post (including the penalty). | |
Yesterday I improved my blog deployment to reduce the time taken by the | |
file synchronization process, from 18s to 4s. I'm using rsync, but I | |
have four remote servers to synchronize: 1 for http, 1 for gemini, 1 | |
for gopher and 1 for a gopher backup. As the output files of my blog | |
are always generated and brand new, rsync was recopying all the files | |
to update the modification time, now I'm using -c for checksum and -I | |
to ignore times, and it's significantly faster and ensure the changes | |
are copied. I insist about the changes being copied, because if you | |
rely on size only, it will work 99% of the time, except when you fix a | |
single letter type that won't change the file size... been there. | |
Links to the challenge reports from others |