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Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

projectnomad.us

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Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#71

Post by nojvek »

brightball wrote: post #70
hamstergene wrote: post #54

Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful. I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his…

Stuff like this is why I keep a small library at my house. Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them. Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)

Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book?

Sounds like a good read.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#72

Post by badsectoracula »

prima-facie wrote: post #59

I come from a time when internet connectivity was not permanent. It was only available a few times per day when you connected via the phone line. My first ISP gave me an allowance of 20 hours of internet per month. You would dial-up, check the news, check your email, read a page or two, download what you had to download, and then disconnect. The internet was very slow by today's standards, and the connection would ge…

Yeah, that is normal for me too. If i find any article that i think is interesting i use SingleFile to download a local copy and ytdlp to download any video i find interesting/informational (e.g tutorials/howtos/etc). I avoid cloud-based stuff, preferring to use local/desktop software instead (and 99.9% of it is open source). And when it comes to AI i use local models only - with inference engines written in C++ (to avoid the dependency hell that is Python - which for some reason seems 100x worse when it comes to AI projects too).

And yeah, i have downloaded Wikipedia (in ZIM format) :-P

It isn't really for some doomsday preparation reason, it is just that sometimes the internet doesn't work (it doesn't happen often but it does happen) or i do not have internet access for whatever reason or stuff simply disappears/changes.

In fact just yesterday night i wanted to lookup how something is done in Bash and after trying to search for it, i noticed my Internet wasn't working (it took ~1h to resume, it was quite late in the night). So i just started a local LLM and asked that instead :-P (i do have the info manuals for bash - and other stuff - installed but they are a PITA to search if you don't know exactly what you're looking for).

One thing that annoys me though is that it is basically impossible to have an offline copy of a modern Linux distro. Sometime during the late 2000s i bought the full set of Debian DVDs, but Debian stopped providing ISOs years ago. Of course with how big distros are nowadays you'd probably need something like 100 DVDs :-P. At least there is Slackware.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#73

Post by Infernal »

nabeards wrote: post #63
Animats wrote: post #52

There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1] In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those. [1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/

I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?

I’m searching for the source material here but must not be using the right keywords, any hints?

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#74

Post by sgbeal »

BoorishBears wrote: post #58
Animats wrote: post #52

There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1] In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those. [1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/

I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage For the margins a $280 MSRP allows you'd think they'd at least try a little bit: maybe hook people up with the RPi Compute Module which has eMMC onboard

> I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage

FWIW, my pi-hole server has been running 24/7 on a Pi Zero with the same micro-SD card for some 4-odd years.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#75

Post by jmuguy »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #69
hamstergene wrote: post #54

Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful. I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his…

I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.

Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#76

Post by paulryanrogers »

dogma1138 wrote: post #45
russellbeattie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.

You’ll be hanged from a construction crane if they’ll catch you with this project in Iran… :)

Why?

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#77

Post by coldtea »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #69
hamstergene wrote: post #54

Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful. I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his…

I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.

The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#78

Post by colechristensen »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #69
hamstergene wrote: post #54

Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful. I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his…

I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.

I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility).

But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.

And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.

My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#79

Post by coldtea »

nojvek wrote: post #71
brightball wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this is why I keep a small library at my house. Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them. Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)

Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book? Sounds like a good read.

In a doomsday scenario one wouldn't need a "rebuild all of civilization" book, but more a "basics like building a fire, filtering water, repairing a car engine, basic wound treatment" and such book. Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...

Re: Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

#80

Post by highhands89 »

I recently watched a video talking about how much censorship there is currently with everything on the internet and how massive web pages and databases of information are just completely evaporating. I am not personally one of those "everything is burning to the ground" people, but it's getting hard to not at least see where those people are coming from, given recent events. Honestly, if you have the space available, getting this is probably not the worst idea ever.

Thank you for sharing

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