Command Line
Tutorial
Not only is it possible to browse the web from the CLI, it's mightily useful, too, as we demonstrate in this article.
A few months ago, I was stranded at an airport – my plane was delayed, so I had a couple of hours to kill. Fortunately, it was past beer-o-clock (i.e., 1800 hours), so I headed to the bar and then cracked open my laptop for some Reddit-browsing antics. But there was one big problem: The airport's Internet connection was slow.
I'm talking horrendously slow here – it was like using some 300-baud modem from the 1980s. I pretty much couldn't do anything on the Internet, and I saw other grumbling passengers desperately trying to reconnect multiple times in hope of a teensy bit of better bandwidth. They soon gave up.
Because I'm a turbo-geek, though, I came up with a solution. Somehow, I needed to drastically reduce my bandwidth but still be able to surf the web. I tried disabling images and JavaScript in Firefox; this resulted in a slight improvement, but browsing was still agonizingly slow. And then it struck me: I could SSH into a Raspberry Pi I have at home and browse from there.
[...]
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