Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

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Many moons ago I was on a constrained internet connection -- I set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.

I had like 2KB/s.

This made most of the internet unusable, but it turns out the parts I care about are text. So I just browsed it through a text browser.

This didn't really work either, because it turns out web protocols don't work very well over 2KB/s.

So I browsed the internet by connecting to a $1 VPS (very fast internet!) over Mosh (which is like SSH, but more efficient and resilient). So that way, it would only send the actual bytes of text to me.

I mostly browsed HN and the linked articles at that point.

The browser that rendered HN the best in those days was w3m. I remember it had indentation and even mouse / scrolling support. I tried lynx too and it was good too, but I went with w3m in the end.

I see w3m hasn't been updated in 15 years, but it's probably still better for reading HN, whose UI hasn't changed for longer than that! I will have to give them both a spin :)

Yeah mosh works really well in those kinds of scenarios. My provider once had an outage where they dropped 50% of all packets, which rendered most of the internet completely unusable. I was able to connect to my VPS via mosh (it took 6 attempts since it uses SSH for the initial handshake), and then mosh + w3m worked essentially the same as if no packet drops even existed. Feels like magic

For HN there's gopher://hngopher.com and for the main web, links preserves the cascaded formatting for threads. Yes, I used mosh with 2.7 KB/s too, against a pubnix, but I used gopher too for tons of services. Thanks to bitlbee I could talk with my SO and relatives against Telegram and https://brutaldon.org allowed me to read posts at Mastodon.

And, well, gopher://magical.fish it's unbeatable.

> set up a repeater by hanging an old phone over my curtains so it could catch Wifi from the cafe across and connected to the phone's internet over bluetooth.

I had no idea this was possible. Can you explain why this works? Sounds fascinating.

Basically you are making a network connection via bluetooth. Depending on the OS you drive, there's probably a guide such as [1] to set up bluetooth via the modem adapter to act as an internet connection.

Of course it relies on both devices being able to create and maintain a good bluetooth connection.

It would be nicer if phones could run two wifi networks at the same time, allowing a mix of leach or hotspots but I guess in practical terms it's only one in a thousand type of demand.

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/internet-on-laptop-with-a-bluetooth...

Oh I see. So you technically could have placed the laptop where the phone was to get a connection, but it was in an awkward location so placing the phone there instead and setting up a hotspot was better.

These days, I wonder if it'd be better to just sic a LLM API on it and have it stream you the text summary back?

Ah yes. I remember having to do something similar. My connection was via 3G on an old Sony Ericsson K750, which was acting as a Bluetooth modem.

I think I did manage to get about 5k/s by placing it at various points around the room, but it was mostly dropped packets and 1k down.

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