Schadenfreude

Working towards an offline computer

This is a work in process and more a brainstorm than something ready to present.

I don't want to deal with the constant connection that's default now. I don't want my writing, working, relaxing or thinking to be always connected. I want to be able to read, watch, or listen to music without it triggering an update somewhere in a database that I started listening to a certain song at a certain time. I want to watch a film without anyone knowing.

I read an interview years ago where Richard Stallman described his computer workflow as being mostly disconnected, and only connecting 2 or 3 times a day to send/receive emails in batches. I can't find it now but I also remember reading about someone else who had a secretary physically print their emails daily and collect their (handwritten) replies to type up and send.

There's also Neal Stephenson who says:

If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

But I treat these as inspiration, not motivation, because my needs are different. I just want to be left alone. I don't want Spotify using how many times I listened to a song in a day as an advertising campaign, I don't want Google using the wifi networks visible to my phone to determine my location. I don't want Google tying all of my browsing data between my devices via QR codes and using feeding this fine-grained data through LLMs to advertise better. I just want leaving alone.

I've been pondering the idea of an offline-only computer with downloaded resources on it, but for now the inconvenience is too much so I'm settling for an offline-lite existence.

I spend most of phone time in a GrapheneOS profile that can only connect to Tailscale with no wider internet access (TODO: replace Tailscale). Through Tailscale there I can connect to anything running on my own servers, but nothing else. Some of the things this gives me:

On my phone I have Auxio for locally stored music, though I lost motivation here to replace Spotify because I realised I don't listen to music that often anyway.

Locally on laptops I have all task lists in TaskWarrior 2 and time tracking in TimeWarrior, with external tasks (eg. JIRA) synced using BugWarrior. I also have scripts pulling in Google Chats from work to a feed but they aren't currently used much. The next step is to move these onto the server so that even laptops can be offline sometimes.

It's a work in progress and a braindump, but I already find that 90% of my phone usage can be "offline", and that even half of that could probably be eliminated all together.

Realistically I'm realising that this means I don't belong on bearblog