After being a customer for a long time, I became aware today of yet one more increase of Internet rates from Spectrum.

This is unbearable. Not only I have to receive the junk mail with scam offers, but I have to see that they actually punish loyal customers. The first increase of 2016 was expected, after the first year promotion went off …for a third time. I had been calling once in a while to get the one-year promotion resetted, but I reckoned that it was time to stop doing so.

And about the junk mail… yeah, TWC is now Spectrum! and let’s promote that Triple Play Crap “for $29.99 each!!”. That deceiving line… why don’t you just put $90 for all three, you pieces of shit? And I am sure that you’ll add every kind of fee afterwards. You fucking scammers.

But this isn’t a rant only. I want to be constructive.

And I think that a month or more without Internet may be a way to improve life. At least, make it a bit more interesting. Funnily, it’s going to be a hard task, as my work is mainly as a programmer, working from home.

It’s really not meant to be “without Internet”. I plan to go every day to the library, and do all I want from there.

Furthermore, I will ran a server in my place, and I am currently:

• downloading a mirror for the Wikipedia, and another for StackOverflow. (if you don’t want to set up your own full featured wikipedia server, you can always use kiwix)
• mass downloading Youtube channels that I’d always liked to go through (mostly educational, French or C++ talks, whatever). youtube-dl makes it extraordinarily easy!
• as for the services that I need running (I had a few things 24/7 that could be accessed from the outside), I’ll just move them to the server that I have colocated (probably the one that is serving this page right now).
• other compulsive data hoarding (using p2p networks, mostly bittorrent -with transmission) with the intention of almost always having what I will need.
• an external with external repositories (Arch Linux, Debian, various source code repos -using git, hg, svn) and some scripts to update when a decent connection is available. I configured the rest of the computers in the LAN to use those repos.

UPDATE: It took me a lot of months to reach a point in which I’d be happy to disconnect. That’s a lot of terabytes of local data. And I did so. It’s definitely doable and can increase productivity, even for a software developer or someone that feels dependent on the Internet.

As stated, I haven’t been nor currently am completely disconnected from the Internet -just from the crappy cable provider. For low bandwidth tasks I tend to use the phone’s LTE (around 100MB a month). For bigger things, scheduling/queueing uploads/downloads (something that actually improves organizational skills) to be run at the public library or a café works.

Honestly, I’d really connect again if there was a decent service! I.e. I’d really give Google fiber a chance if they serviced my area -but no way I’m going back to the likes of Spectrum or Comcast!

To everyone trying to unplug soulless money-grabbing ISPs from their lifes and live partially connected: good luck and godspeed! (it’s worth it)