Ask HN: Offline resources during internet outages?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017733

by beefield • 4 years ago

156 130 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have a feeling that the risk for different infrastructure problems has increased here in Europe. Assuming internet outage for somewhat extended time, what would be good resources/tools to keep locally just in case? Some that I can think quickly from the top of my head might be:

- offline wikipedia

- offline stackoverflow

- youtube-dl

- libgen (are there tools to download e.g. only some genres?)

ggeorgovassilis• 4 years ago

- Offline email client (eg. Thunderbird, Outlook) with claendar sync

- Offline contacts (I print mine out on paper every 6 months)

- Google offline maps

- Decent calculator

- QR & barcode scanner

- copy of legislation

- phone book

bartekpacia• 4 years ago

What do you mean by a copy of legislation? Why would it be useful?

ldoughty• 4 years ago

It's a good idea ...

It's work you can do offline... If you're in a position where you are asked to review sections of a contract.

while not a lawyer myself, our lawyers tend to send over documents with technical requirements highlighted for review.. e.g. "Use TLS 1.1 or greater"

There's also things like HECVAT or similar documents

Infiltrator• 4 years ago

I've heard that Americans get sued/like to sue a lot.

totetsu• 4 years ago

It helps to make people sweat when you break out your pocket dictionary sized edition of legislation with many little post-it book marks and thumb through to relevant sections mid conversation.

fsflover• 4 years ago

- Google offline maps

Or offline Openstreetmap in, e.g., maps.me app.

MandieD• 4 years ago

Internet in a Box might be a good place to start: https://internet-in-a-box.org/

senorsmile• 4 years ago

This was my first thought.

markuman123• 4 years ago

raspberry pi (some low energy home computer) serving nextcloud, offline wikipedia and OSM.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

OSM

OSM offline maps are great! They came useful for me so many times when traveling. It doesn't even have to be an internet disruption. You may end up without signal in some weird place and OSM is there for you. And the maps are not that large - keeping the whole continent available on the phone is trivial.

sgt• 4 years ago

Paper maps also a good idea during the apocalypse.

rhn_mk1• 4 years ago

I use SingleFileZ to store web pages for future reference, and have Recoll scan them to search through them.

_int3_3• 4 years ago

Kivix? https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng (beware, some packages actually won't work offline )

bbrks• 4 years ago

A tool like Dash/Zeal to have a searchable local copy of dev documentation.

I use it even when online because it's simply much quicker and a coherent UI across many languages.

swah• 4 years ago

https://devdocs.io/ also works well

JustFinishedBSG• 4 years ago

Kiwix for general stuff [1] and Zeal [2] for pure documentation.

[1] https://www.kiwix.org/en/

[2] https://zealdocs.org/

m-p-32• 4 years ago

To add to this, IFixIt offers a Kiwix package of all their repair guides.

selfhoster11• 4 years ago

Zeal is not popular enough. It's a really nice resource.

omgmajk• 4 years ago

Good tips in this thread, I have relied on books for offline periods but some other documentation can't be a bad thing to add to my library.

twapi• 4 years ago

Save webpages offline in MHTML format: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-webpages-offl...

easrng• 4 years ago

Save webpages offline as HTML (resources inlined, even things like iframes and web components) https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

freedom2099• 4 years ago

Never heard of books?

scratcheee• 4 years ago

The textual information of all books ever written is around 10s of TB.

So if the goal is to store all books for a rainy day, you can buy a grand of storage or you can build the largest library on earth.

That said, a few books would be wise in case of severe energy loss (it would have to be very severe to make running something like a kindle prohibative, but if we're playing doomer then I'll accept a couple of shelves would be sensible).

throwaway576652• 4 years ago

You can download libgen books through torrent:

https://www.libgen.is/repository_torrent/

But it's huge.

RivieraKid• 4 years ago

What's the total size?

knaik942• 4 years ago

32TB

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Library_Genesis

JonChesterfield• 4 years ago

I should probably put a copy of cppreference somewhere local. edit: https://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives

Brajeshwar2• 4 years ago

1. Books

2. It is OK to get bored. Your mind will start racing the creative track like crazy when you are allowed to be bored.

3. People. Talk to people. Of late, I have found this to be a really good exercise. Listen to the two extremes -- the very young people (20-ish) with their wild, rough, ideas and the old (60+) with their experiences, regrets, suggestions.

zikduruqe2• 4 years ago

I used to teach and consult regarding emergency preparedness to individuals and on TV...

