- offline wikipedia
- offline stackoverflow
- youtube-dl
- libgen (are there tools to download e.g. only some genres?)
Remember that if an Internet outage extends for long enough (days?) in most of Europe then parts of your society will start to fall apart and lots of people will be completely freaking out, especially in the cities. (If it's a part of Europe that had wars fairly recently, people will probably not freak out as much.)
Thus your goal is to stay physically and mentally healthy. As a thought exercise, imagine going a week with no Internet, no mobile phone, and a lot of chaos on the streets: stores and gas stations mostly closed, possibly looting, etc. How exactly would you get through that?
I guess that's the prepper version.
The "half-day internet outages and I want to keep working" version is just have lots of documentation downloaded, plenty of source code too, and don't forget to take breaks: restoring your ability to concentrate is itself a work task.
A good receiver with a bit of antenna can easily give you access to radio stations thousands of kilometers away, as well as amateur radio operators.
And then you realize that these days mostly China and some american religious organizations invest heavily in shortwave broadcasts.
Location: Southern Sweden
That way, I don't need to worry as much about batteries, adapters, etc. and I can pretty easily find or make a 5V supply to power everything important
A few days with no Internet is not enough to bring down civilization.
I hopefully stand corrected.
I didn't mean to suggest it would bring down civilization, just that it would cause more havoc than you might assume.
During the Texas blackouts was mobile internet available? Phone service? Was there food for the people who didn't receive deliveries?
Were you confident the government would restore service soon?
I grew up with frequent blackouts and I'm completely unfazed by anything on a 24-48-hour scale.
But -- and I hope I'm wrong! -- I see many societies growing more fragile and I would worry about what an infrastructure failure like that might mean to people who live much of their lives online.
After superstorm Sandy here in New York I was left without power, heat, internet, gasoline or hot water for 2 weeks. Books, a crank radio, several thick blankets, an LED lantern and many batteries proved critical to making it through.
We have redundancy in our devices, so secondary laptops and SBCs to replace them with would they fail, as well as SD cards with imaged distros to bring them back up if we brick them.
We're not especially fans of kiwix and these wikipedia archives, they're hard to duplicate being so large, too slow to access from SBCs and the content too superficial to be of any use. Instead, whenever we have internet access we hand pick the websites we'll need and make mirrors.
We don't keep anything crucial on electronics, we make printed copies of the important things, we have physical copies of entire courses on trigonometry and celestial navigation.
We tend to rip websites into plain text format, and format it when needed, sometimes we rather not have to fire up the browser just to look at the size of part we might need to make, instead we just cat the file.
I would spend a decent amount of time on organization. This is advice from hindsight. I have over 15TB of total storage but my folder structure is terrible so even though I have a lot of amazing things, I have to remember them and manually search for them.
The last critical thing I can think of is this search tool called Everything by Voidtools. It allows essentially instantaneous search of the entire ntfs based drive by filename or size. It's a windows tool, I am not sure what the equivalent would be on another OS. It's critical though, without it I would never be able to find anything. I have remapped my caps lock to that tool.
x265 takes around 1.5GB for 1080p per movie in a very fine quality for us. I've collected it incrementally over time.
I can stream it form desktop PC or notebooks, anything with HDMI would work, no issues with codecs, subtitles etc. Never too lazy to do few clicks to watch something for 1.5-2.5h.
As for searching, Total commander has built in probably most powerful and intuitive disk search I ever saw, you can search by many criteria of file and its content (not form video perspective obviously).
I just organized it all via normal folders, and export current content of that HDD into simple text file if I need to check if I already have it, and if yes in what form. Normally HDD is turned off, I don't access it that often.
2. It is OK to get bored. Your mind will start racing the creative track like crazy when you are allowed to be bored.
3. People. Talk to people. Of late, I have found this to be a really good exercise. Listen to the two extremes -- the very young people (20-ish) with their wild, rough, ideas and the old (60+) with their experiences, regrets, suggestions.
Just some quick notes:
- Have an AM/FM radio with batteries.
- There still is OTA TV, make sure you have a TV with a tuner and an antenna available.
- Have a method to collect, store and treat water.
- Have lots of bleach around for sanitization.
- Have a way to collect and dispose of human waste.
- Have a way to cook.
- Take pictures of everything in your home, and copies of your documents.
- Cigarettes (or is it vaping supplies nowadays) and alcohol is great bartering material. Used to keep these on hand when I lived in hurricane country. Also have cash.
- Lastly have at least 6 different ways to make coffee. :)
Take a Friday night and turn off your electricity and water then just practice until Saturday morning. Find what works or where you need improvement. Then do it again, this time from a Friday night until Saturday night. Find what works or where you need improvement. Then try it again for a solid three days.
I've taught many persons regarding wilderness survival and emergency preparedness, and honestly you finding yourself stuck at home is the most real world situation you will find yourself in, not naked in the jungle with a member of the opposite sex. And what I have observed the most, are people suddenly being taken away from their dopamine hits from TV, social media and their phones really messes with them and adds additional stressors in a situation. Practice not having these constant stimuli. It will make the actual survival part easier.
> Have a method to collect, store and treat water [...] Have a way to collect and dispose of human waste.
Well, that escalated quickly.
These types of situations do. That is why you prepare.
.. so putting aside that ...
I would welcome Internet being down either for an extended amount of time, or not being reliable at all and just working, say, 2 random hours a day.
. would be back to my vacation as a teenager in th e80's where I had book, the 3 TV channels (this was France, so actually 2, because nobody was watching France 3) and friends I meet outside to chat.
It would be truly wonderful, but I really, really hope it will not happen.
Well here in Iran we are going through that as we speak (there are ongoing protests and government has shut down the internet, it is only available early in the morning). Wanna trade places?
That's all.
My son is in close contact with a girl in Iran and I know how tough this is - but this completely beside the point I wanted to make.
I work in IT, spend my free time coding personal stuff and what is left - it is used to read on Internet various sources of information. This is the reason I would be glad if this was a bit limited, so that people need to go to libraries to read something, and not be overwhelmed by information.
When I go trekking in places where there is no access to Internet I get a satellite phone for the sake of security. I like these times where I simply cannot connect anywhere and have to fill my head with other things (thoughts, reading, discussing, ...)
Have you not lived through a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake? The power grid (and thus Internet) are down for days, sometimes weeks. The running water stops, and refrigerated food spoils.
Do you know what happens? It is not Mad Max style chaos. Businesses open their doors to help everyone free of charge. Neighbors share water. People help each other.
If there was a general failure of Internet on the level of a country for an extended (weeks) amount of time then it would be chaos. a lot of information would not go though, you would not be able to pay in stores, hospital data could be unavailable, travel would be highly disrupted etc.
If Internet breaks locally, what comes from outside this "locally" still works. If this si for a limited time people will manage.
As someone said, we are a few meals away from the collapse of our civilization.
Since you mention the power grid: the generally accepted idea of the Earth hitting a solar flare and having its power grid seriously damaged (and electronics) is that it would be doomsday.
I'm curious if you are very young?
Life doesn't depend on the internet.
Take hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017. Wiped out electricity, phones and water for many many weeks for the lucky and for multiple months for many people. The unluckiest areas were without power for a year or more.
Life goes on. To great inconvenience, but things keep going.
The worst is being without water. As long as there is water, being without electricity or internet for weeks is no big deal. (Except of course for people who depend on life support equipment.)
During these times you mention, were hospitals closed? Shops closed without anything coming in? No banks working? No fuel? Nothing being brought to the people?
If so I would seriously be glad to understand how they survived (I am very serious).
Otherwise it was a localized shutdown, with the rest of the country coming in to help and bring in what was not available locally. Life does depend on Internet and power on a more global scale.
Interesting! So you remember a normal life without internet.
> During these times you mention, were hospitals closed? Shops closed without anything coming in? No banks working? No fuel? Nothing being brought to the people?
Plenty has been written (search Puerto Rico Maria 2017) if you're curious.
Everything tries to continue operating the best they can. Some places have generators so they can open some hours but fuel is difficult to get (wait in line all day for a few gallons). For many things electricity isn't that vital. Water is critical. Supplies trickle in but slowly, so most places run out of everything. Share with neighbors and figure it out.
It's all very difficult, but society doesn't collapse. This went on for months (or a year+ in more remote areas).
> with the rest of the country coming in
Puerto Rico is an island so there is no rest of the country to come in from.
Things arrive by ship which take a good while and there were also a lot of problems with cargo being blocked at the ports, so even with donations arriving they were held up. That's a whole another can of worms.
> were hospitals closed?
Some, not all. Depends on size and priority. They get brought up depending on priorities. In Puerto Rico, Trauma 1, Centro Medico, has to up first for example.
> Shops closed without anything coming in?
Some yes (most smaller ones). Others, no. Problem is that in Puerto Rico the denser area, the metro area, is just on small area of the island. There, bigger stores were opened. In other towns, there you don't have bigger stores. You just have small mom and pop shops that cater to the people in that 'barrio'.
> No banks working?
Banking in PR, the main bank owns the ATH network (an atm network), that has to go up. Pretty sure it's at the same priority of Trauma 1 hospitals so that people aren't stuck. But you actually get a lot of people going to the banks and getting out as much as they can.
> No fuel?
It took *A LOT* of time to get fuel and gas to individuals. Reserves go first to priority one.
> Nothing being brought to the people?
Mostly by random people. As you heard of people in towns that are complaining of not receiving things, you have other regular people going up. The government was a disaster. Both local and federal, including army and fema.
There are local areas with cattle, and that grow vegetables and things. So basically, just going old school. Town squares and contacts. Money while useful for bigger stores, it's not what people needed. So, if you can find fuel and had extra.
It always goes back to basics. Helping each other out. People just get together. If a street is blocked, neighbors get together to open it up. Machetes, saws, etc. Cookouts, 'what do you have?, I have a bbq and rice, bring over vegetables and we'll make something'. 'Got a chicken, we are making asopao and feeding EVERYONE'
----- > If so I would seriously be glad to understand how they survived (I am very serious).
It was tough. Radio operators were brought in to the island to help coordinate things because there was no infrastructure. No cellphones, no radios, no antennas for cellphones (damaged and no power), am radios to hear info.
They would just sit down in front of the house, by a tree and all they neighbors would just talk. Clean the house. Clean around debris.
Think back to childhood times, but now it's everyone.
------
I was able to get my sister, my mom, my grandparents over to my place 6 weeks after the hurricane hit. They stayed with me for 5 weeks before they went back. They went back without having power, but water had just arrived.
My mom was caring for my grandparents. My sister was the one finding things. There were 6 hour lines to be able to get into a store to buy whatever food they had. They were buying whatever they could find, even things that were spoiled. The next day, she would do 4-6 hour lines to get gasoline for the car.
They were cooking over small fires in the yard.
My family lives in a well off city, Guaynabo. Meaning that there's a lot of influential people and I can guarantee you they were trying to pull strings and bribing people to get connected quickly.
I know it, because in the past when I lived on the island, I worked with very influential people and saw their dealings and how they moved things and how favors got exchanged for things, even for a public utility (like they had then, but since it's been privatized).
For reference, 5 years after, a category 1 hurricane just devastated the island. It's been 11 days. While the most of clients have power (denser metro area), the majority of the island (total area), are still out.
Can’t speak for PR in 2017, but generally… satellite internet. Walmart set up satellites in the 80 for their financial networks. Most large banks by now would either have access to them or be able to have access. Everything important already has failover.
If it’s big enough, the government/military gets involved. The European governments surely could set up a Satellite link for a little while. European nations are small, they could probably string together microwave relays.
My biggest internet concern in extended European power outages are the data centers. AWS et al in the EU will lose power, and anything important hosted there will migrate to US or other regions… and I doubt they have excess capacity for that during the holiday seasons (when Amazon and Google have higher usage of their own too)
If it is just your home. You can have a mirror for your Linux distribution at home. There are plenty of self-hosted software (https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted for some initial suggestions) on which you can rely on instead of cloud services, you can download copies of wikipedia and other more or less static files like books, tv shows and movies (most streaming services let you do that for offline viewing, besides not so legal ways) and so on to have enough to see and read for months or years. Just have with you some good storage to hold them all and you can rely less on online internet.
For your country there is probably caches, local mirrors and some local presence of major services (i.e. a local 8.8.8.8, if you use that instead of your local ISP dns). There may be things that will be definitely outside, from social networks to cloud content, but there are enough self-hosted solutions to have your own content with you, and create local communities with your self-hosted solutions.
A local and self-hosted Spotify, Netflix, Google Photos, etc.
For coding and work I think it's unlikely to be productive for innovative things due to libs that you'd need not being available to you, i.e. `go get` won't work. You can do maintenance, etc and still be using Git but as soon as you encounter the "thing you needed to download you didn't know you needed" you're going to be stuck. As for Stack Overflow, there's a lot of joy in having a few good technical books to resort to and to fall back on reasoning about things a little more.
I would say an offline MDN would be very nice and it turns out that does exist https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus/docs/features/offli...
So perhaps the thing here is to encourage other sites to allow an offline mode with local storage.
I use it even when online because it's simply much quicker and a coherent UI across many languages.
I don't see myself browsing through local files on a computer while internet is down, I expect to resort to books and daylight instead.
https://www.libgen.is/repository_torrent/
But it's huge.
- Offline contacts (I print mine out on paper every 6 months)
- Google offline maps
- Decent calculator
- QR & barcode scanner
- copy of legislation
- phone book
It's work you can do offline... If you're in a position where you are asked to review sections of a contract.
while not a lawyer myself, our lawyers tend to send over documents with technical requirements highlighted for review.. e.g. "Use TLS 1.1 or greater"
There's also things like HECVAT or similar documents
The truth is that this system profits to a lot of people and "profit above all" is also a corner stone of american culture, other places have regulations against these as a lot of it is deemed abusive.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/12/27/blame-and-claim-can-we-...
If you burn yourself with coffee and sue the restaurant, or crash your e scooter and sue the city for having ... sidewalks you're not defending you're rights, you're being a clown
As to the coffee, it seems you've fallen prey to clever PR by one of those "profit above all" entities you seem to despise. From [1]:
> There was a famous lawsuit in the 1990s, Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, in which a 79-year-old woman sued McDonald’s because the coffee she had bought, and spilled, was too hot. Thanks to some very good PR by the chain, it was widely seen as a ridiculous suit — a sign of how crazily litigious the U.S. had become, and how everyone was desperate to sue themselves rich. People thought the litigant was driving at the time of the spill, which she wasn’t, and that she was unharmed and just out to make a buck, which also wasn’t true — she required skin grafts for third-degree burns and was permanently disfigured by the incident, plus only took it to a lawsuit after McDonald’s offered her what she saw as an insulting $800 sum.
> McDonald’s were selling their coffee at completely bonkers temperatures — an undrinkably hot 190 degrees, close to boiling point and guaranteed to burn any human flesh it came into contact with (but also guaranteed to keep it fresh in the store longer, a money-saving move).
[1] https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/5-coffee-myths-legends
The coffee was dangerously hot (hotter than is safe, so hot that regulations would require wearing safety equipment to hold) and she got burned at McDonald’s when it spilled and gave her third degree burns. I think a more likely reality is that Europeans drink coffee at a safe temperature (and not to-go) and European companies don’t overheat their coffee for their car-centric culture to ignore until their morning commute is over.
Or offline Openstreetmap in, e.g., maps.me app.
Power generation is tricky, if you can afford solar, do so. a gas powered generator is tricky, the smaller ones are better since they use less gas. and you want to save as much gas as possible. its amazing how ba generators are, here, you could smell it in the air like inhaling poison.
If you're... ahem... sailing the seas, it can be easier to find 1080p h.265 copies at 1.5-2.5GB/each than it can be to find 720p or lower compressed with a high-efficiency, high-quality codec like that. The 480p or 720p rips available may well be larger than the 1080p version.
The quality on those h.265 rips isn't even terrible. Better than Netflix's 1080p streams (which is damning with faint praise, since those are WTF bad, but still, it's pretty incredible how decent they can be in such a small file size).
> instant offline access to 200+ API documentation sets
I came across this last week from an HN thread - thank you HN!
Where I live I could see a specific problem taking several days to fix the phone line that carries my DSL. You might not realize it from recent events but the UK is a modern developed country, but multi day power outages aren't unknown [0], if power lines are down, phone lines could well be too.
NotPetya knocked out a lot of payment processing in Ukraine which caused a fair amount of problems. I could see a sophisticated state level coordinated attack knocking out much of the London Internet Exchagne, which would cause massive problems with internet routing in the UK (there are others, but a large amount of connectivity goes through LINX. An attack wouldn't be trivial given the resilience, but part of my job is to imagine the impossible)
People not having access to facebook for a week or so wouldn't cause mass riots. Day to day finance would be the biggest issue as so much relies on the internet, but restoring logistic and finance network connectivity would be a high priority. Getting netflix back wouldn't be.
I'm also tinkering my Kobo to have Kiwix actually run into it directly (I modded mine with a 256GB MicroSD) and have a copy of Wikipedia in my hands from an extremely low-powered device.
Take this manual on radio operations from the Marine Corps:
https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Docs/TBS/MCRP%20...
It basically goes over everything you need to know about radio theory and constructing antennas, and teaches these things more effectively than any other resource when I was recently learning about amateur radio. Other resources are long-winded and contain distractions, but military publications like these are distraction-free.
Here's the modern version of the Army manual on survival (formerly FM 21-76):
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN1208...
Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape Operations:
https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a3/public...
Field Hygeine and Sanitation:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/tc4_02x...
First Aid:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN1413...
Base Camps:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ATP%203...
Carpentry:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35831-TM_3-3...
Firefighting:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/tm3_34x...
Crowd Control:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN35675-ATP_3-...
Advanced Situational Awareness:
https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34875-TC_3-2...
Takes some effort to get involved in the community, but if you had a group of friends you could all meet up once, connect to the same wifi connection, follow each other and then gossip each other's messages effectively. Setting up a pub or room server helps out too.
That being said, I've been on SSB for 5 years now and love the community that I'm apart of even though it's spread out all over the world and mostly involves the developers that are working on SSB.
Although there might also be sufficient light from the civilization being burned down outside your window.
not sure how youtube-dl would be useful during an internet outage, could elaborate on how you'd see a use for it?, I could see rsync still being useful for LAN file transfers (sincerely not trying to be annoying/condescending, just thinking there might be more to youtube-dl than how I've used it)
but not sure if you mean like downloading a library of documentaries/videos in local hard drives while you do have access to youtube, and then using something like plex to watch them
I do that, except for the plex part, I use mpv in my computer, and don't have a tv with LAN/network capabilities
I also have some PDF ebooks from nostarch, and use zeal for offline documentation browsing, for reference when programming, be it for work, or my own stuff
you only mentioned software/digital things, so I assume not physical tools, like multitool (like the ones that can open cans and/or start fires)
I'd get a at least a couple of physical books, in case if you mean losing not just internet connectivity, but also electricity
I also think it's possible to download libgen to local media, though I haven't done it myself
I saw at least one answer mentioning survival things so I'm not sure if I went off-base here
OSM offline maps are great! They came useful for me so many times when traveling. It doesn't even have to be an internet disruption. You may end up without signal in some weird place and OSM is there for you. And the maps are not that large - keeping the whole continent available on the phone is trivial.
A small example:
- can you read, search etc your emails offline? If not try to correct because being able to is not just useful in emergency condition. From fetchmail to OfflineIMAP/isync to maildrop (refiling via filters) passing through notmuch are some tools of the trade;
- can you read, search etc your digital life (like contracts, banks transactions, notes, ...) there are many not-integrated and often crappy tools for such usage, the best I found so far are Emacs/org-{mode,roam,attach,agenda,...} exporting regularly POSSIBLY automatically if your bank(s) offer such ability or things like woob can wrap the bank anyway, anything might be a useful practice BUT it need to be done regularly or it's simply overwhelming trying to do in a rush...
- can you here music, see movies, browse pictures etc, I mean the ludic part of your digital life offline? If not try to choose some tools and way of organizing such mass of file as soon as you can...
- can you WORK offline? Like for instance can you write/read docs works related, code if any in a local editor, on a local repository etc? If not try to see and discuss with your company operation the available options because again it's not only valid in case of outage but as a standard practice to REDUCE infra cost and augment it's resilience...
Oh, BTW since a desktop typically demand electricity, like a fridge, a heating systems etc can you juice your devices? That's might be "simple" under certain circumstances but it's definitively EXPENSIVE and can't be done at all in a rush. So secondary limited options like printed books, a partner to be together etc might be other options.
Behind the rude part: I'm in France and for what I see here this winter will be probably mostly calm, no real dramatic outages are foreseen except for the newspapers who smell a bit of PR to keep people focused on emergency things instead of seen the nazist derive of our countries. For more than this winter I'm far less confident though.
If you are in Germany or Italy, well there things can be calm, in UK far less mostly due to the fragility of their infra much more private-centered so much more for someone profit instead of a for-the-country public service.
And how will these be stored? My (crude) understanding has been that the increased risk is for general power outages, not just the internet...
Better strategy is to some get music , some get movies, some get e-books, some get software , etc... You pick it at random.
So I recommend something like squid for "stuff in general" and specialised proxies for repositories you use often / care about more.
2. get some HDD space, for sneakernet style sharing.
If you have a TexLive installation you have many thousands of pages of excellent manuals in PDF form.
2] Go round their house and blame them
archive.org for large collections of books and videos.
Can also download music as mp3 from YouTube.
Google Map offline map (super crucial, I learned a few months ago in Roger's outage)
Plain text takes very little space. Only 75 MB for MDN (Mozilla Developer Network), Devhints.io, tldr, Go by Example, some OWASP and some docs for specific software (Apache, Hugo, Django, Flask, Arduino, micro, Pandoc, Lua...). All Free and open source.
If you're preparing for offline, you could download it while you still have the net:
https://terokarvinen.com/2022/ks-kanasirja-offline-tui-dicti...
So if the goal is to store all books for a rainy day, you can buy a grand of storage or you can build the largest library on earth.
That said, a few books would be wise in case of severe energy loss (it would have to be very severe to make running something like a kindle prohibative, but if we're playing doomer then I'll accept a couple of shelves would be sensible).
Books. Get a library card.