Ask Slashdot: Living Without Internet At-Home Access? 462
An anonymous reader writes "I've decided that the internet is no longer a positive influence on my life, and am interested in canceling my service. In the interest of not forgoing all digital conveniences, I plan to set up a small intranet, hosting a few resources that I think I'd like to have access to on a regular basis (e.g. a text dump of Wikipedia). I'll also still have access to the internet at my office, and have easy access to public Wi-Fi at libraries and coffee shops. My questions are thus: Does anybody have any experience living without the internet? What major nuisances did you encounter? What resources should I put on my intranet? Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
Sanity check (Score:2, Interesting)
"Is there anything I'm overlooking?"
Sanity comes to mind. If the net and you don't get along then, fine, I am completely behind unplugging a little. But you're talking about on;y removing the net from home and then only a little bit. It sounds to me like you're going about this completely backward. Try pin-pointing the parts of being connected that are bad for you and look at reducing or filtering those. What you're doing will involve a lot of trouble and inconvenience and half-measures. It would be much better to set up a filter to block things you don't think you should access or talk to your ISP about changing your account options.
Reference Materials (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Travel (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe you are happy with your life, and the internet is the only problem, so ignore this advice if that is the case.
However, if you decide you are stuck in a rut, I think you need to get out of your routine and cutting out the internet isn't going to help. If you are able, sell everything you own, pick a spot on the map you've always wanted to go, and get on a plane and see how long you can make it there. It's only until you let go of your comfort zone that you'll be able to change yourself.
That was my path, of course. Maybe yours is getting a teaching degree and moving to New Orleans, or moving to a shithole apartment in the Bronx and writing a novel, or getting a job on a farm collective somewhere in Utah and rediscovering your body's ability to work, or tending bar in a pub down the street instead of your current job.
In any case, if you are stuck in a series of safe routines that aren't providing you happiness, get out there. You only get one shot. Take it.
Addiction control (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite obvious your addiction is the major problem. In your post you even already mention your escapes : 'can internet at work' (and on smartphone and at friends and offline at home). Others here tell you, and other others even also say internet can no longer be socially avoided. It's like telephone has been for 100 years, TV for 50 etc.
Now, my advise from here would be addiction control. Yes, the AA will tell alcoholics to entirely quit. Such hardly ever works. Any cigarette smoker will tell you the same. Smoke 1 cigarette after 5 years of quitting, and you'r hooked up again. Also, again, as others point out: internet is an essential part of modern society, and as such even its addiction needs special treatment.
My [patent pending] proposal for most addicts is: Addiction control. Quit the idea of quitting altogether, as a regular thc, ethanol and nicotine user i can guarantuee you such idea is prone to fail. It comes down to some self-discipline and yes, technology makes it easy. It can help you, morally.
Chances are you have a modern router. Find 'parental settings' or something, and set a time clock. Of course, you can overrule it (and from an addictive point of view i even say: feel free so, to do so, at any time you wish). But the netto effect is: If you do nothing (have this self discipline) your internet will be on between 19:00 and 20:00, enough to check your email after cooking, and shuts down after. In the morning dito, have a 30 minute timeframe to fetch that mail or facebook.
On older routers, just plug in such simple 24h wall-clock.
Also, leave pc on, purposely, to rediscover the stuff we could do with computers for 30+ years (about since home computer was invented, around 80's) without ever using internet. Yes, the good old cassette tapes etc, maybe you have nostalgia to that times? [personally, nostalgia, yes. longing back to it, no. how convenient 'just clicking download' is these days]. Going off-topic here, cause my key point was: it's about addiction control:
Make appointments with yourself. Try to keep to them. Do NOT feel guilty when you don't keep to them, just review the appointments you made with yourself.
gl from a junkie.
Just institute a mandatory delay to connect (Score:4, Interesting)
I was reading somewhere that someone with a similar problem implemented a 5 minute delay before he could connect to the internet. The delay filtered out the times he went online just for procrastination, or just "because it was there". I find a lot of times I open a browser because I'm waiting for some long-running process (like 25 seconds) and my mind wanders. Even if I had a 60 second delay, I'd probably do that a lot less.
Similarly, Paul Graham said he uses two computers - one for coding and one that sits across the room connected to the internet. He has to physically get up and move to go online, so it has to be worth doing it. That's enough to block out the procrastination type stuff. More Reading. [paulgraham.com]
Re:No Carrier (Score:5, Interesting)
I was lucky in a sense... My own family has been extremely supportive by not drinking ever around me. They don't need to, by now I'm very comfortable around people who drink. My in-laws never stopped drinking around me but the general consensus was that they "admired me for sticking to it". I still am convinced that in reality they didn't admire me for it and it was just a way to encourage me, but it's a way to show support.
As for everywhere else, well... That was easy. I got nabbed drunk driving (2.2 promille) and speeding (184km/h on their clock). I got my license revoked for a few months and had to explain myself in court. As this was the first offense (ahem, yeah, first time caught in 15 years would be a more apt way to put it), I got my license revoked for 22 months, but on probation. So, I'm free to drive, but should I get caught again (speeding or drinking) within the next five years, I get the 22 months plus whatever the new offense brings me. So, people get that story as for why I don't drink: "I'm on probation, I can't drink". That generally gets accepted.
That said, I got caught in an alcohol control yesterday, and while I didn't drink anything, I still was extremely stressed.
Re:Been there, done that, so true. (Score:4, Interesting)
To be fair, the world has changed as the internet has grown.
The internet has greatly helped to shut down stores all over the place, has severely reduced the choices provided in the big-box-stores that remain, etc.
Before the internet, I'd drive to Blockbuster and rent a game or a movie a couple times each week.. Blockbuster is doing poorly, it's small competitors are nearly gone, and now even it's big competitors like Redbox don't have new movies for months.
Both Broadcast TV and Cable TV was much higher quality. Though we had fewer channels, there was far more worth watching. No, this isn't just nostalga.
Radio has become a wasteland precisely because things like Shoutcast and Pandora are so very superior.
You'll have a hard time finding a record store these days. Maybe Walmart or Target has a CD you want, maybe it doesn't. It probably doesn't...
When your computers need replacement parts, well, I hope your boss doesn't mind you wasting a lot of time shopping, because you're not going to find that stuff in stores these days.