Just some quick notes:

- Have an AM/FM radio with batteries.

- There still is OTA TV, make sure you have a TV with a tuner and an antenna available.

- Have a method to collect, store and treat water.

- Have lots of bleach around for sanitization.

- Have a way to collect and dispose of human waste.

- Have a way to cook.

- Take pictures of everything in your home, and copies of your documents.

- Cigarettes (or is it vaping supplies nowadays) and alcohol is great bartering material. Used to keep these on hand when I lived in hurricane country. Also have cash.

- Lastly have at least 6 different ways to make coffee. :)

Take a Friday night and turn off your electricity and water then just practice until Saturday morning. Find what works or where you need improvement. Then do it again, this time from a Friday night until Saturday night. Find what works or where you need improvement. Then try it again for a solid three days.

I've taught many persons regarding wilderness survival and emergency preparedness, and honestly you finding yourself stuck at home is the most real world situation you will find yourself in, not naked in the jungle with a member of the opposite sex. And what I have observed the most, are people suddenly being taken away from their dopamine hits from TV, social media and their phones really messes with them and adds additional stressors in a situation. Practice not having these constant stimuli. It will make the actual survival part easier.

senko• 4 years ago

> Assuming internet outage for somewhat extended time
Have a method to collect, store and treat water [...] Have a way to collect and dispose of human waste.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Brajeshwar2• 4 years ago

Yes, the Go Bag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit

yawboakye• 4 years ago

Underrated answer. I’ll probably re-rank as (1) figuring out who your critical people are and making arrangements to allow reciprocal or even asymmetrical time commitments. bonus here: take the time to know your neighbors and your village/town/city. (2) learning the art of doing nothing (3) books: philosophy books of the generalist kind help here as they don’t bore you with ‘bullshit’ subject matter deep dives. Also the so-called holy books (eg bible, qur’an, etc). Absence of internet might be good time to think about why so many around the world revere the sayings in these books.

ever1• 4 years ago

Interesting question but I wonder what would be the risks on the infrastructure in Europe ? IMO, apart from Eastern Europe (and still), the major risk would be on energy cuts. But in this case, that means that you would need to have an autonomous way of producing electricity for running these local ressources. Maybe physical books are more reliable ?

sneak3• 4 years ago

Things that cut energy far away can also potentially damage fibers.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

I'm running a local transparent package cache. Both because it's much faster that way and because I can reinstall things without internet.

sneak3• 4 years ago

Did you handroll it or do you have some images/scripts up somewhere for us to follow in your footsteps?

viraptor3• 4 years ago

There's a few language-specific projects out there. You can do it all using simple nginx / squid / ... caching, but with language-specific services you get more clever behaviour. Gemstash for example can handle the cached index serving only in cases if the upstream is not available. Apt-cacher-ng is nice for deb repos and can handle deltas.

So I recommend something like squid for "stuff in general" and specialised proxies for repositories you use often / care about more.

waterpowder• 4 years ago

Books and e-books.

xani_• 4 years ago

Huh, that reminds me where just about every disto came with package of a bunch of linux-related howtos, I learned so much from them back in those days

buro9• 4 years ago

Plex.

A local and self-hosted Spotify, Netflix, Google Photos, etc.

For coding and work I think it's unlikely to be productive for innovative things due to libs that you'd need not being available to you, i.e. `go get` won't work. You can do maintenance, etc and still be using Git but as soon as you encounter the "thing you needed to download you didn't know you needed" you're going to be stuck. As for Stack Overflow, there's a lot of joy in having a few good technical books to resort to and to fall back on reasoning about things a little more.

I would say an offline MDN would be very nice and it turns out that does exist https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus/docs/features/offli...

