Dave Taht <davet@teklibre.net> wrote:
    > In this case I just need to get on a couple times a day, download my
    > email, grab a few new music files, get the weather report, and get
    > off. So I really don’t need all that much power for very long, except
    > to surf the web briefly and make a ton of videoconference calls. An
    > hour or two a day, tops.

While IMAP/SMTP-SUBMIT let you do that, you could also run UUCP (which is still practical).
A local caching HTTP cache which knows how and when to override ETAG, and
can do some predictive guesses.  cake means that it doesn't have to get out
of the way of your videoconferences...

But, I think you want a rather small (bits/second) always-on downlink channel
that would let people call you.

    > tidbit - one time recently I was 10 miles out at sea, in a 25 knot gale
    > and 15+ seas trying to write something down important, and I hit the
    > wrong key and the !@#!@@ new apple M1 laptop asked me:

    > “do you want to install siri”

    > "No, damn it, I just want to write stuff. If there’s no friggin
    > internet why on earth do I want to use siri?”

Maybe need to send some Siri programmers to the backside of the moon for a
week!

I also had the idea of sending the Android team on a week-long hike in
data-free hills so they'd understand what it meant to be offline and still
need to have a map and email and ...

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     mcr@sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [