Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

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> how can I browse an offline copy of Wikipedia." Those problems would probably last longer than you want to schlep around and item like this.

Which is why you download offline Wikipedia before the disaster. I know "preppers" have a bad rap for cos-playing, but this project strikes me as the tech equivalent of "Prepare an emergency go bag,and buy some tarp to seal your windows and doors in case of a shelter-in-place order[1]". Sure, buying your gear/rations from an Army Surplus store is cos-playey (as is the EMP shielding), but the principle is sound.

> IMHO, if it's an actual doomsday, it's probably safe to assume technological society will collapse and not recover for generations, and any high technology would in reality be a short-to-medium term consumable that will break without replacement.

I suspect you're overthinking it - this is a computing equivalent of a go bag, not a nuclear bunker. Having offline useful information will be useful from day 0 (maps, emergency frequencies, agricultural & disease info, for example). The RPi has no moving parts and can run for years: my 1st-gen pi is chugging along just fine.

1. Which is always a good idea; see https://ready.gov/kit

> Which is why you download offline Wikipedia before the disaster.

You misunderstand. I'm saying that browsing a downloaded copy of Wikipedia is a counterproductive waste of time in a disaster. Investing effort into making sure you'll be able to access Wikipedia at all times in even the most dire of circumstances is probably having your priorities out of whack. It's like a kid packing for a trip by filling their bag with toys.

> I suspect you're overthinking it

No, I'm questioning some of the fundamental assumptions that would cause one to construct a device like this for anything besides cyberpunk cosplay.

> but this project strikes me as the tech equivalent of "Prepare an emergency go bag,and buy some tarp to seal your windows and doors in case of a shelter-in-place order[1]

> this is a computing equivalent of a go bag

It's like the exercise-equipment equivalent of a go bag, or the kitchen-gadget equivalent of a go bag (e.g. the kind of thing that shouldn't be in a go bag in the first place).

I think the idea that this is for anything but cosplay is the result of tech people fallaciously believing their most familiar tools (i.e. general purpose computers) will always be useful, and therefore making elaborate plans to preserve their access in situations where their PC will be as obsolete as a buggy whips.

> Having offline useful information will be useful from day 0 (maps, emergency frequencies, agricultural & disease info, for example).

Even assuming that is so, I think a bulky mains-powered PC is not anything close to the right tool to provide any of that. It would be about 1000x better to have compact amount of judiciously-selected paper reference material, augmented with a kindle with an appropriate selection of eBooks if you must be less judicious.

> Even assuming that is so, I think a bulky mains-powered PC is not anything close to the right tool to provide any of that.

I must ask: did you read the article? It's about a 5V system with a Raspberry pi in a case with an official raspberry pi screen packaged in a water-tight container with a custom keyboard - not too far off from a kindle, just with room for a battery/power bank. Add a modest 50W solar panel, and you have better data-density and durability than a stack of paper.

> better data-density and durability than a stack of paper

Eh, what? Paper has survived for hundreds if not thousands of years. Show me your RPi 1000 years for now, next to an equally old bible, and we'll chat again. (Not a religious argument, the bible is just an example.)

Edit: Make it 100 years from now, the effects should be obviously already at that point.

Is the bible printed on lambskin parchment? If not, the paper probably dissolved.

> Is the bible printed on lambskin parchment? If not, the paper probably dissolved.

Even the lowest quality paper can easily last 50 years when stored in acceptable conditions. IIRC, they've even recovered 2000 year old readable papyrus from ancient garbage dumps in Egypt.

And SD card (especially a high-density one) will almost certainly fail with catastrophic data loss before a decade or two, if not sooner.

> Eh, what? Paper has survived for hundreds if not thousands of years. Show me your RPi 1000 years for now

If my RPi has a long chain of monasteries taking care of it and making new copies every few decades, I will have more than a few RPis to show you. I think paper is an extreme example of survivorship bias: how much of it was preserved vs the total amount that was produced. If you want durability, go with clay tablets, or carving on rocks (but you're trading off against data density)

An offline copy of wikipedia would be the next most important thing to membership in a community.

Wikipedia tends to be pretty high-level, i.e. focus more on people, events, general principles, high-level summaries of how things are and their history. But in case of a societal collapse, wouldn't that be kinda useless? Not sure what specific pieces of literature you'd want to have on your emergency hand crank emp-shielded Kindle, but I'd expect more hands-on material would be preferable, i.e. material that tells you how to make and do certain practical things and the right technique and relevant caveats.

I think that information about topics ranging from plants, agriculture, medicine, chemistry, mechanics, historical technology would be really valuable. My previous comment is somewhat overstated. Instructional material on fashioning and using specific survival tools or accomplishing survival-essential tasks would be really important!

> An offline copy of wikipedia would be the next most important thing to membership in a community.

It would definitely not be. You're taking Wikipedia marketing waaay too literally. It's not the "sum of all human knowledge," it's a flawed collection of Cliff Notes for some of it. A roomful of undergraduate textbooks (or the equivalent eBooks) would be about 100 times better than Wikipedia as a foundation for knowledge, but neither would be very helpful in solving urgent, practical survival problems.

I can agree with the device being too bulky. However, if it survives EMP and your smartphone obviously doesn't, it will win against any kind of paper you can carry hands down. If it has offline openstreetmap, wikipedia and other literature - such as medical reference, geodesic data, books on how to prepare shelter, cook food in extreme conditions, craft materials, etc. then it is an extremely useful device. I still think it should be 5x as compact and support charging from a solar cell while staying watertight, but the premise is solid.

p.s.: how to evaluate usefulness - imagine you're trapped in Azovsteel and have no internet but access to sunlight, supplies are slowly running out and you need to learn how to better treat water so it can be consumed, treat wounds and repair equipment - if you have a device prepared for this, it raises your chances of survival. p.p.s.: IRL, however, defenders and civilians in Azovsteel have ways to procure electricity which allows them to use Starlink so everyday smartphones work quite well.

> if it survives EMP and your smartphone obviously doesn't

Wouldn't it be much easier to shield a smartphone? Those are much more compact after all. You can buy foil-lined pouches that are intended for preventing mobile devices from connecting to the network that might work against an EMP as well – at least as well as the device from TFA, which from the picture appears to have a rather large gap where both halves connect.

Maybe plug in a software-defined radio and antenna: possibly helpful for scanning frequencies for useful/helpful broadcasts.

> Maybe plug in a software-defined radio and antenna: possibly helpful for scanning frequencies for useful/helpful broadcasts.

That's actually the only decent use case I've heard for something like this.

It still probably pretty low on the list of priorities, but it's not so obviously useless as the other ideas to justify it.

It's also easy to have it contain an enormous library of ebooks that are very relevant to DIY and survival.

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