So perhaps the thing here is to encourage other sites to allow an offline mode with local storage.

incone123• 4 years ago

Agree. Was handy when I moved home and was waiting for a new service to get connected.

rcarmo• 4 years ago

Organic Maps (https://organicmaps.app/) might come in handy in that situation.

sirsuki• 4 years ago

I try to put all my tips tricks and ideas into a tiddlywiki.com as it is a full featured wiki that runs as a self contained HTML file that runs offline. Fantastic for offline documentation.

BrandoElFollito6• 4 years ago

Putting aside the fact that such an event would be catastrophic for our civilization and would end it in bursts of Mad Max like rebellions...

.. so putting aside that ...

I would welcome Internet being down either for an extended amount of time, or not being reliable at all and just working, say, 2 random hours a day.

. would be back to my vacation as a teenager in th e80's where I had book, the 3 TV channels (this was France, so actually 2, because nobody was watching France 3) and friends I meet outside to chat.

It would be truly wonderful, but I really, really hope it will not happen.

trey-jones• 4 years ago

This paradoxical sentiment is something I'm familiar with. The establishment sucks and is broken and is holding humanity back, but the alternative is terrifying. I've always thought I would have been better off in a pre-digital age (or post-digital?), but at the same time, I love the digits. And you're right, there would be blood.

hexomancer2• 4 years ago

It would be truly wonderful

Well here in Iran we are going through that as we speak (there are ongoing protests and government has shut down the internet, it is only available early in the morning). Wanna trade places?

sbaiddn• 4 years ago

You have energy. Its not obvious BrandoElFillito will. Come April, he might want to swap. Western leaders are already kissing ME tyrants' butts. One cold winter, and Habeck will look to cuddle with your Mullahs for warmth.

BrandoElFollito6• 4 years ago

I am not sure about your comment. I never told I would be happy to be in an oppressed place. I would be glad to not have Internet (or have an unreliable one, available only sometime) because I miss the time where there was less information available.

That's all.

My son is in close contact with a girl in Iran and I know how tough this is - but this completely beside the point I wanted to make.

thesuitonym3• 4 years ago

would end it in bursts of Mad Max like rebellions...

Have you not lived through a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake? The power grid (and thus Internet) are down for days, sometimes weeks. The running water stops, and refrigerated food spoils.

Do you know what happens? It is not Mad Max style chaos. Businesses open their doors to help everyone free of charge. Neighbors share water. People help each other.

BrandoElFollito6• 4 years ago

No, I have not lived through a natural disaster where a set of very localized resources are temporarily unavailable (for a few days).

If there was a general failure of Internet on the level of a country for an extended (weeks) amount of time then it would be chaos. a lot of information would not go though, you would not be able to pay in stores, hospital data could be unavailable, travel would be highly disrupted etc.

If Internet breaks locally, what comes from outside this "locally" still works. If this si for a limited time people will manage.

As someone said, we are a few meals away from the collapse of our civilization.

Since you mention the power grid: the generally accepted idea of the Earth hitting a solar flare and having its power grid seriously damaged (and electronics) is that it would be doomsday.

faebi• 4 years ago

Honestly, I think the internet/data is the least affected during electricity issues. These systems have massive government supported backup systems. I think you are more likely to run out of battery/electricity. Then, if the internet actually fails for a long time there will be some moving USB sticks of stuff like wikipedia and maps. Like in Cuba. These days you can transport petabytes of MicroSD per hour with a bicycle, if you want. Assuming it is that bad, I would more likely buy a survival guide, some do it yourself books and paper maps.

hiq• 4 years ago

Conversely, how likely is it that you have such internet problems while still having reliable electricity? Intuitively I'd say it's unlikely, but I'd be curious about others' opinion.

I don't see myself browsing through local files on a computer while internet is down, I expect to resort to books and daylight instead.

vineyardmike4• 4 years ago

I agrée it’s unlikely, but I can imagine serious bandwidth issues. Especially if local data centers close to preserve power.

biztos2• 4 years ago

If you're talking about a major extended outage, I would worry about having books to read, food to eat, other humans to interact with, music to listen to, and a way to exercise or at least move around outside. As a hacker you will also want some minimal low-powered computer to mess around with, because it will calm you down. Oh and a multi-band radio that also does short-wave and is crank-powered so you can keep up on the apocalypse!

