
Daily Life with the Offline Laptop - UkiahSmith
https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2020-02-18-offline-laptop-v2.html
======
cableshaft
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
...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
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
No affiliation, but I found Dash incredibly helpful for working offline:
[https://kapeli.com/dash](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.

~~~
andrepd
Pity it's mac only

~~~
HuShifang
Check out Zeal, which piggybacks on Dash for Linux and Windows:
[https://zealdocs.org/](https://zealdocs.org/)

~~~
throwaway77384
Funny, I've been looking for something like this, without knowing that I was
really.

Unfortunately I am getting "Content rendering error An unhandled error
occurred in the application. We apologize for the inconvenience!" for the
HTML, CSS and JS references.

edit: That appears to be a bigger issue which has been discussed for some time
by a few people
([https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/1155](https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/1155)).

    
    
      find ~/.local/share/Zeal/Zeal/docsets -name "react-main.*.js" -exec rm -rf {} \;
    
    

here's a fix that worked for me on Manjaro (Linux) for the time being.

~~~
DarthGhandi
Try [https://devdocs.io/](https://devdocs.io/) instead. browser based and
offline*

I refresh it before every long haul flight.

* Uses localstorage and sometimes can be cleared.

------
broabprobe
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...

~~~
ohithereyou
What sort of development do you do on the PowerBook?

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

------
afaik69
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
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
There is an awesome pdf manager and web page capture softwar
[https://getpolarized.io/](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.

------
lostgame
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.

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

~~~
mikekchar
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.

------
lea4c6561
I find [https://devdocs.io/](https://devdocs.io/) very useful for offline
access to Python documentation (and many other languages too)

~~~
zenlot
Or just download official documentation for offline usage:
[https://docs.python.org/3/download.html](https://docs.python.org/3/download.html)

