A week of Web

One thing I love about Gemini is how refreshing some of the things I read can be. The discussions on Small Internet, Offline First or the Dumbphones are great and make me reconsider many things.

I enthusiastically woke up one day thinking "aaah, fuck the web!" so I started monitoring what exactly I do on the Web for one or two weeks. Not sure why though, do I want to cut it, or use offline/alternative services?

Anyway, in no particular order, a week of sending HTTP missives:

A lot of Wikipedia 📖

Checking French dictionaries 🇫🇷

Translating French and English on Word Reference ✍️

Checking Debian packages, sometimes it's nicer than raw APT! 🍥

Youtube, often actively but sometimes passively for music I don't have on my computer or at work 🎬

Coursera, always erratically following a few classes there 🎓

Linear for project planning, completely superfluous 📈

Developer docs: mostly Python but due to a new job some Typescript/React and all that jazz 🖥️

Checking out some links from various feeds 🗞️

Checking out some links from my friends! 😊

Occasional online public service access 🏢

Occasional torrent trackers access ☠️ 🦜

And you guessed it, Emojipedia ✨

Now I'll decide what to do with some of them: cut it ✂️ , look for an offline-first alternative 🍃, reduce it 👀 or it's fine 👍, and I don't know 🤷.

Wikipedia is a great resource, and the website is light enough. For offline usage though there are a lot of possibilities to consider, but databases are several GB for each language, does downloading them really save bandwidth in the end? 🤷

French dictionaries, I'm done with that! Now stealing trea- erhm I mean royalty-free XML dicts are my best friends. 🍃

Translations: Word Reference is very good not only to provide the numerous possible translations of words but also to understand idioms, and the forum is often helpful. Not sure what to do with that one yet. 🤷

Youtube: I'm going back to downloading most of my music because I hate streaming. To actively watch videos I started to use the Cloudtube instance hosted by Cadence, which is way more lightweight and does not bother you with ads, interrupting alerts and other mischiefs. Might host one later! 👀

Linear: not sure what the hell I'm doing here. I used it professionally and it's fine, but for less formal stuff it does not compete with a text file. Logging off! ✂️

Developer docs: for Python now I use a simple bash one-liner function which opens the command-line help for whatever module or function I typed. It could be improved a lot but the next step should be instead to download the documentation entirely (what format? HTML, PDF, text?) and just C-f through it. For frontend languages it's not simple, but if not for work they can go transpile themselves. I still need the occasional Stack Exchange research for things I'm not yet familiar with but I tend to rely less on it. 🍃

All the rest is occasional and fine by me. I can cut them for days or weeks without issues. 👍

That's it! Don't you want to cut some Web ties as well now?

Links:

Wikipedia database download

Cloudtube+NewLeaf instance hosted by Cadence