Remember that if an Internet outage extends for long enough (days?) in most of Europe then parts of your society will start to fall apart and lots of people will be completely freaking out, especially in the cities. (If it's a part of Europe that had wars fairly recently, people will probably not freak out as much.)

Thus your goal is to stay physically and mentally healthy. As a thought exercise, imagine going a week with no Internet, no mobile phone, and a lot of chaos on the streets: stores and gas stations mostly closed, possibly looting, etc. How exactly would you get through that?

I guess that's the prepper version.

The "half-day internet outages and I want to keep working" version is just have lots of documentation downloaded, plenty of source code too, and don't forget to take breaks: restoring your ability to concentrate is itself a work task.

exitb• 4 years ago

Portable shortwave radio is a good idea and doesn't really need to be crank-powered. These things sip power and can last a couple weeks of moderate daily usage on a single set of batteries. A box of double-A batteries (which you should have anyway) can last you months.

A good receiver with a bit of antenna can easily give you access to radio stations thousands of kilometers away, as well as amateur radio operators.

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

Adding to this there are portable shortwave radios that also play mp3/wav files. Most are not great quality but useful if that's all one has. I have one in front of me made by XHDATA. D-328

tpmx2• 4 years ago

Small shortwave radios with built-in antennas are next to unusable in urban/semi-urban areas these days, unless there also is power outage shutting down all of those local emitters of RF noise. Witnessed that last winter when we had a six hour power outage - the SW/MW radio could suddenly receive quite a few broadcasts again.

And then you realize that these days mostly China and some american religious organizations invest heavily in shortwave broadcasts.

mod• 4 years ago

A small solar charger designed for camping (charging phones) might make this pretty self-sufficient.

0127• 4 years ago

Some shortwave radios (like the TECSUN PL-380 I got off amazon), also support external power via USB. I almost prefer this over the crank charging some have

That way, I don't need to worry as much about batteries, adapters, etc. and I can pretty easily find or make a 5V supply to power everything important

wlesieutre• 4 years ago

A solar USB charger is handy to have if you're setting up this kind of kit

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

Jeez, dude. I had no Internet access for four days and rolling blackouts with only 2 hours a day of electricity for two weeks, and no hot water or water at all for the first day, during the Dallas ice storm two years ago. Roads were unusable and we received no deliveries for a week. It was annoying, but we were fine with no special preparation or extra supplies.

A few days with no Internet is not enough to bring down civilization.

biztos2• 4 years ago

Jeez, dude.

I hopefully stand corrected.

I didn't mean to suggest it would bring down civilization, just that it would cause more havoc than you might assume.

During the Texas blackouts was mobile internet available? Phone service? Was there food for the people who didn't receive deliveries?

Were you confident the government would restore service soon?

I grew up with frequent blackouts and I'm completely unfazed by anything on a 24-48-hour scale.

But -- and I hope I'm wrong! -- I see many societies growing more fragile and I would worry about what an infrastructure failure like that might mean to people who live much of their lives online.

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

As a thought exercise, imagine going a week with no Internet, no mobile phone, and a lot of chaos on the streets: stores and gas stations mostly closed, possibly looting, etc.

After superstorm Sandy here in New York I was left without power, heat, internet, gasoline or hot water for 2 weeks. Books, a crank radio, several thick blankets, an LED lantern and many batteries proved critical to making it through.

demarq• 4 years ago

yarn cache installs

falcor84• 4 years ago

Books and a hand-powered/solar rechargeable light, so you can keep reading at night.

Although there might also be sufficient light from the civilization being burned down outside your window.

whoooooo1233• 4 years ago

Candles work too; just make sure you also have something to light them with.

kleiba• 4 years ago

That depends entirely on your own personal usage patterns. Why don't you just turn off your router for a day and observe which are the resources you access most often?

throwaway787544• 4 years ago

If you use Linux, download an entire copy of a Linux distribution, source and binaries.

Books. Get a library card.

_int3_3• 4 years ago

1. get linux apt-get repository if you need software while offline. Whole thing has 70-80 GB.

2. get some HDD space, for sneakernet style sharing.

