Ta-tah, 7 days are over.

You can find more reports/thoughts here:

gopher://uninformativ.de/1/phlog/2022/2022-07
gopher://uninformativ.de/1/phlog/2022/2022-08

Here's the amount of time I spent online (hours:minutes:seconds, number
of times I connected):

-   2022-07-31: 00:13:07, 13
-   2022-08-01: 00:26:09, 15
-   2022-08-02: 00:13:23,  8
-   2022-08-03: 00:13:58,  8
-   2022-08-04: <skipped>
-   2022-08-05: 00:26:02, 14
-   2022-08-06: 00:18:03,  7
-   2022-08-07: 00:34:12, 17

More on the 4. of August below.

The "number of times I connected" certainly does not match my behavior
from the 1990'ies, at least not from the early ones. The early pricing
models included a fee *per connection* and it was quite high, so you
certainly didn't go online about 10 times a day. It was more like 1-3
times, if I remember correctly. And maybe not even every day, I don't
remember. It feels a bit like cheating that I didn't account for this.
Then again, this pricing model definitely went away after a while (or
maybe it just got so cheap that I didn't think about it anymore) and
this was well before we had a pricing model with unlimited time/quota.
So I hope it's okay-ish to ignore this.

I have to admit, it also feels a bit like cheating that I didn't limit
myself to 56k modem speed. With my current 50 MBit/s line, I can
download something like a 45 minute youtube video in a very short time.
And then that keeps me occupied for a while. :-) On the other hand, this
time would have been spent in front of the TV in the 1990'ies, so ... I
dunno.

Other people have tried to limit themselves to 56k and at least this
person eventually dropped it, too:

http://tekk.in/oc2.html

I read a bit more through other reports:

-   "Lots of devices want to connect to the internet": This isn't the
    case for me. I use my desktop PC and that's basically it. I
    sometimes switch to my laptop when I want to go outside, but it's
    rare. My mobile phone ... is a phone; no apps or anything. No other
    devices like gaming consoles or smart home stuff. I think this made
    the challenge a little easier for me.
-   "Following the news and falling behind": This didn't happen for me
    at all. I use rss2email for basically everything, news, blogs,
    youtube, whatever. I go online, fetch mail, go offline. It's just a
    few seconds -- and then I can read that stuff in my mail client.
-   "Social media": Go online, fetch my twtxt feeds, go offline. Again,
    just a few seconds. I usually ran my `getmail` script and my twtxt
    client/fetcher at the same time. The challenge really made this
    point obvious: I don't like real-time communication that much.
    Hence, I never started doing these kinds of things in the first
    place, sooo ... basically no need to change anything for the
    challenge. I don't have a mobile phone that goes "bing, bing" all
    the time and I'm very, very inactive on IRC these days.

And finally:

"Is it weird to say that the challenge is almost mundane at this point?"
I felt the same. I think one of the major lessons for me was simply: I
don't really spend that much time online. I usually am connected, but
the line sits idle. This actually came as a surprise to me. But when you
think about it ... Go online, fetch some info, go offline -- and *then*
you process that info in some way. Read the news, watch the youtube
video, read through my twtxt timeline, even reading wikipedia articles
can work that way. Same for the other direction: twtxt replies are put
in a queue and then sent as a whole; it takes quite a long time to write
phlog posts like these and I just do that in a text editor. Why would I
need to be online for any of this?

And yet: It creates mental pressure to see the timer rising. :-)
(Remember, I put up a 7 segment LED display as a tracker.) That's quite
a bit annoying and I'm glad that I don't *have* to keep an eye on my
online time. That was the major pain point about this challenge, so much
pressure. :-)

Oh, one other funny thing: When I started, I had a little sound file
playing every time I connected:

gopher://uninformativ.de/9/phlog/2022/2022-08/2022-08-08--dialup-with-dial.ogg

(The modem sample at the end is real, but the dial is re-constructed
using Audacity. The loudness is also a bit tweaked for my speakers.)

This was cute at first but got *super annoying* real quick. :-) Not only
was the sound file itself annoying, but also that I had to wait for it
to end. That's probably something else that I got used to over the
years: When I want to go online, I can do that *now*. Playing that sound
file adds to the experience, but oh dear, am I glad that I don't have to
listen to that every single time. :-)


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


About that 4. of August.

When I started the challenge, I turned my DHCP client on and off. And
then I started seeing kernel panics. I didn't expect this to be related
with DHCP, so I looked for other issues and ran memtest86 -- which
showed up errors. I now believe this was a red herring, because I
eventually found reports that claim this is a common issue with
memtest86 on some configurations. Still, I was in a pretty bad mood that
day and I wasn't up for anything, so I didn't do the OCC. :-)

Eventually, I switched to iptables: Block all traffic or allow it. Since
then, no more kernel panics.

(I don't feel too good about this either way. Do I have memory issues
now or not? If it's related to DHCP, why does this crash the kernel? I
should probably investigate this issue more ...)