41–50 of 146 posts
Nice idea, but as other commenters has pointed out, maybe not the best name. Back in the 90’s when I first connected to the internet, my ISP provided a package called Internet in a Box made by a company called Spry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBox
"On your marks, get set...we're riding on the Internet"
A super hardened computer, drop proof, waterproof, weatherproof, sandproof, rated for at least 20 years of use.
No moveable parts and everything stored on PROM.
It would come with a kit to use any power source possible
That should be able to survive in remote village with no supervision required for a long time.
I did not imagine a PI with a plastic case and a standard harddrive.
Clearly the rugged one would cost magnitudes more and things like WordPress and other programs like it would not be possible on rugged version either.
I would think that as a plus not a minus.
If a village fills up a blog or some other such software with large amounts of data and the harddrive crashes its gone. Does not come with a backup as far asI can see
When I read the headline, I had an alternate vision of this. A super hardened computer, drop proof, waterproof, weatherproof, sandproof, rated for at least 20 years of use. No moveable parts and everything stored on PROM. It would come with a kit to use any power source possible That should be able to survive in remote village with no supervision required for a long time. I did not imagine a PI with a plastic case an…
It's an offline stash of free knowledge, such as Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and OpenStreetMap. It brought to mind El Paquete Semanal, Cuba's sneakernet culture drop: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-cuban-cdn/
Https://github.com/i5ik/22120
Does this solve real people's actual problems? Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better. The majority of the world either has an Android phone (possibly a decade old), or a family member with one. Have the android app available in the app store and the data downloadable for those who occasionally have internet connectivity (for example visiting a big city), but don't…
From what I can tell, even here in South Africa's townships they are using fairly new Samsung, Huawei etc smart phones (always with a broken screen - this happens without exception), albeit cheap ones.
Even my gardener has a Samsung 10 something. Not entirely sure how he can afford it, but I suspect he borrowed a lot of money to afford it. Having next to nothing, the smart phones becomes your communication channel and your media center, news and.. hopefully learning.
You'd be surprised how many poor smart phone users exists in all of Africa. And 3G or better is almost everywhere now.
The pricing has come down and that is truly bridging the digital divide.
These don't work and never have. We have 20 years on this. I get in the 90's it would have seemed like a quick win. But it didn't work. This inability to move on is frustrating. If you care , which most people don't. But if you do, what you want on them is porn and copyright TV. If you don't understand why I can't really help you, it's a pretty simple idea. You can't do that obviously, so how do you do it by proxy? T…
Does this solve real people's actual problems? Selling the 32 gig SD card together with an Android app to browse the data seems far better. The majority of the world either has an Android phone (possibly a decade old), or a family member with one. Have the android app available in the app store and the data downloadable for those who occasionally have internet connectivity (for example visiting a big city), but don't…
I have seen a IIAB device used in a school in a remote area (one IIAB for several clients on the WLAN, old PCs with wired network, phones, and tablets).
The IIAB scripts, https://github.com/iiab/iiab/tree/master/roles , make setting up such servers very easy (including best FOSS apps, wifi hot spot, networking, and web admin interface). You just need to bring one beefy hard disk and you suddenly have access to all of Khan Academy, wikipedia in dozens of languages, and all kinds of other collections of educational and reference materials.
Of course nothing prevents you for copying content over to individual mobile phones and tablets (like takeout), but centralized setup of a "learning resources hotspot" that people can connect to is very efficient first start.
Related: see related info about installing Kolibri and Kiwix in this comment (these are two of the apps that are available via the IIAB install scripts) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26137100
When I read the headline, I had an alternate vision of this. A super hardened computer, drop proof, waterproof, weatherproof, sandproof, rated for at least 20 years of use. No moveable parts and everything stored on PROM. It would come with a kit to use any power source possible That should be able to survive in remote village with no supervision required for a long time. I did not imagine a PI with a plastic case an…