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Ask Slashdot: Living Without Internet At-Home Access?
An anonymous reader writes "I've decided that the internet is no longer a positive influence on my life, and am interested in canceling my service. In the interest of not forgoing all digital conveniences, I plan to set up a small intranet, hosting a few resources that I think I'd like to have access to on a regular basis (e.g. a text dump of Wikipedia). I'll also still have access to the internet at my office, and have easy access to public Wi-Fi at libraries and coffee shops. My questions are thus: Does anybody have any experience living without the internet? What major nuisances did you encounter? What resources should I put on my intranet? Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
Porn
I've got some really sage advice for you, but you won't be able to get it...
loyalty above all, save honor
"I think the Internet contains things which are a negative influence on my life, and I haven't the self-control *not to do those things and go those places*."
There; FTFY.
Sounds to me like you are not living without internet. Just disconnecting it and making it on demand.
"Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
Sanity comes to mind. If the net and you don't get along then, fine, I am completely behind unplugging a little. But you're talking about on;y removing the net from home and then only a little bit. It sounds to me like you're going about this completely backward. Try pin-pointing the parts of being connected that are bad for you and look at reducing or filtering those. What you're doing will involve a lot of trouble and inconvenience and half-measures. It would be much better to set up a filter to block things you don't think you should access or talk to your ISP about changing your account options.
Stage one, preparation. For this you will need one room which you will not leave. Soothing music. Tomato soup, ten tins of. Mushroom soup, eight tins of, for consumption cold. Ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of. Magnesia, milk of, one bottle. Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins. Mineral water, Lucozade, pornography. One mattress. One bucket for urine, one for feces and one for vomitus. One television and one bottle of Valium.
I think the best thing to do is simply try it for a while. This is as easy as unplugging the physical connection to your ISP. Deal with issues as the come up.
I don't fear computers, I fear the lack of them. -I. Asimov
[quote] Does anybody have any experience living without the internet? [/quote]
Is the *internet* really the best place to ask this question?
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
It's been over 6 years since I had any sort of access to the internet in any capacity. I don't find that I have any problems with it. You just spend more money on actually buying porn. Otherwise it's no different.
Does anybody have any experience living without the internet? Yes
What major nuisances did you encounter? Lack of internet
What resources should I put on my intranet? A router hooked up to your ISP
Is there anything I'm overlooking? The usefulness of the internet
In all seriousness, good luck.
please excuse my apathy
Is Saturday really the right time to be asking on the Web for helpful advise from people who have already foregone the Internet except at work?
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
You want to go off the Internet, so your first instinct for advice is to POST TO SLASHDOT?
A) You've come to the wrong place.
B) You'll never make it anyway.
Anyone that's been in the military recently can give you a pretty good of how much of a pain it is, though they are all dealing with far less (no full access at work). Obviously mileage will vary, since some of them have access to wide open internet all the time, and others won't have any for months.
On the carrier, I had access to email pretty much all the time (while I wasn't actively working and the ship wasn't on radio silence), but internet access meant 15-30 minutes on the slowest and most unreliable connection I've ever used. We'd pray that a page would even load, and often it didn't (so no Googling, you need to know exactly where you're going, and don't bother downloading files because they'll fail before they finish). Granted this was for a 2006-07 cruise, and from what I understand they've made some changes since then.
I ran a game server for the department berthing, including one which required SQL and was in development. Prior to that, I hadn't used the software or SQL, and was learning while underway. What I found out, was that not being able to Google an error or download patches and modules was a massive pain. Trying to research anything (an apartment, college, etc) or order anything online was out of the question. I wouldn't ever choose that, even if I cut back on internet.
My point, is that obviously it's entirely dependent on you, your situation, and your usage, and we have no way of addressing your concerns since you haven't even given us a clue of what your concerns are. In general, it's probably whatever you're doing on the internet that's the issue (Facebook, porn, etc), and not access in general. It sounds like you won't be that disconnected anyway, between having access elsewhere, and likely still using a cell phone.
If you need to cut off certain activities, do so. Get someone else involved and have them control access (lock your Facebook profile, set up parental filters for porn, whatever the issue happens to be). Try going to a cafe or somewhere you might normally use wifi, and don't get the password. I do this anyway when I need breaks from the distractions of wifi.
