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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

> "how can I browse an offline copy of Wikipedia."

I would like a source (1) low power, E-ink book readers with (2) an SD card slot that can handle large cards, and ideally (3) open to hacking.

This is a very small set, possibly zero. All of the android readers are ruled out because it's power overkill just to get bits off a card to flip an e-ink screen and then go back to zero power for days or weeks. There used to be some readers with SD slots but those are often limited to 32 gig. And I want (3) in case the reader doesn't handle the formats I want.

Such a machine /would/ be an offline, after civilization goes away machine. You'd want wikipedia, emergency medical handbook, plant identification books, etc etc.

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How about PineNote? The RK3566 can run on a single core and be underclocked to 400MHz.

https://www.pine64.org/pinenote/

PineNote is looking good, but it's not ready yet - crucially, it's lacking in proper power management firmware, so it eats through batteries right now.

It'll be amazing next year, but not right now.

SD cards have short retention lifetimes (5-10 years under optimal conditions when new, even less with wear), and therefore are undesirable as a component of a "after civilization goes away machine".

USB blu-ray players are the way

You could honestly just start with this design, remove a few things, add an eInk display, use some other form of storage than SD cards for the Pi (since SD cards are notoriously indurable), and have exactly what you want. You'd probably need some custom display writing code and have to write some custom X/Wayland app that draws to the eInk screen. The idle power draw of the Pi is tiny and as long as you avoid writing to the screen with any frequency, it can probably stay alive for decades. (Though whether a Pi can last that long is a good question.)

> The idle power draw of the Pi is tiny

This is... uh... news to me?

I'm curious where OP got that idea from too. Compared to full blown PCs sure the idle power draw is tiny, but it will still drain an average powerbank in a few days at most.

You could fully shut down the Pi (which would require some external hardware or user input to wake it up again) but even then compared to usual low power electronics drawing microamps in deep sleep, the milliamps the Pi slurps up is a lot. It would probably last a few weeks, maybe months in this state, but it would also take 30+ seconds to boot every time you need to do anything.

Wikipedia printed in the most compact form could be a really useful book. Obviously it can't have everything, but I wonder what such a book could look like.

The problem is that Wikipedia's policy prohibits howto information. You can get a chunk of theory out of it, but not practical instructions.

I don't know the reasoning behind it, but it makes Wikipedia significantly less useful for this particular use case than it might otherwise be. WikiBooks might fill the gap in some areas, but it's just not got as wide coverage.

“ The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm”

Is a fun read. It seriously considers these questions and talks about practical things, like how to salvage iron ore from scrap rather than having to resort to mining it initially.

Take a look at https://github.com/dps/remarkable-wikipedia based on the Remarkable 2 tablet.

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