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 kingship.
The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that.
They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors.
Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.
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.
I live in a country with a functional government with an unlimited creditcard. The prepping is their business not mine.
I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.
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.
calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
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.
> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.
I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!
In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.
In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst."
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
Yes though watching that crowd is worthwhile. They often think about things different from mainstream and notice different things so good additional signal even if you ignore it
I went on to install this, but it seems very US centric, which isn't apparent in anything else than the domain name. The maps only cover the US, you can only download English dumps of Wikipedia, etc.
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
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 get lost very often.
It was during that time when it was drilled into my head that the network access comes and goes.
That it should not be taken for granted.
So a lot of the stuff that I use nowadays, I also have in an offline format.
I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use.
I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful to me.
Obviously it's not enough for a major catastrophe but it's better than nothing.
I'm by no means a prepper, but I also believe that each of us should be prepared for short term disruptions of various kinds. The network should not be taken for granted.
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.
I'm a fan of "civilization in a box" kinds of projects. However the ZIM file format leaves a lot to be desired in 2026. I've been exploring a refreshed, alternative approach: https://github.com/stazelabs/oza
I do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
Found a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements:
What About Raspberry Pi?
Project NOMAD is designed for more capable hardware to support local AI.
If you're looking for a Raspberry Pi-based solution, check out Internet
in a Box — it's a great lightweight option for basic offline content.
Project NOMAD is for when you want the full experience: GPU-accelerated
AI, comprehensive content libraries, and a professional management
interface.
Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)
Missing a chance to note (or configure for?) installation on a Raspberry Pi --- that'd make an affordable option to leave powered down, but ready to go in an EMI-shield/Faraday Cage.
222 comments
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 kingship.
> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers
The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that.
They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors.
Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.
I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.
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.
> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd.
I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash!
In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children.
In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
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. :)
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers
Yes though watching that crowd is worthwhile. They often think about things different from mainstream and notice different things so good additional signal even if you ignore it
In the meanwhile, wikipedia ships wikidata, which uses RDF dumps (and probably 8x less compressed than it should be).
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download
There is room for a third option leveraging commercial columnar database research.
https://adsharma.github.io/duckdb-wikidata-compression/
It's not the biggest deal if you're proficient in English, but I wasn't even able to download the full dump of English Wikipedia as their hardcoded link to it just seems to return 404.
The Docker setup leaves much to be desired, as network names are hardcoded, and extension services are expected to be reachable over hardcoded port numbers, making it impossible to run behind a reverse proxy.
Going to give this another go in a couple of years when it has had some more time in the oven, but it still looks very promising!
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 do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
https://internet-in-a-box.org/
https://wrolpi.org/