Offline preparedness

What?

Yeah, this sounds weird, maybe even prepper-like, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. But I don't think it's so weird if you get a bit of an idea, bascially I have taught myself to use as few applications as possible that unneccesarily connects to the internet, maybe it's me being an old fart, and being used to “the good old days” and maybe it's my situation of having lived in 3 different countries the last 10 years. Not being used to having always on connections, means kind of a freedom for me, I don't need it to get things done, or to keep entertained. This one mostly will be about phone usage, but the same broadly applies to my PC usage as well.

I don't have a data-plan with my phone, which means when I'm out of wifi-range I'm offline, and strangely I've found it to be a good thing for me generally.

Entertainment, podcasts

So through the years podcasts has shown themselves to be something that I really enjoy, I started listening to them in 2006 and still listen to them to this day, and another good thing about them is that they are very timed offline doable, I have set my podcatcher to download my favourite ones as soon as I'm in a wlan, and with the files being on my phone I can enjoy them no matter where I am, and I don't need a connection to be happy and entertained.

Games

I never was a big multiplayer gaming fan, and I still don't am, so I usually keep to my single player games, and emulation, and if a game needs a connection to even start it's a sure goner, It's not that I went out doing this as a start, but exactly that is something that just chrystalized out of how I'm using things.

Reading

For offline reading I mostly keep things on my ebook-reader, which I mostly have with me anywhere I go, but just to be safe I also keep some books on my phone, just so that I can have something to read when I'm not online as well.

Consequences

So the biggest consequences from this is that I tend to keep at least copies of everything that I do offline, even if it's something that I do mainly online, I don't like having to rely on and deal with missing stuff just because I'm unable to connect to the internet at the time being. Now with smartphones this offline online nomad thing is so much easier than before, I used to bring my PSP around with me to listen to podcasts, just because I could use it to connect to free wifi and download some more listening material on the go, and I still fondly remember having a dedicated mp3player with all of my podcasts in it. But since storage and batterylife is usable on phones now a days that's usually all I need to carry along,

Also I'm one of those weirdos going around with a backpack, and there are some things that I usually keep along with me.

So I don't know, maybe I'm stuck back in the older times, or maybe I'm just weird, that's just how I am.