AdrianB1• 4 years ago

Please define "extended time". I used to have frequent outages from minutes to several hours (I think 8-10 hours max), that is not really a problem if you have as a backup a phone and tethering. If you are talking about a month of outage country wide, the food, fuel for heating, a couple of guns and a thousand bullets may be what you need to survive that, because that will cause massive chaos: our logistic chains cannot work without phone and internet.

bombcar• 4 years ago

I was without internet for awhile.

If you have a TexLive installation you have many thousands of pages of excellent manuals in PDF form.

jarenmf2• 4 years ago

The internet was cut off for three months in my country. I had offline Wikipedia, tons of books and other media. It was more than enough for reading/media consumption but I really missed communicating with people.

m-p-32• 4 years ago

I keep a Kiwix package of Wikipedia (EN) at around 85GB, my favorite music albums, my favorites movies (MKV, with embedded SRT subtitles) all available from a low-powered Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is powered by a 20,000 mAh battery pack and could be recharged using solar power if needed.

I'm also tinkering my Kobo to have Kiwix actually run into it directly (I modded mine with a 256GB MicroSD) and have a copy of Wikipedia in my hands from an extremely low-powered device.

jarenmf2• 4 years ago

I always keep a fresh copy of Endless OS image around. https://endlessos.com/

nousermane• 4 years ago

Offline wikipedia for android:

https://github.com/itkach/aard2-android#download

colanderman• 4 years ago

All the -dev packages for your programming language(s) of choice. Plus any other development tool or environment you've ever thought might be useful someday, or that you might want to learn.

anotheraccount9• 4 years ago

For me, it's also about having a complete operating system that I can install fully, with all softwares working, without relying on the internet, on different systems. A BBS-like system for local users would be valuable, even a short-wave or wifi system to share stuff with the local community.

thesuitonym3• 4 years ago

An actual bulletin board would be more useful.

_int3_3• 4 years ago

I have feeling that we will all get Kivix, and wikipedia. Like we all bought toilet paper for lockdowns.

Better strategy is to some get music , some get movies, some get e-books, some get software , etc... You pick it at random.

knaik942• 4 years ago

One very valuable resource that I frequent is a subreddit called datahoarder. The idea is to be your own library essentially. There are many guides that have been written up over the years, along with links to tools and best practices regarding data management. The more things you automate, the less you'll have to think about this. The biggest one missing from your list is Plex or Jellyfin, a way to organize and serve local content via a media server. That's the frontend and using it with automated downloaders like Radarr, for downloading higher quality or lower quality films of what you currently own. At some point storage is going to come into question, 10 2gb movie files is a better use of storage in this hypothetical than 1 high quality movie file. The other main thing is a website storage and cataloging tool, like wallabag or pocket.

I would spend a decent amount of time on organization. This is advice from hindsight. I have over 15TB of total storage but my folder structure is terrible so even though I have a lot of amazing things, I have to remember them and manually search for them.

The last critical thing I can think of is this search tool called Everything by Voidtools. It allows essentially instantaneous search of the entire ntfs based drive by filename or size. It's a windows tool, I am not sure what the equivalent would be on another OS. It's critical though, without it I would never be able to find anything. I have remapped my caps lock to that tool.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index

https://www.voidtools.com/

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

My equivalent of the above - huge collection of x265 encoded 1080p movies, few tv shows, some anime, some disney/similar, quite a few documents that I mostly viewed and deemed worthy of keeping, or all ratings are so ridiculously high that it simply is a quality movie and I will enjoy it once I will see it later. FYI downloading this is perfectly legal where I live (Switzerland). That's one 10TB drive which isn't even full and I keep adding stuff that gets released (or re-released via remasters, various cuts etc).

x265 takes around 1.5GB for 1080p per movie in a very fine quality for us. I've collected it incrementally over time.

I can stream it form desktop PC or notebooks, anything with HDMI would work, no issues with codecs, subtitles etc. Never too lazy to do few clicks to watch something for 1.5-2.5h.

As for searching, Total commander has built in probably most powerful and intuitive disk search I ever saw, you can search by many criteria of file and its content (not form video perspective obviously).

I just organized it all via normal folders, and export current content of that HDD into simple text file if I need to check if I already have it, and if yes in what form. Normally HDD is turned off, I don't access it that often.

gmuslera• 4 years ago

How locally is locally? Your country, your city or your house? And how much extended, hours, days, months?

