Linux

There is the kiwix hotspot.

A WiFi hotspot that gives you access to the entire Wikipedia, medical information, homesteading books ...

an extreme option could be something like the Varvara / Uxn virtual machine by the Hundred Rabbits collective (created after having to deal with Adobe updates and Xcode updates over a barely functioning cell connection) – emulators are available for all sorts of hardware

blog: Weathering Software Winter | youtube: Weathering Software Winter

I haven't heard of kiwix before, that's pretty neat

So... I've done that May 2023 for a holiday trip.

I left with my RPi4 and few gadgets but no Internet.

There I built https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline-octopus/ and my main take away is

• you can build what is missing

and more importantly the meta take away is

• you need to iterate preparations

because just like first aid you need to be actually ready when needed and knowledge change over time. You need to actually try though, test your setup and yourself genuinely otherwise it is intellectual masturbation.

Have fun!

You can download a collection of thousands (maybe a million I don't even know) of books in Spanish in epub format, from the "secret library". It's like a 100Gb torrent, but way worth it.

Ebooks tens to have long lasting battery. I spent a few hours reading on monday.

Just now I'm on my phone, but if you are interested let me know and I'll try to find the link and will mp it to you if you want.

And just now I've been thinking that epubs being so small size maybe there's a way to transmit them over this radio mesh networks on demand, like some sort of radio library. I've have to look into that. Maybe they are too big for that as radio bandwidth for data transfer tends to be incredibly small.

You mentioned ham radio

definitely fun! It's a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF ("walkie talkie"-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power ("QRP") it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup...

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

https://freifunk.net/

An independent mesh network in Germany.

I have my homeserver rsync three Arch mirrors and three Arch ARM mirrors in rotation on three days every week. Thus I have full local repos for these. All my machines are configured to use this local repo. The reason I do this is precisely to be prepared for the inevitable 'Internet is broken' scenario.

There's a whole community for self hosting software.

[email protected]

Hopefully I did that right...

Downloading all of wikipedia for one language is abiut 90GB. Inhave it on a spare drive in case of an outage. That way if I need to research something I can still do.

You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.

Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.

Spain? check guifi.net ;)

People had LAN Partys playing video games "offline" in the 90s... Setting up a network is easy, the difficulty comes from scaling up to many nodes, and spreading through the geography (e.g. if you were to use antennas for WLAN, they would need a mostly unobstructed vision) which in urban areas gets tricky.

But those "topology" issues can be flattened, e.g. you can always have a raspberry pi (or any device) acting as server in the corner of a neighborhood. A virtual bulletin board, emails, etc. all could be self-hosted locally there and then people could go grab a coffee and consume the local news just like in the middle ages, but with a screen, digital assets and some healthy amount of trolling :P