There is the kiwix hotspot.
A WiFi hotspot that gives you access to the entire Wikipedia, medical information, homesteading books ...
I have my homeserver rsync three Arch mirrors and three Arch ARM mirrors in rotation on three days every week. Thus I have full local repos for these. All my machines are configured to use this local repo. The reason I do this is precisely to be prepared for the inevitable 'Internet is broken' scenario.
Yeah, some people don't like to run with full repo mirrors but keep updated copies of the Debian ISO that can be mounted as repositories at any point:
It's essentially the same, but in another format.
One can also use a cache to hold deb and rpm files requested by the machines. (Works great when running hundreds of systems.)
I like "apt-cacher-ng". It will do deb and rpm. https://wiki.debian.org/AptCacherNg
https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~bloch/acng/
Edit: better link
Since this has seen some interest – here's how much disk space this opulence costs: Arch x86 repository is 113 Gb and Arch ARM is 123 Gb :)
That’s actually much smaller than I expected.
good one thanks, will RTFM for this
total respect
There's a whole community for self hosting software.
Hopefully I did that right...
thanks, will crosspost there. I didn't saw that one
Downloading all of wikipedia for one language is abiut 90GB. Inhave it on a spare drive in case of an outage. That way if I need to research something I can still do.
Doesn't Kiwix already do this? Or is there any advantage in doing it myself?
I guess the advantage would be to have a more updated copy, because the ones on kiwix are one year old.
You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.
Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.
Meshtastic
Also Reticulum Network Stack! Much more ambitious than Meshtastic.
doesn't this one needs a specific set of hardware? is it affordable here in Europe? thanks for sharing, I have heard of this for a long time but didn't get onto it, might look now that this happened
an extreme option could be something like the Varvara / Uxn virtual machine by the Hundred Rabbits collective (created after having to deal with Adobe updates and Xcode updates over a barely functioning cell connection) – emulators are available for all sorts of hardware
blog: Weathering Software Winter | youtube: Weathering Software Winter
Spain? check guifi.net ;)
People had LAN Partys playing video games "offline" in the 90s... Setting up a network is easy, the difficulty comes from scaling up to many nodes, and spreading through the geography (e.g. if you were to use antennas for WLAN, they would need a mostly unobstructed vision) which in urban areas gets tricky.
But those "topology" issues can be flattened, e.g. you can always have a raspberry pi (or any device) acting as server in the corner of a neighborhood. A virtual bulletin board, emails, etc. all could be self-hosted locally there and then people could go grab a coffee and consume the local news just like in the middle ages, but with a screen, digital assets and some healthy amount of trolling :P
Navigation on Android: Osmand lets you download and cache OSM data so you can use it offline. Cache is unlimited if you download Osmand via F-Droid.
You mentioned ham radio
definitely fun! It's a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF ("walkie talkie"-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power ("QRP") it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup...
There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.
Good luck!
thanks, really appreciate all the recommendations here :) i got myself an RTL-SDR because a friend told me about them (didn't arrived yet) definitely gonna check on all that you talk about too
(there’s also an older, but still working, protocol called packet radio – does require a bit more technical expertise though)
An independent mesh network in Germany.
I haven't heard of kiwix before, that's pretty neat
One I'm using a lot is a self hosted password manager. Vaultwarden specifically. Useful for more than just passwords of course, can take secure notes as well. I keep it locked to my local network only, and need to VPN in to my home network when I'm out to access it.
So... I've done that May 2023 for a holiday trip.
I left with my RPi4 and few gadgets but no Internet.
There I built https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline-octopus/ and my main take away is
and more importantly the meta take away is
because just like first aid you need to be actually ready when needed and knowledge change over time. You need to actually try though, test your setup and yourself genuinely otherwise it is intellectual masturbation.
Have fun!
You can download a collection of thousands (maybe a million I don't even know) of books in Spanish in epub format, from the "secret library". It's like a 100Gb torrent, but way worth it.
Ebooks tens to have long lasting battery. I spent a few hours reading on monday.
Just now I'm on my phone, but if you are interested let me know and I'll try to find the link and will mp it to you if you want.
And just now I've been thinking that epubs being so small size maybe there's a way to transmit them over this radio mesh networks on demand, like some sort of radio library. I've have to look into that. Maybe they are too big for that as radio bandwidth for data transfer tends to be incredibly small.
i'd love to have those if you don't mind, is it ok for you to send over here? otherwise you have my contact info on my profile. Thanks for the info and is a very good idea indeed
Could you send ePub files over ham radio? Let’s forget about TCP-IP mesh networking like AREDN for now. That’s too easy. Let’s look at radio protocols. D-Star can run at 128 Kbps on the 23 cm band. That’s not too common. Drop down to HF and you’re looking at 9 Kbps via PACTOR-IV.
In comparison, landline dial-up modems topped out at around 56 Kbps.
Now, I’ve seen ePub files around 1-2 MB, but that’s with cover art, images, embedded fonts, and all that fun stuff. With enough patience, that can work. But, strip out all that, leaving behind plain text and XML, and you’ve got something much more manageable that can be sent relatively quickly.
I can’t speak for Spain, but in the U.S., the FCC recently removed most symbol rate restrictions, so we might be able to squeeze out a little more speed.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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