This repository is design to gather tools and technics to reduce bandwith consumption during a sailing trip with sattelite communication (9kB/min).
This guide is mainly dedicated to OSX, but is is designed to give cross-plateform advice in the future
Measuring is the first step before regulating. Use the tool you have to diagnostic network consumption, like Monitor on OSX:
Using pfctl : https://developer.apple.com/legacy/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/pfctl.8.html
I wrote a simple small pf.conf file that you can activate this way:
sudo pfctl -f pf.conf
sudo pfctl -e
You can disable the packet filter this way:
sudo pfctl -d
You should forget Gmail and its fancy web interface: it waste 100 times (check the good ration) the amount of data you need to exchange email. Go back to a simple desktop mail application with POP/SMTP configuration (IMAP send unnecessessary synchronisation message). Make sure to respect the following best practice:
- Use text only (not formatted) content.
- If you really want formatting, use Markdown
- No signature (your email address reveal already your identity)
- Remove previous content. If you want to quote, use ">"
Here are some desktop client you can use:
Simple and well integrated with OSX, the default Mail application make the job. Make sure to disable the rich text formatting by going to Mail > Preferences... > Compositing and select Plain Text from the Message Format dropdown menu.
TODO: Download and test
Using mail command...
- Go to your browser settings and disable images, scripts, flash ...
- Opera offers a turbo mode: All pages are visited from opera's servers, compressed and then send to your computer. Privacy lovers, this is not for you
- A similar option exists in most mobile browsers
- http://lite.cnn.com/en
- https://text.npr.org/
- Some extension allow to request lite version such as "Save-Data: on" on chrome
Lynx is a text based web browser, pictures and javascript free, that allows reducing the bandwith when browsing the web. Some websites might not be functionnal.
Installation via Brew
brew install lynx
Installation on Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install lynx
Here is how to open a webpage with lynx:
lynx http://duckduckgo.com
Press arrows to navigate, enter to follow a link and q to quit
Browsh is a browser using firefox to render pages and send you a text version. For bandwith usage, it must be installed on a remote server that you access via ssh.
In order to reduce DNS request, there is two option:
- Using IP instead of name server => unfortunately, it doesn't work if you try to access a website using virtualhost
- Add common domain name to
/etc/hosts. When looking for a domain name resolution, the system first look into this file to avoid DNS request
Most of your application exchange data with a server. Keep only the one you need.
- TODO: List unnecessary services
Forget Google Docs, Etherpad and other derivative: it's also a waste of data. Use Git and work locally. Here is a helpful ressource about it: https://try.github.com
Follow the best practices:
- Work locally by cloning repository:
git clone git@github.com:PoissonPilote/lowdata.git --depth 1 - Use local issue (like issues.md)
Sending picture is generally a bad idea when you have a 9ko/min bitrate. If you really need to, you should definitely reduce the size and choose the jpeg format (if you don't need transparency). ImageMagick is a simple command line tool dedicated to that.
brew install imagemagick
$ convert -quality 60 monitor.png -resize 1104x monitor.jpg
Look at the size I spared for the above image:
$ ls -l monitor.*
-rw-r--r--@ 1 martin staff 70K 29 jul 13:50 monitor.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 martin staff 496K 29 jul 13:48 monitor.png