So, my laptop (where I seem to be doing most of my writing these days) seems to have developed a wee-glitch. It seems, that (somewhat randomly) the system just freezes irrevocably whilst, get this, scrolling on twitter.com. No really. I'll be minding my own business, and suddenly firefox freezes, I can't interact with the window manager, I can't kill the window server and start over, I can't switch to another virtual terminal to fix things, nada. Hold down the power button and restart. Interestingly throughout all of this the mouse still works, as if to taunt me.
I've not been able to produce the freezing in any other application, and I'm concerned that it might be hardware related (disk access has been sort of weird lately, it's an older computer,) it could also be related to some of the dependencies in Awesome 3.3. I'm waiting for things to sort of even out on a number of fronts before I assign blame. (And switch distributions of GNU/Linux.)
My response, of late, has been to just avoid the web entirely. This isn't a huge problem, as I try and avoid the web as much as possible. I mean, I lead a very networked/digitally connected life, but it turns out that most of it isn't web-based on a day-to-day working sort of way.
The experiment, then is to see just how far in my avoidance of the web. The "information fast" isn't a startlingly new idea, and I'm sort of interested in seeing how this affects my computer usage on the whole. Information fasts work, by forcing/allowing you to take a cold turkey break from the information that you consume and then re-evaluating your information consumption habits and seeing what's worth sticking with and what's not. So basically I'm using this as an exercise to see: What changes, if I say "ok now web-browser," what tools and workflows do I develop, and is this a better way to work?
Hints and suggestions would be helpful. There are some practices that I need to get set up with, and using more effectively. Twitter and identi.ca via IM (check). Offline, multi-computer RSS reading. Offline access/browsing to common resources (eg WikipediaFS and other fuse resources; YaOddMuseMode for the EmacsWiki, some way of reading c2 wiki and so forth.)
We'll see where that leads me. Do people have suggestions for tools in this (and other directions)? Has anyone done this before? Would anyone else be interested in doing the fast with me?
I look forward to hearing from you!
Update: I had a non-twitter related crash. I was browsing, loading a new page and scrolling on the existing page. Bam! I have, in response: upgraded the think-pad touch-point (or whatever) drivers to their jaunty versions as the sources were disabled during the upgrade.
I've also, in this vein, installed and have a fairly effective copy of w3m, an emacs-accessible browser, running. While I don't think this is the way forward forcing myself to use an editor-based browser, might allow me to focus more effectively and rely on the Web more for information than for entertainment. As it should be!