In Japan I’ve seen at Starbucks: a guy bring in a giant power supply and plop it down on top of the table to power his tower and monitor like it wasn’t the most sociopathic thing in the world. And another guy used to set up six or seven screens at his table to “daytrade” — turns out he wasn’t day trading at all, they were all running videos of fake daytrading / stock tickers. (I had a friend at that Starbucks who would give me all the details; they had to ban him eventually for disrupting / getting surly with other customers).

Hacker News is the url I use to test most fussy connections because it's so light, and will load under even the slightest trickle of data. When I was doing research in Ghana, it was the only site I could get to reliably load for news in the field, and thus spent a month reading only HN (good luck getting the _New York Times_ to load without a gigabit connection). Appreciate how it stays — and has stayed — svelte and fast throughout the years.