It’s probably unrealistic to try to mash together mosh and DeepTabNine or something, but if you spend a lot of your time working in Emacs, have you tried using its many remote-file-editing capabilities to run it locally rather than on the remote box? That greatly reduces the impact of any network issues.
I should have done this years ago.
Working from my third floor bedroom connected to wifi in the basement, in a house with seven other people who might all be streaming video at once, with a workflow that is built entirely around being ssh’d into a remote server, this is just amazing.
A few dozen hours at most spent practicing your touchtyping is also probably something you would’ve benefited from doing years ago, but still would now.
I’ve considered it, and have done similar things before, but I’m also really worried about touching the networking setup at all in any way because of how dependent we are on it right now. The likelihood of breaking something is low, but the benefit if I succeed isn’t all that high.
Ethernet cable is way more reliable than WiFi (a major reason I install it, to just make all of those occasional glitches and disconnections and mysterious gremlins go away), and also pretty much impossible to screw up installing. You plug one end into each device. Not even a password to set up.
I’ve worked with ethernet a lot. I’m nervous to the point that I don’t even want to plug a new cable into the cable modem (which is also an ethernet switch). The cable modem is supposedly some sort of special one that we can’t replace ourself, so if it breaks we have no wired internet for however long it takes our cable company to get us a new connection.
I was considering getting a redundant cable connection (our building can get both Comcast and RCN) but that would involve letting a cable tech into the basement which I’d also really not like to do right now.
Other things I could do include moving the WiFi box up from the basement (the cable from RCN is long enough to reach the second floor) but again that is risky.
(This is not a way I’m used to thinking: normally I just do things and expect that in the unlikely event that it goes wrong I’ll be able to buy what I need to fix it. But covid changes that.)
Another reason this didn’t make sense before is that I didn’t have a desk at home, and used my laptop from a lot of different places. But now that I’m working remotely full time I have a place where my laptop is 80% of the time and where I can easily go if my video calls aren’t working well.
If a failure in connection is really that perilous, sounds like another thing you should’ve done years ago—and setting up a backup Internet connection as well (used to be you might get a DSL or T1 backup connection if you worked from home and really couldn’t afford any interruptions, but these days it can be as simple as making sure you can set up your smartphone as a hotspot). The other two suggestions remain.
We have backup internet via tethering to our phones or else I would have got an extra line to our house in early March. But it would still be really inconvenient to work this way, since 4G is not as good as high speed cable and phones aren’t great at this.
It’s probably unrealistic to try to mash together mosh and DeepTabNine or something, but if you spend a lot of your time working in Emacs, have you tried using its many remote-file-editing capabilities to run it locally rather than on the remote box? That greatly reduces the impact of any network issues.
Here too, instead of suffering a death by a thousand cuts (how does one run out of socks? One day at a time), have you considered running an Ethernet cable down? I have twice been in similar situations, and both times I found it well worth my while to run an Ethernet cable to avoid the latency and unreliability of WiFi (even when that required digging a trench for 50 feet). EDIT: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mdcXfbiEe6mq2qXPa/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-calls
A few dozen hours at most spent practicing your touchtyping is also probably something you would’ve benefited from doing years ago, but still would now.
I’ve considered it, and have done similar things before, but I’m also really worried about touching the networking setup at all in any way because of how dependent we are on it right now. The likelihood of breaking something is low, but the benefit if I succeed isn’t all that high.
Ethernet cable is way more reliable than WiFi (a major reason I install it, to just make all of those occasional glitches and disconnections and mysterious gremlins go away), and also pretty much impossible to screw up installing. You plug one end into each device. Not even a password to set up.
I’ve worked with ethernet a lot. I’m nervous to the point that I don’t even want to plug a new cable into the cable modem (which is also an ethernet switch). The cable modem is supposedly some sort of special one that we can’t replace ourself, so if it breaks we have no wired internet for however long it takes our cable company to get us a new connection.
I was considering getting a redundant cable connection (our building can get both Comcast and RCN) but that would involve letting a cable tech into the basement which I’d also really not like to do right now.
Other things I could do include moving the WiFi box up from the basement (the cable from RCN is long enough to reach the second floor) but again that is risky.
(This is not a way I’m used to thinking: normally I just do things and expect that in the unlikely event that it goes wrong I’ll be able to buy what I need to fix it. But covid changes that.)
This is overstating the risk. I should do it.
Done. It’s nice and I didn’t break anything.
Another reason this didn’t make sense before is that I didn’t have a desk at home, and used my laptop from a lot of different places. But now that I’m working remotely full time I have a place where my laptop is 80% of the time and where I can easily go if my video calls aren’t working well.
If a failure in connection is really that perilous, sounds like another thing you should’ve done years ago—and setting up a backup Internet connection as well (used to be you might get a DSL or T1 backup connection if you worked from home and really couldn’t afford any interruptions, but these days it can be as simple as making sure you can set up your smartphone as a hotspot). The other two suggestions remain.
We have backup internet via tethering to our phones or else I would have got an extra line to our house in early March. But it would still be really inconvenient to work this way, since 4G is not as good as high speed cable and phones aren’t great at this.