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Internet in a Box

internet-in-a-box.org

131–140 of 263 posts

Re: Internet in a Box

#131
post #8

I remember encountering this project: https://piratebox.cc/faq , I even still have a compatible hardware at home. I wonder if allowing it to have instant messaging (including offline asynchronous messaging) would change how people in a small community communicate each other. I wonder if, for one, it would induce Internet trolling.

Doesn't seem likely - the key to trolling is lack of accountability, in a small community everyone would know you were being a jerk?

Guys... people are jerks IRL too, in small communities too.

Re: Internet in a Box

#132
I've set up IIAB and tried Kiwix as well. I used a Pi Zero 2 and as it's only me using it, I found the user experience was good, although given the Zero's power, not high-speed. I managed to gain enough knowledge to create my own ZIM files of some selected YouTube content ( including my own). Being aware of the recent propensity of useful data to "vanish" I've approached a couple of online content providers to see if they'd ask to get their content added to Kiwix: sadly I heard nothing back, but I'll keep trying.

Re: Internet in a Box

#133
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are actually IIAB partners, we attribute to all the various OOS projects (Kiwix, IIAB)in our credits and comply with all the licensing. Our goal was just to make those packages polished as a consumer product and add newer content (some licensed and some commissioned ).

And yet there's neither mention of projects over https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/about-us

Yeah, the only mention I can find of many of the open-source projects they use seems to be in one of the FAQs.

Re: Internet in a Box

#134
post #124

Volunteer for Kiwix here ( https://kiwix.org ), we do a lot of offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner ( https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner ) which scrapes MediaWikis, primarily Wikipedia. We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11! You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of ( https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user ) to create "selections" whic…

Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just download a dump?

I was thinking the same. It must take much less space in database form than all the html pages.

Re: Internet in a Box

#135
post #134
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding mwoffliner: Why scrape Wikipedia when you can just download a dump?

I was thinking the same. It must take much less space in database form than all the html pages.

Its also kind of bad form to scrape a huge website when there's a downloadable dump available. Save yourself, and more importantly wikimedia, a whole lot of bandwidth & CPU cycles.

Re: Internet in a Box

#136

With the crazy news we have those past months, I actually started to wonder what would happen if internet went offline "for real" (let's say, several weeks) here in developed countries. I know we can easily download Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. But what else? And how to share it? I can do a hotspot home, but would my neighbors understand it? I would need some kind of captive portal to tell them when they connect to m…

> would my neighbors understand it?

I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own.

I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we have right now.

Re: Internet in a Box

#138
post #133
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet there's neither mention of projects over https://www.prepperdisk.com/pages/about-us

Yeah, the only mention I can find of many of the open-source projects they use seems to be in one of the FAQs.

And even with you writing that it was not easy to find because its under an unrelated topic.

Re: Internet in a Box

#139

Volunteer for Kiwix here ( https://kiwix.org ), we do a lot of offline Wikipedia stuff. I've personally worked on MWOffliner ( https://github.com/openzim/mwoffliner ) which scrapes MediaWikis, primarily Wikipedia. We have apps for basically every platform. Our PWA even supports IE 11! You can use the WP1 tool which I'm the primary maintainer of ( https://wp1.openzim.org/#/selections/user ) to create "selections" whic…

I had an offline copy of wikipedia from like five years ago, just in case. When I recently needed it I opened the kiwix app and everything was broken by some godforsaken overhaul update. I don't have an offline copy of wikipedia on my new phone anymore.

Re: Internet in a Box

#140
This could be helpful even for people who already have internet access. The internet is full of distractions, and we often end up seeing ads instead of actually learning something. It would be great to create personal collections of useful websites and have a powerful search tool to explore them—without relying on Google and getting sidetracked.

Right now, Kiwix’s search function is quite basic and doesn’t work well with large amounts of content. It might be worth exploring the use of a generative language model or embedding model to improve its accuracy and usefulness.

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