Becoming Less Dependent On The Internet

• Adam Douglas

• Published Oct 7, 2021
• Revised Dec 19, 2022

• opinion
• #100DaysToOffload #commandline

As years have passed by in the area of computing I’ve noticed that myself and I’m sure many others have become quite dependent upon having access to the Internet. This all comes of course with great benefits and negative benefits of having and using the Internet. We can quickly lookup a business’ store hours, locate an address on various map services, convert a time to another timezone, etc. In this process of using the Internet more we’ve made many tasks more complicated without noticing and have become too dependent on the Internet when we can do it ourselves. We end up using the Internet for various tasks that we truly do not need to use the Internet for. Another way to look at it is we indirectly waste resources such as Internet bandwidth, storage, money, time, etc. I personally feel we should be more independent and should think more on what we are doing in the moment. I find myself using online services at times in a passive manner instead of a more engaged thoughtful manner. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use the Internet, it has great value but let’s try to keep it simple and use what resources we have locally first. In return I feel this will bring on a more meaningful way of life and also could learn something along the way.

One such example I thought about one day is I find myself doing frequently is converting time to another timezone. My first thought is to go to timeanddate.com or time.is or even just type it into a search engine to convert. Now of course these services are great and connivent but they are not truly needed. I also find they end up indirectly making us think less about how to accomplish the task and end up only focusing on the desired results.

In Linux you can easily get or convert a time to another timezone using the command line command date.

Convert Time To Local Time

$ date -d '2021-10-07 18:00 PST'

Fri Oct  8 01:00:00 AM UTC 2021

Get Time In A Specific Timezone

$ TZ=":America/New_York" date

Thu Oct  7 04:27:33 PM EDT 2021

List Available Timezones

Timedatectl command

$ timedatectl list-timezones

File listings

$ ls /usr/share/zoneinfo

Show Current Datetime and Timezone

Date command

$ date

Thu Oct  7 10:30:43 PM UTC 2021

Timedatectl command

$ timedatectl status

Local time: Thu 2021-10-08 04:36:34 UTC
        Universal time: Fri 2021-10-08 04:36:34 UTC
                RTC time: Fri 2021-10-08 04:36:34
                Time zone: UTC
System clock synchronized: yes
            NTP service: active
        RTC in local TZ: no

File listings

$ ls -l /etc/localtime

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 Jun 14 14:46 /etc/localtime -> ../usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC

What ideas do you have that you can do without using the Internet? Feel free to share them by contacting me.

I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting 100DaysToOffload.com.

References

• (timedatectl(1), Arch manual pages
• date(1), Arch manual pages
• Fiber cable wire network, photo by Lucent_Designs_dinoson20, published June 13, 2019, Pixabay
• ls(1), Arch manual pages

Changelog

• Feb 1, 2022
  • correct spelling of the word "dependant"
• Dec 19, 2022
  • change topic
  • add tag commandline
  • remove tags command-line, terminal

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