If it is just your home. You can have a mirror for your Linux distribution at home. There are plenty of self-hosted software (https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted for some initial suggestions) on which you can rely on instead of cloud services, you can download copies of wikipedia and other more or less static files like books, tv shows and movies (most streaming services let you do that for offline viewing, besides not so legal ways) and so on to have enough to see and read for months or years. Just have with you some good storage to hold them all and you can rely less on online internet.

For your country there is probably caches, local mirrors and some local presence of major services (i.e. a local 8.8.8.8, if you use that instead of your local ISP dns). There may be things that will be definitely outside, from social networks to cloud content, but there are enough self-hosted solutions to have your own content with you, and create local communities with your self-hosted solutions.

Temporary_31337• 4 years ago

Have a think about what scenario are you preparing for - 8 hour outage or more? Up to 8 hours, the LTE power generators will keep the bases station online (in practice a lot longer, usually, but not guaranteed). If you need more than that, is it to keep you productive or what?

gwbas1c• 4 years ago

Probably some kind of long-term outage caused by warfare.

whoooooo1233• 4 years ago

I used to find that implausible here in western Europe; now I think it's merely unlikely.

iso1631• 4 years ago

Lots of people assuming that a few days of internet outage means you're in a post apocolyptic wasteland.

Where I live I could see a specific problem taking several days to fix the phone line that carries my DSL. You might not realize it from recent events but the UK is a modern developed country, but multi day power outages aren't unknown [0], if power lines are down, phone lines could well be too.

NotPetya knocked out a lot of payment processing in Ukraine which caused a fair amount of problems. I could see a sophisticated state level coordinated attack knocking out much of the London Internet Exchagne, which would cause massive problems with internet routing in the UK (there are others, but a large amount of connectivity goes through LINX. An attack wouldn't be trivial given the resilience, but part of my job is to imagine the impossible)

People not having access to facebook for a week or so wouldn't cause mass riots. Day to day finance would be the biggest issue as so much relies on the internet, but restoring logistic and finance network connectivity would be a high priority. Getting netflix back wouldn't be.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-60431176

bherb• 4 years ago

Offline documentation browser like https://kapeli.com/dash or https://zealdocs.org/.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

I have lots of military publications saved as PDFs. The US Army and Marine Corps provides for free tons of manuals of a massive number of niche topics. The majority of them are not applicable for most people, but there's a number of these manuals that I think are worth having on hand in case of long term outages or catastrophic events.

Take this manual on radio operations from the Marine Corps:

https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/MCRP%20...

It basically goes over everything you need to know about radio theory and constructing antennas, and teaches these things more effectively than any other resource when I was recently learning about amateur radio. Other resources are long-winded and contain distractions, but military publications like these are distraction-free.

Here's the modern version of the Army manual on survival (formerly FM 21-76):

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN1208...

Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape Operations:

https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a3/public...

Field Hygeine and Sanitation:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/tc4_02x...

First Aid:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN1413...

Base Camps:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ATP%203...

Carpentry:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35831-TM_3-3...

Firefighting:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/tm3_34x...

Crowd Control:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35675-ATP_3-...

Advanced Situational Awareness:

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34875-TC_3-2...

ephbit• 4 years ago

briarproject.org .. App for messaging over Bluetooth.

nmz• 4 years ago

As someone with continual power outages (PR) I could offer advice. but it depends on how much money you have. The itch to code is nonexistant, its basically off grid living. keep everything offline (r/datahoarder r/opendirectories) every byte counts, Yes, Every single byte (No mp3's, its all opus) opus with a bitrate of 16 for audiobook/podcast (thank god for those, I can have an entire library of a podcast and its less than a gigabyte. Stick to less than 720p for videos. its good enough. You're going to be using the tablet a lot for movie viewing, 1080p is overkill. if you happen to have small power generation, dlna is usable on most devices. keep a fullstack language, there's only 2 solutions here I can think of luapower, and factor. (though factor is x86 only, which is pretty bad).