Depends on your criteria for why it's negative in his life. It may very well not simply be the content.
Speak for yourself! Mine turns on unbidden at night and beams images into my brain. That's the only explanation for the queer thoughts that have been running through my brain of late - shameful things like voting for social progressives.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Hey buddy, why not just ask anybody that's older than say 30, "What did you do before you had internet?" Since internet access from the home isn't that old, i'm sure you can find some things to do and resources to use... for example...
Get a phone book.
Buy a map.
Buy a dictionary/thesaurus
Buy stamps, envelopes and practice writing with this invention called a 'pen' or alternatively a 'pencil'.
Do you miss playing FPS games with your friends? Try paintball.
Miss online racing? Try go-kart racing.
Videoconferencing/skype? Use the telephone and look at a photograph of the person you're talking to. That's a printed photo, not flickr.
You know that area in your backyard, that's probably covered in weeds and crab grass? Try cutting it, planting something and watching it grow. It'll be more rewarding than 'gold farming', infact some of the things you can grow in your back yard are edible or attract other forms of life. Setting up a bird feeder is easy.
Oh yeah, and since you don't have the self control to handle internet access, please cancel your cable/satellite service, since you'll fall into this pit of despair called "Jersey Shore."
Does anybody have any experience living without the internet?
Yes, but those people can't see your post to Slashdot.
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I've been through this, a few years back when our DSL took a hit and I had to keep our connectivity up anyway.
Living with a slow 56k modem link between your LAN and the Internet will:
- give you a reversible foretaste of what you're planning. Don't like dialup? You'll hate cold-turkey so much that you might not be at all productive.
- highlight your Internet time-waster habits, because the waits for those pages to load will become obvious. This is called "rubbing your nose in it". For anything that's not essential, you *will* find better things to do, or more efficient variants on the familiar. Setting your mail-lists to daily-digest, for instance.
- make it obvious what Internet resources you'll have difficulty doing without. Keep a log of the ones you keep going back to anyway: they're your reasons not to give it all up.
- change some of your Internet habits right there, because there is no instant gratification, instead you have to wait for everything to finishing downloading. You can dovetail some tasks into those waits, such as, getting a cup of coffee while Google News loads, or doing the laundry while waiting for all the new-format Slashdot comments to be visible, or going shopping while a YouTube video is being sucked in for local replay. You'll get impatient and get off your ass just to keep some momentum going because the Internet isn't doing it for you anymore.
You'll get used to prefetching bulky things you really want on hand, and using LAN storage to make it available for browsing. wget will get a lot of scripted use, particularly the "wget -c" option, because it can take most of week to get a CD ISO in. You'll learn to use local tooling to replace online stuff that isn't always there. Early on, for example, I set up a local wiki and a web calendar, to be visible to every machine on the LAN. Then I wrote CGI tooling to fill in my specific blanks. YMMV.
You will likely do a lot of scripting to automate fetching in things you really want or really need, and transferring out your responses. A cron'd mail-check every 5 minutes will keep up a dialup link that idles-out in 15 minutes. This might include bringing the link up in the wee hours to do downloads when nobody's likely to phone, and dropping it again, ready or not, when the phone line needs to have a phone ready for use.
Dialup will have you looking at your computer less as a source of consumed entertainment and more as a creative workspace. If that's what you're after, dropping to 56k might be enough.
Maybe you are happy with your life, and the internet is the only problem, so ignore this advice if that is the case.
However, if you decide you are stuck in a rut, I think you need to get out of your routine and cutting out the internet isn't going to help. If you are able, sell everything you own, pick a spot on the map you've always wanted to go, and get on a plane and see how long you can make it there. It's only until you let go of your comfort zone that you'll be able to change yourself.
That was my path, of course. Maybe yours is getting a teaching degree and moving to New Orleans, or moving to a shithole apartment in the Bronx and writing a novel, or getting a job on a farm collective somewhere in Utah and rediscovering your body's ability to work, or tending bar in a pub down the street instead of your current job.
In any case, if you are stuck in a series of safe routines that aren't providing you happiness, get out there. You only get one shot. Take it.
It's quite obvious your addiction is the major problem. In your post you even already mention your escapes : 'can internet at work' (and on smartphone and at friends and offline at home). Others here tell you, and other others even also say internet can no longer be socially avoided. It's like telephone has been for 100 years, TV for 50 etc.
