On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 06:11:46PM -0700, Darrell Bellerive wrote:
| I will soon be moving into a house in the rural country.
Nice. I like the countryside too :-). Last night my dad showed me an
article about the company CrossUSA that purposely hires software
people out in the boonies. It's a cool idea but they are only located
in Minnesota and North Dakota right now (which isn't an option for me
at this time).
| Nice place
| except no ADSL or cable Internet services. Until I can get a wireless link
| going, I will be forced to use dial-up Internet access. Residents in the
| area report speeds of 26,000 bps are the norm.
|
| I will be using a 3COM/US Robotics external Courier modem (model #
| 3CP3453) connected to a serial port to hopefully get a reliable link.
|
| Can anyone share some tips, tricks, or favorite applications to increase
| the useability of a dial-up Internet connection?
|
| My Internet needs are very simple:
| email,
Use fetchmail or imapsync or similar tools to automatically download
your mail while you're not watching. Then when you want to read it,
your mail reader can obtain it from the local machine and not be
constrained by the slowness of the dial-up link.
| web cerfing,
Use squid and adzapper. adzapper will save you time by not
downloading the flashy flash, images, and javascript ads that sites
try to bombard you with. I use it even on broadband because the pages
look nicer that way. Also, pages that you visit frequently can be
cached by squid thus eliminating the dial-up bottleneck. Patience
will also be needed here since web surfing is generally an interactive
activity.
I suppose if you tend to download stuff, you might want to make a list
of things you want to download and then download them all at once when
you leave your machine. For example, while browsing you can keep an
editor open and paste links to ("large") files you want to download
in the editor. When you are done and going to leave for dinner, bed,
or whatever take the list of URLs and run wget with all of them. That
way wget can sit there while you're doing something else and download
the files. If you download them while you're still surfing, you'll
end up dividing your bandwidth between the interactive surfing and the
download which makes the interactive part slower than if you weren't
doing the download.
| and keeping my Debian stable system up to date.
Use a cron job such as
@daily root aptitude update >/dev/null && aptitude -d -y upgrade >/dev/null
(I put this in /etc/cron.daily/LOCAL) to download new versions of
packages while you are sleeping. Then when you are at your system you
can run aptitude and choose to install the ones you want to install.
At installation time you won't need to download anything since it will
already be cached from the download during the night.
HTH,
-D
--
If your life is a hard drive,
Christ can be your backup.
www: http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/ jabber: dman@dman13.dyndns.org
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