Power generation is tricky, if you can afford solar, do so. a gas powered generator is tricky, the smaller ones are better since they use less gas. and you want to save as much gas as possible. its amazing how ba generators are, here, you could smell it in the air like inhaling poison.

the_og_umar• 4 years ago

It seems you live in a place a survivalist would be preparing for, it would be interesting to know where this is from?

cfeduke• 4 years ago

They mention Puerto Rico in their post.

yamtaddle• 4 years ago

Yes, Every single byte (No mp3's, its all opus) opus with a bitrate of 16 for audiobook/podcast (thank god for those, I can have an entire library of a podcast and its less than a gigabyte. Stick to less than 720p for videos.

If you're... ahem... sailing the seas, it can be easier to find 1080p h.265 copies at 1.5-2.5GB/each than it can be to find 720p or lower compressed with a high-efficiency, high-quality codec like that. The 480p or 720p rips available may well be larger than the 1080p version.

The quality on those h.265 rips isn't even terrible. Better than Netflix's 1080p streams (which is damning with faint praise, since those are WTF bad, but still, it's pretty incredible how decent they can be in such a small file size).

thesuitonym3• 4 years ago

I was thinking it would be a good idea to buy an actual encyclopedia on CD or as a download, because then you'd have vetted information, but it seems all of the old encyclopedias either no longer exist, or are online subscription services only.

whoooooo1233• 4 years ago

You can still buy physical encyclopedias second-hand on eBay etc, for a fraction of what they used to cost when they were still being published.

yboris• 4 years ago

Dash - https://kapeli.com/dash

instant offline access to 200+ API documentation sets

I came across this last week from an HN thread - thank you HN!

w0de0• 4 years ago

Books. Christ.

entaloneralie• 4 years ago

My partner and I live aboard a sailboat outside of reliable internet range for most of the year, we keep copies of safety guides such as Field Manuals(FM Series), barefoot doctor, plant identification guides and other repair manuals for the boat. We also have copies of all our projects, and the documentation for the languages they use.

We have redundancy in our devices, so secondary laptops and SBCs to replace them with would they fail, as well as SD cards with imaged distros to bring them back up if we brick them.

We're not especially fans of kiwix and these wikipedia archives, they're hard to duplicate being so large, too slow to access from SBCs and the content too superficial to be of any use. Instead, whenever we have internet access we hand pick the websites we'll need and make mirrors.

We don't keep anything crucial on electronics, we make printed copies of the important things, we have physical copies of entire courses on trigonometry and celestial navigation.

We tend to rip websites into plain text format, and format it when needed, sometimes we rather not have to fire up the browser just to look at the size of part we might need to make, instead we just cat the file.

sylvain_kerkour• 4 years ago

You may want to read this article by a couple living on a boat https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

tero• 4 years ago

If you enjoy command line and TUI, I've collected some offline resources as 'ks'.

Plain text takes very little space. Only 75 MB for MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), Devhints.io, tldr, Go by Example, some OWASP and some docs for specific software (Apache, Hugo, Django, Flask, Arduino, micro, Pandoc, Lua...). All Free and open source.

If you're preparing for offline, you could download it while you still have the net:

https://terokarvinen.com/2022/ks-kanasirja-offline-tui-dicti...

2devnull• 4 years ago

If you work locally there is no problem. Buy a personal computer.

Izkata• 4 years ago

I have a feeling that the risk for different infrastructure problems has increased here in Europe.

And how will these be stored? My (crude) understanding has been that the increased risk is for general power outages, not just the internet...

nanomonkey2• 4 years ago

I really enjoy Secure Scuttlebutt for interacting with friends (social) and journaling. It is offline first, so I can write out my thoughts and respond to other people while away from the internet, and it will sync up when I have a connection.

Takes some effort to get involved in the community, but if you had a group of friends you could all meet up once, connect to the same wifi connection, follow each other and then gossip each other's messages effectively. Setting up a pub or room server helps out too.

vineyardmike4• 4 years ago

I’ve always been fascinated by SSB but I don’t know how to find people to interact with. It seems weird to try to befriend strangers online… just to use a social network.

nanomonkey2• 4 years ago

This is why I suggest getting all of your friends and family together and onboard everyone together. The hardest part about SSB is the initial contact and on boarding. Once you have a social graph things work quite well.