Now, my advise from here would be addiction control. Yes, the AA will tell alcoholics to entirely quit. Such hardly ever works. Any cigarette smoker will tell you the same. Smoke 1 cigarette after 5 years of quitting, and you'r hooked up again. Also, again, as others point out: internet is an essential part of modern society, and as such even its addiction needs special treatment.
My [patent pending] proposal for most addicts is: Addiction control. Quit the idea of quitting altogether, as a regular thc, ethanol and nicotine user i can guarantuee you such idea is prone to fail. It comes down to some self-discipline and yes, technology makes it easy. It can help you, morally.
Chances are you have a modern router. Find 'parental settings' or something, and set a time clock. Of course, you can overrule it (and from an addictive point of view i even say: feel free so, to do so, at any time you wish). But the netto effect is: If you do nothing (have this self discipline) your internet will be on between 19:00 and 20:00, enough to check your email after cooking, and shuts down after. In the morning dito, have a 30 minute timeframe to fetch that mail or facebook.
On older routers, just plug in such simple 24h wall-clock.
Also, leave pc on, purposely, to rediscover the stuff we could do with computers for 30+ years (about since home computer was invented, around 80's) without ever using internet. Yes, the good old cassette tapes etc, maybe you have nostalgia to that times? [personally, nostalgia, yes. longing back to it, no. how convenient 'just clicking download' is these days]. Going off-topic here, cause my key point was: it's about addiction control:
Make appointments with yourself. Try to keep to them. Do NOT feel guilty when you don't keep to them, just review the appointments you made with yourself.
gl from a junkie.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Those of us born before 1985 or so can remember we LIVED WITHOUT INTERNET. We got by just fine. We went to libraries and subscribed to periodicals and bought books for information. We wrote letters on paper, used stamps, and waited days for mail turnaround. We read National Geographic for education and other activities. We survived, we liked it, we didn't notice much missing.
No 'net?
Been there.
Done that.
Was nice.
Don't wanna go back.
Pity the person who does.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
George Washington had no internet access -- and now he is dead.
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
How about changing the phrasing to such:
I drink alcohol to excess
and when I am intoxicated I make dangerous decisions
such as
a. blah blah
b. blah blah
c. blah blah
d. driving drunk
Getting rid of the car will make choice "d" more difficult to implement (but not impossible, you could borrow someone else's car before going out).
And you lose the benefits of owning your own transportation.
Without addressing any of the other secondary issues (a, b and c).
And without addressing the primary issue (drinking too much alcohol for your metabolism).
I was reading somewhere that someone with a similar problem implemented a 5 minute delay before he could connect to the internet. The delay filtered out the times he went online just for procrastination, or just "because it was there". I find a lot of times I open a browser because I'm waiting for some long-running process (like 25 seconds) and my mind wanders. Even if I had a 60 second delay, I'd probably do that a lot less.
Similarly, Paul Graham said he uses two computers - one for coding and one that sits across the room connected to the internet. He has to physically get up and move to go online, so it has to be worth doing it. That's enough to block out the procrastination type stuff. More Reading.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Asking the Internet how to go without the Internet? Well, I've heard of weirder things. To explain my subject line, though, don't take it negatively: what I mean by perspective is that you need to take some time off, a vacation, not just from work, but from the Internet, and possibly civilization in general. Go backpacking somewhere where there is no cell service, and don't take a satphone with you. At least a week if you can manage it. Take some time to clear your head and ask yourself: do you really need to forego the Internet completely at home, or could you just make some adjustments to your habits and ways of thinking that will help turn the Internet into a vital tool and put control of your experience of it back in your hands.
Nathan's blog
http://xkcd.com/597/
I give you an hour :p
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I've decided that alcohol is no longer a positive influence on my life, and am no longer going to drink continuously. To prepare for this, I am planning to stock a small cellar with wine, beer and some specialty liquor.
I'll still be drinking at work, and can frequent bars and taverns.
My question is thus: does anybody have any experience living without a steady stream of alcohol? What major nuisances did you encounter? What and how much should I put in my cellar? Is there anything I'm overlooking?
"Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
You're overlooking the irony of asking Slashdot.