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Ask HN: Living with seriously limited Internet?

11 points by paulryanrogers ↗ HN
Got some family struggling with very limited Internet service in the Caribbean. Recent storms and financial challenges mean living with only mobile access at home and relying on the Wifi generosity of local businesses. Appears to make life increasingly difficult as OS updates become impossible monsters, huge page loads crawl, and gaming even on consoles won't accept entirely offline lifestyles.

Sending a few portable HDDs hasn't really helped much since so much must be downloaded directly by devices themselves. Offline installers appear to be an endangered species.

Are there other tools, ideas, or free/low cost solutions I can pass along?

8 comments

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ioddly
Not sure how doable this is with mobile, but I would say blocking ads + javascript and teaching them to whitelist sites in case it's needed for functionality.
DoreenMichele
It will depend in part on what they are doing. I had limited internet when I was homeless and had to cope with doing stuff on a tablet in the evening with battery power and no internet.

Find games that can be played offline.

Use a URL to PDF converter for things you want to read.

Favor lightweight websites and lightweight apps.

Get a video downloader and download videos you like watching repeatedly, like music videos.

Clear your cache regularly and delete stuff you aren't really using.

Try several different browsers to compare performance. After finding one that works well, uninstall all others that can be uninstalled. Some mobile browsers have an optimization option that will help.

sicelo
how does clearing cache regularly help?
DoreenMichele
It is not unusual for a device to be laggy because of storage issues. This can compound any problems from download speeds.
O_H_E
I do think that clearing cache is a very bad advice for a limited internet situation, as cache is data loaded once and being saved for "possible" later use if you loaded the same page again
ladberg
You can pretty easily download Wikipedia and send it over on a flash drive. I feel like having a local copy of it would alleviate a lot of my personal use for internet all the time. There are a lot of other static websites that I browse and could easily get local copies of (documentation, forums with useful info, other wikis, PDFs of books).
O_H_E
I find "uBlock Origin"[0] very effective ad-blocker (in some cases it can decrease page load by more than half)

Opera, of Firefox with "uBlock Origin" would be a very good choice for phone browsing

Endless OS [1], a free debian based disrto that comes preloaded with so much things, actually their focus/mission is to target situations pretty much like the one you described

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

[1] https://endlessos.com/

detaro
If Windows systems are needed, there are ways to distribute updates for them offline: http://www.wsusoffline.net/.

On Linux you can of course do that too - and if you purge software you don't use, I'd assume need less update volume overall.

Go for DRM-free games that don't require forced updates or online connectivity where possible.