Comment by pryelluw

Comment by pryelluw 11 days ago

7 replies

I went through this already. Lived through a category 5 hurricane that took out the power grid, and antennas (among many other key infrastructure).

I downloaded as much documentation about the technology I relied on as possible. Ma pages, cloning repos, saving websites as HTML, etc. My goal was to have everything I needed in case I had to build my own internet again. Even if it was like cubas version that uses thumb drive based networking.

It worked for the most part. The one downside was having to ration my electricity usage as it was generated by a generator and fuel was not easy to come by.

This taught me that any kind of network requires a robust electrical grid. So, I’d install solar panels with batteries, a backup generator, some wind turbines, and then work on downloading all the documentation needed to make the network work.

mattpallissard 10 days ago

I used to travel across the US a lot. On my laptop I started keeping websites, documentation, base container images, source code for Linux, tools I used, and languages I was programming in for references the languages I was using. This wasn't for emergencies, it was so I could work productively while in transit. (I also tuned the hell out of the Linux power settings on my Lenovo)

I hardly travel anymore but still wind up using all of those local resources. It's zero web searches, next to no latency, and I have the structure memorized. Finding information I need is so fast.

I wish it was more popular to have a local-first mindset when writing software.

yazzku 11 days ago

I think you meant "man pages", but "ma pages" works for me.

sourcecodeplz 11 days ago

I would invest in an M Macbook just for this reason, that battery life is insane even with wi-fi on, imagine no connectivity, should pass 15 hours.

  • mattpallissard 10 days ago

    The latest Lenovo P14s I have running Arch/sway has a crazy long battery life as well. It idles at 3.4W with wifi on. Writing code with an editor and all the fancy LSPS/plugins pushes me to 4W. I can get more than a full days worth of work on a single charge if I'm not doing anything compute heavy.

    That said, it's not out of box like a Macbook.

    • pryelluw 10 days ago

      Good to know. I’m looking to transition into a Linux laptop setup and have been looking into power efficient setups.

      What processor do you have?

      • mattpallissard 10 days ago

        It's a Intel(R) Core(TM) Ultra 7 155H. And as far as power is concerned, spending some time fiddling with tlp will get you a good chunk of the way there. Playing around with different DEs will give different results. Sway is my preference, it's my favorite and has the lowest power footprint. Blacklisting drivers, tuning sysctls and hardware helps as well.

        I'm almost never CPU constrained, so I tend to have everything idled down as much as possible.

        Edit: and just for context, opening firefox and browsing the web right now has me at 9W.

  • pryelluw 10 days ago

    At the time (2017), I was using an intel 2012 MacBook. Battery life was fine. The biggest challenge was not having a useful local search engine. It has prompted me to download lots of models and run them with ollama. I create local knowledge bases. This greatly augments the strategy.