Old Computer Challenge - Day 1, Look Mum: No Computer

I did not expect to use a computer today, nor spend more than a couple of minutes connected to the internet on my smartphone. I was wrong!

It's a special day in France, Bastille day, a public holiday. Every year, we invite a bunch of friends and organize a home party. This year was no exception.

I usually spend the morning grocery shopping and cooking with my partner. The afternoon chatting and spending quality time with my friends. The night playing board games.

I love this holiday!

Grocery-wise, we organize ourselves in a "auberge espagnole" style AKA. bring your own food. Basically, every guest is expected to bring something, depending on their income and spare time. Meaning either a homecooked meal, either some booze/soft drinks, either some dessert.

With so many guests, some level of collaborative organization is required, you can't plan everything by yourself. We use a Signal chat group coupled with an etherpad collaborative document to implement the said organization.

This is where the internet usage unexpecteadly gone over the roof: you need a continuous internet connection to use these two tools.

While grocering shopping, I was probably looking on the etherpad on my phone for the 1/4 of the time I was in the supermarket. Knowing I stayed there at least 1h30, I spent at least 25 minutes staring at my internet-connected phone.

Add to that the time spent reading and sending group chat messages, we probably easily reach 40 to 50 minutes spent online on my phone. I sadly do not have a tool to get a precise number.

I came back home and started cooking. This is where a second realization hit me: I can't cook a celebratory meal without having access to the home wiki. This is where we keep all our receipes.

I don't cook these meals frequently enough to remember how to make them.

The home wiki is hosted on a machine sitting in my office, meaning in the home LAN. It's not exposed to the internet. Does it count as internet usage? For the sake of convenience, we're going to assume it does not count as online time :P

The rest of the day has been spent offline.

What really strikes me here is this hidden online dependency. Now we have a continuous internet connectivity not only on computers but also on our smartphones, we built a fair share of always online-habits.

I really did not expect to spend more than 5 minutes online when I woke up this morning. I ended up spending almost an entire hour connected.

I did not do any hobby programming. I only used the old computer to write this article via Emacs. I'm pretty happy about the setup. Boot time aside, the computer is more comfortable than my modern X250.

I forgot how good the X200 keyboard is. Lenovo really went downhill keyboard-wise. It's a sad thing to see.

I don't expect to use my computer or my phone tomorrow. But who knows, maybe I'll be wrong once again!

See you probably on Monday!