That being said, I've been on SSB for 5 years now and love the community that I'm apart of even though it's spread out all over the world and mostly involves the developers that are working on SSB.

kkfx• 4 years ago

Hum, pardon me to being harsh but the best offline resource is your desktop(s)/homeserver(s) storage witch need something more than software to massively download on-line resources, like a design to be useful offline.

A small example:

- can you read, search etc your emails offline? If not try to correct because being able to is not just useful in emergency condition. From fetchmail to OfflineIMAP/isync to maildrop (refiling via filters) passing through notmuch are some tools of the trade;

- can you read, search etc your digital life (like contracts, banks transactions, notes, ...) there are many not-integrated and often crappy tools for such usage, the best I found so far are Emacs/org-{mode,roam,attach,agenda,...} exporting regularly POSSIBLY automatically if your bank(s) offer such ability or things like woob can wrap the bank anyway, anything might be a useful practice BUT it need to be done regularly or it's simply overwhelming trying to do in a rush...

- can you here music, see movies, browse pictures etc, I mean the ludic part of your digital life offline? If not try to choose some tools and way of organizing such mass of file as soon as you can...

- can you WORK offline? Like for instance can you write/read docs works related, code if any in a local editor, on a local repository etc? If not try to see and discuss with your company operation the available options because again it's not only valid in case of outage but as a standard practice to REDUCE infra cost and augment it's resilience...

Oh, BTW since a desktop typically demand electricity, like a fridge, a heating systems etc can you juice your devices? That's might be "simple" under certain circumstances but it's definitively EXPENSIVE and can't be done at all in a rush. So secondary limited options like printed books, a partner to be together etc might be other options.

Behind the rude part: I'm in France and for what I see here this winter will be probably mostly calm, no real dramatic outages are foreseen except for the newspapers who smell a bit of PR to keep people focused on emergency things instead of seen the nazist derive of our countries. For more than this winter I'm far less confident though.

If you are in Germany or Italy, well there things can be calm, in UK far less mostly due to the fragility of their infra much more private-centered so much more for someone profit instead of a for-the-country public service.

oshirisuki• 4 years ago

useful how? for work? leisure?

not sure how youtube-dl would be useful during an internet outage, could elaborate on how you'd see a use for it?, I could see rsync still being useful for LAN file transfers (sincerely not trying to be annoying/condescending, just thinking there might be more to youtube-dl than how I've used it)

but not sure if you mean like downloading a library of documentaries/videos in local hard drives while you do have access to youtube, and then using something like plex to watch them

I do that, except for the plex part, I use mpv in my computer, and don't have a tv with LAN/network capabilities

I also have some PDF ebooks from nostarch, and use zeal for offline documentation browsing, for reference when programming, be it for work, or my own stuff

you only mentioned software/digital things, so I assume not physical tools, like multitool (like the ones that can open cans and/or start fires)

I'd get a at least a couple of physical books, in case if you mean losing not just internet connectivity, but also electricity

I also think it's possible to download libgen to local media, though I haven't done it myself

I saw at least one answer mentioning survival things so I'm not sure if I went off-base here

markus_zhang• 4 years ago

z-lib also had a large collection.

archive.org for large collections of books and videos.

Can also download music as mp3 from YouTube.

Google Map offline map (super crucial, I learned a few months ago in Roger's outage)

gadders• 4 years ago

1] Download a list of all members of Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace etc

2] Go round their house and blame them

tomchuk• 4 years ago

During a recent move, I found my WikiReader [0] from 2009 at the back of a drawer. Tossed some new AAA batteries in it and it fired right up. It contains a fairly complete offline copy of (2012-era) Wikipedia and some reference material for survival, medicine, farming, and repair of various mechanical and electrical devices. Remarkable little device for the $20 I paid for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

monroewalker• 4 years ago

One thing to consider would be ways of archiving the pages you've already visited such as with tools like Yacy and ArchiveBox. The comment thread and associated post here have good info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848566. I was curious about looking into this to get full text search for my own browsing history, though other people take this a lot further and attempt to archive all the content they come across and find useful

Ask HN: Offline resources during internet outages?

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