If the material on this site seems a bit empty or imprecise these days, it’s because I’m completely offline now. I’m at my new location, and many of the amenities (read: Internet access) are still spotty.
Life offline isn’t as bad as I had anticipated. After all, I do still technically have access to news, etc., while at work or from public sources.
But judging by my previous experience in getting Internet service started, I am anticipating a delay of anywhere from two weeks to a month, before I’m fully online and running top speed.
But this time I had the benefit of preparation, so I’ve made sure to download a lot of distros — for both upper- and lower-end hardware — to give me something to do, and something to write about.
And of course, I was lucky to have friends with large DVD collections, so I have borrowed some of theirs to keep me occupied.
Perhaps the oddest part of my new arrangement is the lack of open network connections. Perhaps that’s just bad luck, but for those who were about to suggest piggybacking off a local network, pickings are slim.
And most of those appear to be encrypted. Wireless encryption is nothing intimidating, but no, I won’t be cracking my new neighbors’ networks, just to check my e-mail.
Like I said, I can get online at the office and take care of whatever needs attention, through the course of a normal work day. And that’s enough for now.
P.S.: Written at 150Mhz, because the Mebius has a USB port and I can move this file off that way. Floppy disks? Well, the office machine doesn’t have a floppy drive. To me, that’s a shortcoming. 🙄
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I wonder what you use to watch those DVDs. Bet it’s the Mebius.;)
Yeah, well I wonder what K’s work computer is running!
kmandla, always pushing the boundaries of minimalism.
Going without a GUI wasn’t spartan enough for you, eh?
Think of all the apps you no longer need when you don’t have an Internet connection!
Browsers are such resource hogs. 😉
I once hooked up my windows mobile phone in sync mode to my ubuntu laptop. It immediately recognized it as a modem and boom – internet connection established. I was completely blown away.
Under a native environment (read: Windows XP) this needs the install of the 50 MB+ active sync program. In Ubuntu it was allready built in – fantastic job.
I wonder if cell phone tethering wouldn’t be a viable alternative for your modest blogging needs.
needs the hideously large networkmanager
plus I’m not sure is kmandla has a phone they could tether
Well, ‘m sure that the automation of the process isn’t something that could be done on the cli right now. But setting it up manually should work somehow.
I’m pretty sure NetworkManager doesn’t automate it, it makes the connection to the phone. NetworkManager isn;t a wrapper, it is a userspace network handler.
I think you are completely right.
I did a bit of googling and well, it seem as if you plug in your cellphone via USB in sync mode, most of them get recognzed as a modem. Networkmanager jsut sees it pop up and tries to connect to that.
Without nm you just run dmesg to see where it is located and then you can connect to it via pppd. A script might automate that on a cli based laptop.
aircrack is your friend 😉
….. ok, ok, don’t look at me that way XD
hm how about carrying your virtual machines on usb to the work, and doing all the apt-get, pacman and prt-get you need there?
Hey, now you can live like Richard Stallman!