Offline computing: An introduction

I'm starting tonight my first of three night shifts at work--from 7pm
to 7am.  I don't like working at night, it's not good at all for the
health but I acknowledge it gives me spare time to write.  One could
say it gives me more money too, since night hours are supposed to be
better payed.

But once you know that, in my current line of work, it's payed 10% more
by hour, and that the normal hour is 8 euros (minimal legal payement
for an hour in France), it is not what I call "better payed".  So much
for the motivation.  But I digress, this is not why I fired up my
editor.

Anyway, I'll use this opportunity to explain in little thematics posts
in the coming days how I manage to be offline from the Network most of
the time without frustration.

But before doing so, I'd like to ramble about it because publicly
talking of this subject feels weird--at least to me.  Here's why.

When I started to use computers, I didn't have connection to Internet. 
So all the ressources I could find came from CDs bought with magazines,
or the sneakernet.  And one of my struggle was to deal with disk space
and CD-RW to archive all the things I wanted to keep.

My first main access to Internet was when I went to University for the
first time--having Internet at home was too expansive for me back then. 
Thus, for some years, I was using a little USB stick to bring back home
all I found during my digital wanderings--from saved webpages, to mp3s
and softwares.

At that time, I remember reading people on forums explaining how you
could configure PPP to connect or disconnect at given time
automatically, so it didn't explode an arbitrary quota of hours per
day--unless you wanted to pay fortunes in excess of your Internet plan
at the end of the month.

And then, like everyone else, I finally had an unlimited access at home
for a few tens of euros per month.  And, like anyone else, it changed
everything for me.

Now, yet we are many years later from this era, it still feels strange
to me that it became a thing in various smolnet communities to explain
how to go offline, how to "live off the grid" as I read it sometimes. 
Gods, if you read Solène's % gopherhole, you know there was even a
challenge about it this summer!  On many places, we can find posts
explaining why we should do it, or how it's bad that so much programs
have to be connected to function normally, even if it's not mandatory.

Don't misunderstand me though.  I like those posts; they actually
helped me a lot in my own approach for a serene disconnection.  In the
same way, I liked the idea of the said challenge.  I didn't clearly
participate even if somehow I did, not having Internet at home for more
a month.  Finally, I can't agree more on the bad programs design topic. 
As of myself, I don't like that some of them have to be connected to
work even if they don't have to.

I'm not saying either that everyone of us should go full offline, all
the time, and use as little as possible Internet.  I just think that we
should use it consciously for the great tool of communication it is,
without immersing ourselves in it to the point of drowing.

I think it's necessary that the casual internet users and the more
advanced ones too are made aware and/or educated on how to configure
their devices to work offline, how they can do it and what softwares
are good to achieve part of the process.

But it feels weird talking about it because my guess is that it should
be normal to be able to go and stay offline as much as we want to.  And
to do so without the need of howtos and good arguments on why we should
at least try.  To make a poor analogy, it feels like trying to explain
why it's a good thing to not take your car to go buy your bread a block
away, pointing the benefits of daily walking, and how you can achieve
this success!  I mean that should be normal behavior, not the other way
around.

But hey, that's the world we live in.  So I'll make my part and share
the way I do it.  I'll explain what softwares I use and how I keep
locally all the things I need so I can access them easily without any
connection to the Network.  Maybe it'll be usefull to anyone.

In the meantime, have a good night knowing that someone, somewhere,
watch over your dreams.