Dial-up internet and the joys of digital asceticism
-----
Since my last post, the weather has given us a foretaste of the
upcoming winter rains. The last 3 days have been cloudy and rainy,
but this is certainly not a complaint in light of the ongoing
drought situation in California. As we are still relying on a
shallow 20' well for our current water requirements, the early
rains are welcome.
We have been busy preparing for the upcoming rainy season, Pacific
storms and attendant power outages. Thankfully we have a generator
and plenty of candles. PG&E has always been very
responsive to power outages, but due to our more remote location,
it can take hours and, on some occassions, days to fix the issue.
When the power does go out, it is a strange, but peaceful and
comforting silence devoid of the 60 Hertz buzz in our heads we have
all become unconsciously accustomed to. Now it is just the light
of candles and the fireplace and a good book made with real paper.
Still, periodic contact with the outside world is necessary. Even
during a power failure, the landline telephone network is still
functional and to access the internet, we can still resort to
good-ole-fashioned dial-up.
In my retro obsession of doing more by getting by with less
(technoid geek minimalism to be more precise), I am throwing a
challenge to myself to see if I can carry on my day-to-day computer
work with dial-up and more specifically, the command line interface
(cli for short...does Windows even have command line anymore??). I
hope to accomplish several things with this retro geek challenge:
* Due to the terrain where I live, I do not get any cell signal
(this is a double edge sword). For my internet access, I do have
satellite broadband, but the latency is significant. Since the
signal has to make a 46,000 mile round trip, that alone will slow
things down, although admittedly, when the data does come, it comes
fast (when the weather is good). Ironically, if one is working
from the cli, a dial-up connection is much more responsive,
particularly if I do my work from my Unix shell account (see
http://sdf.org). The added bonus, is that I have located a free
dial-up provider with a local number. So, while using a text based
web browser, page loads are quite fast since the browser scrapes
out all of the fluff yielding just content, no distractions at next
to no cost.
* Working from the terminal is not only much easier on the eyes
(white text, black background or whatever color you prefer), but
much easier on system resources. I can even work from my 17 year
old Toshiba laptop.
* Although working from the gui web browser does present lots of
nice eye candy (that doesn't serve any real function), it does tend
to be a time sink if I am not careful. A significant amount of my
time is spent waiting on page loads on the satellite link.
Invariably, the content I want to read on the page is the last
thing to load. Completing my tasks from the cli helps me to
maintain my focus and get my work done. Perhaps I am a bit old
fashioned, but I still regard the computer, to a great extent, as a
tool and not a source of entertainment (I can hear the collective
gasp now). Radio and later television were originally designed to
be a medium for education and information.
Of course this is not a blanket indictment of broadband or the gui.
Expectations have to be reasonable and there are some things you
just cannot do from the cli or a dial-up connection. Downloading
torrent files, youtube videos or iso images is out of the question
unless you're willing to wait days, weeks, months for the download
to complete. The one panel I need to see on a Google map will be
the last to load even after I have returned to my desk after making
a cup of chai. For me, time is precious and I need all the help I
can get to maintain my focus.
Although there are hundreds if not thousands of cli programs to
carry out routine tasks, below is a table of the programs I
routinely use:
+---------+-------------------------+
| Program | Category |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Surfraw | Search Engine Interface |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Elinks | Text Based Web Browser |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Lynx | Text Based Web Browser |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Alpine | Email Client |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Mutt | Email Client |
+---------+-------------------------+
| SC | Spreadsheet |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Nano | Text Editor |
+---------+-------------------------+
| VIM | Text Editor |
+---------+-------------------------+
| MPG321 | MP3 Player |
+---------+-------------------------+
| Snownews| Rss Feed Reader |
+---------+-------------------------+
Surfraw, originally written by Julian Assange (of Wikileaks fame)
is a great search tool which interfaces with a variety of different
search engines...the following is from the man-page (somewhat
humorous):
"Surfraw (
http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/) provides a fast unix
command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines
and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista,
dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from
the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms,
placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as
god loving extensions to the shell."
There are a variety of browsers available for the cli, but I
routinely use elinks (
http://elinks.or.cz/) and Lynx (which can
also serve as a Gopher client see
http://lynx.browser.org/lynx.html). These load pages very fast
even from a dial-up connection (like lightning if I run them from
my Unix shell account...the browser strips out all of the ads,
fluff, compiled javascript etc and sends the plain text formatted
page. A real boon on a dial-up connection). As a side note,
people are becoming increasingly fed up with all of the garbage
that comes with loading a typical web page so I suspect that as
time wears on, a healthy number of these sites will be "ad-blocked
into oblivion."
When connected to my Unix shell account, the email clients I use
are Alpine (
https://www.washington.edu/alpine/) very easy to use I
might add and of course Mutt (
http://www.mutt.org/) which I use to
connect to gmail (IMAP).
Snownews (
https://kiza.eu/software/snownews/) is my rss feed reader
of choice. It's interface is very simple. By default, it uses the
Lynx browser to open an article of interest, but other browsers can
be specified through the configuration tool.
Even a spreadsheet is available at the command line. Those of you
who remember Lotus 1-2-3 will find the venerable sc is very
similar. Although I am still trying to get my arms around the use
of this particular spreadsheet, I think it is a valuable addition
to the cli arsenal.
In the realm of text editors there has been an ongoing (good
natured) feud between users of Vim and Emacs. Both editors are
very powerful in their own ways, but my primary experience is with
VIM which I am quite comfortable with. New persons to the cli
would find the learning curve for Nano
(
https://www.nano-editor.org/) very easy to manage.
Although I am probably contradicting myself about the computer
being a tool, not an entertainment device, but how about music?
MPG321 is a simple to use mp3 player with plenty of options
(
http://mpg321.sourceforge.net/). Mplayer is another media player
that is available on most *nix platforms. Mplayer can play just
about any file format and if Svgalib is installed, movies can also
be played.
I use a Linux platform, however most of these programs are
available for Windows as well as Mac. Now atticware can be brought
back to useable life by simply taking advantage of the multitude of
command line tools that are available. Perhaps the cost savings
may be worthy of mention. There are still a few free dialup isp's
out there, but they are a dying breed. There is no lack of low
cost dialup providers with service around $10 per month.
Unfortunately, as time wears on and the lineline networks fall into
decay, the future of dial-up is uncertain. Land line network
upgrades are a thing of the past and it appears the big telcos are
beginning to divest themselves of their landline business in favor
of the more lucrative wireless business.
