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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

sparkbox.com

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Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#22
post #6

Rich from a site that loads 4 trackers

... and is built with Next.js including no less than 12 enormous x-font-woff2 chunks of data at the top of the source code and another big __NEXT_DATA__ JSON chunk at the bottom. Hardly lean, vanilla HTML and CSS.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#23

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

I have a dual-SIM phone with AT&T and T-Mobile lines (a Google Pixel). I wish they had a triple-SIM phone, then I could add Verizon.

Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#24

Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.

Using the lite subdomain is a great way to read all the subscriber articles as well. Was reminded of the lite site during some annoyingly aggressive A/B testing CNN was doing a few months back.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#25

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

> we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity

Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#26
post #25

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

> we didn’t know how far we’d have to go to find a gas station with electricity Corollary: carry cash, so you can buy things without depending on Point Of Sale systems being on and able to talk to the payment card networks. My favorite nearby ATM dispenses $100 bills, so I can have several hundred tucked in my wallet without taking a lot of space.

I recommend having a mix of bills; the other person may not have change.

Clarification: Sure, keeping a $100 bill tucked away in the wallet for emergencies is a great idea (and I do that too), but wherever you keep emergency supplies, I suggest having a mix of smaller bills.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#28

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

I have a dual-SIM phone with AT&T and T-Mobile lines (a Google Pixel). I wish they had a triple-SIM phone, then I could add Verizon. Now that I think about it, I think you can have multiple eSIMs, but only one can be active at a time.

iPhones support 8 (or more): https://support.apple.com/en-us/118227#:~:text=You%20can%20h...

Unsure why they say 'or more' and what makes that happen.

2 can be active at the same time.

I can't find how many a Pixel can store at the same time though.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#29

Other Helene stuff I took note of: - AT&T was completely down for us but Verizon and its MVNOs were up - I had a Verizon MVNO secondary e-sim that came free with a home internet plan, unused until the hurricane hit - It worked pretty well! - The day the Verizon disaster internet trucks showed up at the police station in our town my Verizon MVNO internet went down Non-internet learnings: - Fill up your vehicle’s fuel…

From a Pineapple Express a few years back (80+ mph gusts and lots of landslides):

- When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks).

- Whatever cell networks people fall back on will effectively be down (as you saw with verizon)

- all emergency services websites should fall back to web 1.0 forms and static images if they take more than 5-10 sec to load. Loading a pile of JS and CSS to load a fake modal that obscures the content affer 5 min of loading at 2G speeds doesn’t count (looking at you PG&E)

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#30

[flagged]

I'm not sure I understand. Are you implying we should not design our technology around serious edge cases that humans encounter in life? Why wouldn't we target people in crisis when we design crisis management information sites?

I’m saying no one will unless incentivised to.
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