Intermittent internet access

It is common for nomads to have only ocassional access to the internet. One way to deal with this challenge is to remember how things were done on dial-up internet in the 1990s.

The main thing is to be ready when the internet access is available.

• Have your offline email ready to go.
• Update your devices/computers/apps.
• Pull down offline content.
• upload pics and videos
• check in on forums, subreddits, youtube channels, blogs
• etc

The techniques for minimizing email bandwidth also pay off here. Use a POP3 mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird to compose, read, and reply offline. When you get a window for internet access force a Send/Receive.

Gmail also has an extension called Gmail Offline which sends/receives when the connection is available. This method does not save as much bandwidth as the POP3 methods can but may be easier to set up. Note: you must be connected to the net the first time you run Gmail Offline so it can set itself up.

Phone email apps also tend to respond well to intermittent connections.

The impact of the outage will fall mainly on web browsing, since that is a real time, interactive activity. It is also the area where we have the fewest tools to deal with it.

• your browser will allow you to save (non-interactive) pages to your device for later reading.
  • in chrome/chromium right-click the page and choose Save As.
  • in firefox right-click the page and choose Save Page As.
• send pages to your kindle – there are plugins for your browser that will send a cleanly formatted copy of the webpage to your kindle. Of course your kindle will have to connected at the same time so it can receive the file. So bring your reader into that starbucks!
• if you don't have a kindle you can save pages to Pocket or similar offline readers.

Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix, etc, often allow some amount of downloading for future watching. If your device has a microSD card for storage you may want to point the app to it before downloading.

Caveats:

• the number of shows to d/l may be restricted
• the devices to which one can download may be restricted. In particular, rooted/jailbroken devices are often not allowed.
• 'casting to TVs or other devices may be restricted

If you will be watching on a phone you may want to reduce the quality/resolution to save bandwidth. {Prime's “data saver” setting makes for very small downloads and is quite watchable at phone screen size – secessus}

Download YouTube videos with a freeware youtube-dl. You can specify the quality (and therefore filesize). Be nice to your wifi host and don’t download 1080p versions if you don’t need that resolution. YouTube also has a service called Red that will allow you to d/l videos if you have a subscription.

Mosh works well over high-latency and internet connections. Since it is UDP-based it cannot provide tunneling.

If you require tunnelling, autossh can reconnect when connection is broken.

screen and tmux keep shell sessions alive and re-connectable for when the connection is restored.