Offlife
(Actually Off- & Onlife)
When I first got on the internet, pre-web in 1992, I had a 9.6 and then a 14.4 dial up modem. Since you dialled up, it meant you paid for the time you were connected, like a phone call.
Pretty soon, you got the routine of downloading your emails and the Usenet groups you subscribed to, maybe copied some posts on gopher (if anyone remembers gopher?) and pasted them into text files. Then you promptly logged off, in order to save your phone bill.
tom jennings posted something on Mastodon, which I replied to. It was about about the “age verification” happening and finding himself “increasingly unwilling to cooperate with anything on the Internet requiring unnecessary logins, and lately, onerous (subjective) cookies requirements.”
In my reply, I mentioned that I find myself increasingly in flight mode, i.e. simply offline. I come from an era where we stored documents, texts, books, images, even music on our own computers, disks, CD-ROMs and later USB thumb drives. It’s a habit I never really left, more like the opposite, I think I have refined it, partially thanks to something called portableapps. I’m simply not hooked on streaming and subscription services.
Here is a basic overview over things I use and how I use them, when in offline mode.
- LibreOffice For producing my own material, be it presentations, texts, etc.
- SciTe and Notepad++ editors Cleaner interface for creative writing and working on notes. No, I mean when I myself am creative, not using generative LLMs.
- KeePassXC A password manager that is not an online service, but a program on your computer. KeePassDX is the Android app version. I do not use it only as a PW manager for e.g. my OpenPGP/GnuPG encryption keys, but also as a notebook that is automatically encrypted. This file mainly contains shorter or simpler notes. For longer notes, I use Joplin.
- Joplin My main notetaker. It is not just for personal notes, but works as a personal library, where I save interesting articles and other texts on various topics, from sciences, politics to all kinds of curiosities. There is always something interesting to read in this collection. [Technical side note: In order to easily copy and paste something online into this, I use the Reader setting, Ctrl + Alt R, on my LibreWolf browser.] Joplin uses Markdown, which nowadays is the default for how I take down notes.
- VLC For listening to music (MP3s) or watch videos (MP4s) offline.
- Various e-book readers (Sumatra, Calibre, For Android: ReadEra, PocketBook) The EPUB format is great, and with Calibre, you can even make your own books. While I use Markdown a lot for texts in general, EPUB is probably the second most common format for my texts and books I buy, rather than PDFs, if doable.
- OpenPGP/GnuPG, Veracrypt and other encryption software For encrypting texts, messages, storing personal documents, etc.
In addition, there are so many more programs you use offline and that are open source/FOSS; Gimp, Krita, Blender or Inkscape if you are more artistically inclined than I am, OBS Studio and Shotcut for creating your own videos, edit or mash up already existing ones, and more.
I am sure this does not work for everybody, perhaps especially if one is used to Tiktok, Instagram, Spotify and constantly being online. But to me, it doesn’t just work, but I find joy in it.