++++
9/24/2024
  ++++

7:40 am I am sitting down on my coat on top of my towel on
top of leaf litter in a wooded area. 

The rules I have set up are to write my text on the
computer called Alfred, send the text over to the computer
called Catwoman wirelessly, simulating a world without the
internet, and apparently without USB sticks. To add
slightly the post-apocalyptic feel, my little camp is by
the ruins of a WPA-era retaining wall near a creek. I was
hoping it would be a little more dignified, but the amount
of graffiti has really made it more of a mural than a 
history lesson.

Let's get to our real protagonists. Alfred is a jail-broken
Chromebook. And while, yes, it is running Mint, I have
dropped it to TTY mode and have a tmux session going. I
have the commands I am going to try copied in a txt file so
hopefully I can do everything from the command line.  If
not, I have a back up rule of being allowed to use library
WiFi to troubleshoot, but I'd rather not leave camp. (Edit:
so I thought a the time). 

Catwoman is a Windows 7 era HP G72 Notebook, with HDD and
two Pentium P6100 running at 1.999GHZ. It was my dad's last
computer and had set for some years before my mother had
come upon it looking through things and gave it to me. It
was choked on Windows, did okay with Mint, but I have
recently installed Arch on it, and it seems to be living
its best life with xfce (when a desktop is even necessary).
It has a short battery life, or I would have given it the
staring role in composing the text. 

8:05.  I wrote the above while eating my breakfast of some
"Health Grains" clusters that had been sitting in a cabinet
for a over a month, and two hard-boiled eggs. I drank a
decaf coffee before I left and have packed a thermos of
tea. 

8:13. First attempt did not work... naturally.

  | nmcli dev wifi hotspot ifname wlan1 ssid TheWoods
password ...

I went into man nmcli to try to actually understand what
LLM hath given. From what I got from the documentation I'm
not supposed to just assert the name wlan1 or wlan0 (which
I had tried).  At the very least, it was put as an optional
parameter, so I just removed the ifname ... 

And I got a message of "successfully activated. . . "

* Pouring the last of the tea from the thermos and booting
up Catwoman. *


9:20. Sitting at a comfortable chair at the library. The
chair is still outdoors, but there is a nice covered area
here. It is a great relief from the both the ground and the
fallen tree I sat on. Catwoman was getting low, so I had to
act in order to troubleshoot. It only occurred to me on the
drive to use my phone to make sure TheWoods was really
sending out those magical waves... and yes, it is. It's
funny sometimes how badly your brain works when you are
uncomfortable. 

I ended up not using the library WiFi, but instead just
using my phone to get on duckduckgo's AI (LLM) chat, so I
probably could have stayed in the woods. But again,
discomfort, so I wasn't thinking straight.  

9:53. Catwoman is connected. 

10:07.  Success! I transferred the text. The battery on
Catwoman is 33%, so I am just going to copy some notes from
the terminals tabs I have open. I'm going home to recharge
the device. 

==

Okay. I've spent some time under a warm blanket and had
some tomato soup. Catwoman, for her part has had some time
to charge. 

These notes I took earlier don't look all that interesting,
but I got Catwoman to find TheWoods station using iwctl. I
didn't realize that the command would be expecting wlan0 in
spite of what TheWoods network called itself on its end.
That shows how much of a noob I am at networking, but I am
loving learning it. 

Next, I set up Alfred with an IP address: 

 | sudo ip addr add 192.168.1.1/24 dev wlp1s0
 | sudo ip link set wlp1s0 up
                        
As for the transfer, I used python's built-in http server: 
  | python3 -m http.server 8000

Which turned the current directory into a website that
Catwoman could access with the IP address.

As for next year, I plan to do the challenge basically the
same way, but on a bench looking over a body of water, and
hopefully execute this as a speed run. 

====
This piece is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.