Last week I mailed my laptop to Dell Support. The battery stopped working entirely and suddenlny, and a new replacement battery wouldn't work either. The next step is for Dell to replace the motherboard—a costly circumstance that makes me fortunate my laptop is still covered by the default one-year warranty.
In the meantime, I've been using my old laptop to take care of essential computer tasks. That machine suffered a career-ending injury when it fell three feet onto a hard floor. Its screen, which prior to the fall already suffered from several dozen burnt-out pixels, now intermittently goes into psychodelic mode and displays wrong colors, sometimes covering the whole screen, sometimes as splotchy artifacts. As a result, I've been using the machine mostly in text mode, kinda like the old DOS command prompt days. You can still browse the web this way, in fact, using not just one but several text-only web browsers. My text-only web browser of choice is elinks.
You might think the things you miss out on most by using a text-only browser is not being about to see images or watch videos, but that's not the case. A bigger problem is that these days many, if not most, websites require JavaScript to work fully, and no text-only browser (that I know of) has a JavaScript engine.
What can you do without JavaScript? Here are some web tasks that still work:
- Check email with GMail—basic HTML mode only
- Check the weather—various sites
- Read wikis—Wikipedia, Arch Linux wiki, etc.
- Check sports news—Velonews and Yahoo sports
- Check movie showtimes
- Read posts on Blogspot
And here are some sites and tasks that require JavaScript:
- Google Reader
- Google Maps
- Renew a single book at the Phoenix Public Library—
renew all
works OK, however - Post to Blogspot
The second list would be longer if I tried more sites in elinks instead of using my laptop downtime to catch up on sunshine, sleep, and reading real books. And I suppose there's commentary lurking around here somewhere about how the Internet was a remarkably robust set of technologies that's evolving into a glitzy monolith. But that commentary isn't for today.
2 comments:
You are so sweet to imply that the laptop fell due to its own malfunction rather than the malfunction of your wife's legs.
Laura— No worries. Laptops, like all other consumer electronics, come from a magical land of abundance, where little elves sing happy songs while they tirelessly toil to create joy for us Americans.
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