Title: Life with an offline laptop
       Author: Solène
       Date: 23 August 2019
       Tags: openbsd life disconnected
       Description: 
       
       Hello, this is a long time I want to work on a special project using an
       offline device and work on it.
       
       I started using computers before my parents had an internet access and
       I was enjoying it. Would it still be the case if I was using a laptop
       with no internet access?
       
       When I think about an offline laptop, I immediately think I will miss
       IRC, mails, file synchronization, Mastodon and remote ssh to my
       servers.
       But do I really need it _all the time_?
       
       As I started thinking about preparing an old laptop for the experiment,
       differents ideas with theirs pros and cons came to my mind.
       
       Over the years, I produced digital data and I can not deny this. I
       don't need all of them but I still want some (some music, my texts,
       some of my programs). How would I synchronize data from the offline
       system to my main system (which has replicated backups and such).
       
       At first I was thinking about using a serial line over the two
       laptops to synchronize files, but both laptop lacks serial ports and
       buying gears for that would cost too much for its purpose.
       
       I ended thinking that using an IP network _is fine_, if I connect for a
       specific purpose. This extended a bit further because I also need to
       install packages, and using an usb memory stick from another computer
       to get packages and allow the offline system to use it is _tedious_
       and ineffective (downloading packages and correct dependencies is a
       hard task on OpenBSD in the case you only want the files). I also
       came across a really specific problem, my offline device is an old
       Apple PowerPC laptop being big-endian and amd64 is little-endian, while
       this does not seem particularly a problem, OpenBSD filesystem is
       dependent of endianness, and I could not share an usb memory device
       using FFS because of this, alternatives are fat, ntfs or ext2 so it is
       a
       dead end.
       
       Finally, using the super slow wireless network adapter from that
       offline laptop allows me to connect only when I need for a few file
       transfers. I am using the system firewall pf to limit access to
       outside.
       
       In my pf.conf, I only have rules for DNS, NTP servers, my remote
       server,
       OpenBSD mirror for packages and my other laptop on the lan. I only
       enable wifi if I need to push an article to my blog or if I need to
       pull a bit more music from my laptop.
       
       This is not entirely _offline_ then, because I can get access to the
       internet at any time, but it helps me keeping the device offline.
       There is no modern web browser on powerpc, I restricted packages to
       the minimum.
       
       So far, when using this laptop, there is no other distraction than the
       stuff I do myself.
       
       At the time I write this post, I only use xterm and tmux, with moc as a
       music player (the audio system of the iBook G4 is surprisingly good!),
       writing this text with ed and a 72 long char prompt in order to wrap
       words correctly manually (I already talked about that trick!).
       
       As my laptop has a short battery life, roughly two hours, this also
       helps having "sessions" of a reasonable duration. (Yes, I can still
       plug the laptop somewhere).
       
       I did not use this laptop a lot so far, I only started the experiment
       a few days ago, I will write about this sometimes.
       
       I plan to work on my gopher space to add new content only available
       there :)