(Almost) off the grid

Sitting on the deck in front of a lake in the Laurentians north of Montreal, I find myself almost off the grid. There is no cell phone coverage for about 20KM before the driveway, so no 3G wifi hotspot. A rural data wireless provider with antennas on mountaintops usually provides a decent wifi connection, but a power surge destroyed the base station of a radio, and here I find myself reduced to my last 2 lines of communication: satellite TV and an old-school voice landline.

Yes, I did make a dialup connection over the landline during last week: it was 24Kbps, slow even by dialup standards, and modern web pages, even those optimized for lower-speed connections like the HTML version of Gmail, are completely unusable.

Colleagues are covering for technical support responsibilities in civilization, and my brother will drive me this afternoon to the community center, 7KM away. Until then, I find myself myself essentially cut off: no WhatsApp texts, no checking for latest headlines, weather, or trivia, no streaming audio for my airpods.

So here I am typing on a computer in offline mode, to be pasted to the Internet later today. This reminds me of a project I have put off several times: a complete offline web development environment. Hosting a LAMP server is trivially easy, whether on the baremetal of a Linux laptop, or as a vm guest on a Windows laptop, but one must take precautions to be productive offline: I need to install a local copy of the php.net documentation, and I have found some interface code that must be redone to invoke local copies of JavaScript libraries, rather than pulling them in from remote locations at run time.

People tell me that I will benefit from being “unplugged,” that it will relax me. They are mistaken, although I will survive until Monday morning when I return to the city, sustained this afternoon by a half hour of the community center’s free wifi. The rural data wireless base station will be replaced at some point, I hope soon – I will be back in the city on Monday morning, but my Mom spends the summer up here – I hope for her that she will soon get wifi for her iPad.

By the way, here at the community center: wifi is awesome, never take it for granted.