Off-line developing during an intercity trip in 2019

No wifi on laptop image

As you might imagine from the title, I am at the moment of writing this article sitting in a train from Berlin to Hamburg. For those of you who have never been in Germany...we do have WIFI on the trains here, but contrary to what you might expect it is really bad. (And if it is sometimes fast enough, you get only 200mb of traffic <= Thanks to mac address randomization that can be bypassed)

Wait, what? Bad WIFI on trains in the first world industry nation Germany? Yes, even during my travel on a train in Thailand I had way better WIFI than I ever experienced in the German trains. There are two main factors for that:

But enough ranting about the WIFI in here (that is BTW current non existent)

OK sorry one more thought: Looking around me I see a lot of people in nice suites working on there laptops. Imagine them earning 60€/hour and they need double the time for a task, because the WIFI is so weak. Assuming there are 100 (conservative calculation) of such people on a train. So during this single trip from Berlin to Hamburg (2h) there is 60€ * 100 * 2 = 12 000€ of wasted human capital....better not tell that any company paying their employees the train ride and the “work time” during this trip.

Actually this article is about tech

I experience this not the first time, but why am I triggered this time that much, that I decided to write a blog post about this topic? As web developer I am currently working on a live chat project (gramchat.me – please be kind, the landing page would be finished if I actually could work here) where I wanted to finish the landing page & documentation during this trip.

Now I experience myself sitting here and my laptop, normally the device paying my rent, is not more than a dump black box....close to every work flow I have does requires the Internet, I can't work off-line. grrrrr

How could that happen? Normally I am always at places with good WIFI or mobile network (Berlin Big City Life) and so some bad habits sneaked in:


Short interruption: Because of other issues I had to change to another (slower) train. This one does not have WIFI at all...so now next level shit.


I sit here and have basically three options what to do:

So here I am writing the article :D

Prevent such a situation in the future

So the biggest fail, is me not being prepared for off-line usage of my devices. So what will I do to prevent this in the future? Technical problems need technical solutions:


Oh girl, another thing came up: I have to show my train ticket, wich is a PDF attached to an email...that I never downloaded. What is going on here...my life goes nuts without Internet. Download your important tickets/documents


So overall this trip showed me how depending I am on the Internet and that I should change that. Please see this post as work in progress as I will update and add off-line tools when I get to know them and have more experience with them.

Overall there is one main learning: Download stuff instead of only opening it in the browser. (Same here with my university pdfs...never did download them for offline use, so no research for me no)

If someone was in this situation him or herself and found out other tools that helped I would love if you share them with me, so that I can introduce them into my stack and update this article.

So now I hope that the Edge Internet connection I have on my mobile Hotspot right now will be enough to upload this article :'D

Wish you an awesome (online) time!

Simon

p.S. Another thing I found: Check what applications are using Internet on your machine, so that if you only have low bandwidth this important resource does not get sucked away by an open Skype or so.


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