Back To The 90s: Lo-Fi Work Setup
Mobile bandwidth is still expensive here in good ol' Germany. If you run out of it, you get throttled to back to the 90ees, which is about 16 kbit/s. You can restock data - or you can continue reading this article and find out a clever and elegant way to work with your throttled connection.
Requirements
First of all, we need a wormhole server, which is a virtual machine sitting on a high bandwidth connection. This can be any VPS.
The VPS used in this example runs Ubuntu. Install the following packages:
Illustration of the setup:
Throttled Connection (16 kbit/s) -> Wormhole Server (100 Mbit/s) -> World
Wormhole
I need a SSH replacement supporting keeping up lo-fi connections. My tool of choice at the time of this writing is mosh.
Mosh supports keeping up connections while switching between networks, a local echo to be able to keep writing while you're disconnected plus getting completely rid of network lags.
80x24 Looking Glass
Sticking to a 80x24 character terminal solution perfectly solves two issues at once: It keeps you focused and the traffic low.
The terminal multiplexer of choice is tmux. But you can use whatever you like, today there are plenty other more advanced solutions to that today.
I use the following tmux.conf to keep my viewing glass small:
set-window-option -g aggressive-resize on
You can find my whole tmux config on GitHub.
Utility Toolbox
The terminal can display anything. Even images. Here's a list of terminal user interfaces (TUI) handy to have:
| App | Usecase |
|---|---|
| chafa | Image Viewer |
| mutt | E-mail Client |
| lynx | Web Browser (text-based) |
| browsh | Web Browser (graphical) |
| weechat | Chat Client (IRC, Matrix, Slack, etc.) |
| tg | Chat Client (Telegram) |
| hx | Editor, IDE |
| vd | Excel like Spreadsheet Explorer |
| tig | Git GUI |
There's a TUI tool for almost everything you usually need, do in a web browser or whatever. Find more here and here.
Screenshots
tbd
Hardware
There's also custom hardware that's meant to downgrade to a minimum. This stuff is called Cyberdecks. I never tried one of these, but it's sure worth a look:
Benefits & Conclusions
80x24 and the TUI tools will help you keep focused.
Your looking glass is always on - even if you turn off your computer. Just reattach to your session and continue where you stopped.
Audio stream playback is not yet possible on my lo-fi setup, which makes video streaming useless.
Last words
Turn on your FM radio to a channel playing 80s music while surfing the lo-fi web.
Enjoy your brand new slowed down digital work environment!