\nSitting on the deck in front of a lake in the Laurentians north of\nMontreal, I find myself almost off the grid. There is no cell phone\ncoverage for about 20KM before the driveway, so no 3G wifi hotspot. A\nrural data wireless provider with antennas on mountaintops usually\nprovides a decent wifi connection, but a power surge destroyed the\nbase station of a radio, and here I find myself reduced to my last 2\nlines of communication: satellite TV and an old-school voice\nlandline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, I did make a\ndialup connection over the landline during last week: it was 24Kbps,\nslow even by dialup standards, and modern web pages, even those\noptimized for lower-speed connections like the HTML version of Gmail,\nare completely unusable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Colleagues are\ncovering for technical support responsibilities in civilization, and\nmy brother will drive me this afternoon to the community center, 7KM\naway. Until then, I find myself myself essentially cut off: no\nWhatsApp texts, no checking for latest headlines, weather, or trivia,\nno streaming audio for my airpods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So here I am typing\non a computer in offline mode, to be pasted to the Internet later\ntoday. This reminds me of a project I have put off several times: a\ncomplete offline web development environment. Hosting a LAMP server\nis trivially easy, whether on the baremetal of a Linux laptop, or as\na vm guest on a Windows laptop, but one must take precautions to be\nproductive offline: I need to install a local copy of the php.net\ndocumentation, and I have found some interface code that must be\nredone to invoke local copies of JavaScript libraries, rather than\npulling them in from remote locations at run time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People tell me that\nI will benefit from being \u201cunplugged,\u201d that it will relax me.\nThey are mistaken, although I will survive until Monday morning when\nI return to the city, sustained this afternoon by a half hour of the\ncommunity center\u2019s free wifi. The rural data wireless base station\nwill be replaced at some point, I hope soon \u2013 I will be back in the\ncity on Monday morning, but my Mom spends the summer up here \u2013 I\nhope for her that she will soon get wifi for her iPad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the way, here at\nthe community center: wifi is awesome, never take it for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … <\/p>\n