Digital Prepping - preparing your computers and smartphones for the possibility of any number of events … which could leave you without Internet or power for an extended period of time

submitted by [deleted] from self.Internet

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/digital-prepping-part-1-off-line

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/digital-prepping-part-2-preparing

all 8 comments
sorted by:
new (suggested)
topinsightfulfun

[–]smsfree 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

did not read through the article (sry) but basically if i were in that kinda situation i'd use a durable laptop with a small power consumption, maybe three of those laptops and only use the second one if the first one fails (only back the first one's data up per month). if stored properly (proper temperatures, etc.) it should last me 30 years.

for smart phones i really don't know. like, whether iphone 5 is still good at this point, or the earlies samsung smart phone is still good now. but laptop is more essential in that case.

[–]SoCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Some of my rambling insight on the topic..

In my experience, back before I became vax-disabled, I used go on 5-10 mile hiking trips weekly and do a bunch of kayaking, like almost every other day. I tried lots of offline map options, as I usually was stomping around no-cell signal parts of Southern Illinois' Shawnee National Forest and it's River to River Trail.

Google Maps, even once they started allowing you to cache a small area of map tiles offline, was mostly useless without a mobile data signal. It frequently didn't work without a signal at all, even after smashing through all the settings to disable the tons of shopping and advertisement crap squeezed into it that help kill the app when there is no signal.

It has been a couple years and there seems to be more options now, but I tried many offline map apps. I ended using this, Polaris GPS (GPlayStore) and continue to, although there may be better options now. It has a clunky interface that takes a bit to figure out, but works, works offline, records trails, and allows downloading offline tiles from several providers free.

I found several solar panels (on a budget), including my 16.5 inch (42 cm) square 30 Watt solar panel (EBay listing of same model with specs), to be largely inadequate for...charging a phone, rather on real use on the trail or river. This wasn't the only one to push me into solar pessimism, though.

Hopefully, solar panels are getting better, slowly, but their usefulness is frequently overstated and they are barely a trickle of power, even then, mostly only when perfectly directly hit by the sun from a clear sky. At least that is my experience.

I played with downloading copies of Wikipedia before, so I could host them on a dark-network. I wanted to put a high power Wifi antenna on a tower in the middle of town and provide a free non-Internet connected "Community" network and try to provide as many free downloads and web services I could, as I was somewhat versed in administrating servers and webhosting. If it worked, I had hopes to convince others to put up antennas and to connect them all together, tunneled through the Internet (but not allowing access to it). No matter your big fancy high-gain parabolic or omni-directional antenna, high power, but legal, access point, on a very tall pole...even the slower (ie a,b,g not N) Wifi's usable range is abysmal, at a couple blocks tops, even with line of sight.

Wiki provides up-to-date snapshots of itself and tries to encourage you to do so with lots of documentation. I was just installing a Media Wiki server and importing the data. I also tried converting them the page to all static HTML pages, if I recall correctly. The Wiki snapshots are HUGE, but they give nice options for including just relevant-to-you subsections of content. Setting up all the server stuff was a super big pain. This Kiwix app looks like it may make it easy.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[removed]

    [–]SoCo 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

    The Marble install page has installers for Windows you can download and bring to another machine and links to the various Linux package managers where you can find direct downloads of the Linux packages for your system, such as the .deb package.

    Doing this to install without Internet, would require you get all the dependency packages as well, but they should be listed and available too, although numerous. If you grabbed the source code of Marble, you'd still need the dependencies, either their source, or their development packages, to compile it. There is a Qt interface version of Marble, which may have less required dependencies if you aren't using a KDE desktop already. If you do have Internet, you can of course just do sudo apt-get install marble or sudo apt-get install marble-qt on Ubuntu/Debian flavors of Linux.

    I've not tried Marble yet, but have it on my list now...but I suspect you will also need an Internet connection to download offline map tiles for your area, once installed. I'm not sure if they have an option to side load them, allowing you to download and archive the offline tiles to install later or on another machine.

    FYI: Maps like this generally use "tiles" made up of a bunch of small square PNG images layout out in a grid. There is usually a whole set of images for each zoom level. This would be the "raster" tile approach, but vector maps are gaining traction, which more-so have defined geographical lines, points, and rectangles and text data, rather than images. This gives lots of analytical map opportunities, but is heavier on processing. Frequently, one uses the vector map data, that has bunch of color formatting styles and options applied, and then was pre-render to image tiles for use, like is mostly the case for end use of Open Street Maps' user generated map data.

    [–]HiddenFox 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

    I find this very interesting. Thank you.

    [–][deleted] 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    You are welcome.

    [–]Drewski 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

    Thanks for sharing, it's always nice to see Lunduke's content. Need to buy a few extra hard drives for some of this stuff. Do you have any resources about data preservation / storing data long term?

    [–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    https://dhitma.neocities.org/

    [–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

    Just make a multiple copies of it, medium doesn't really matter.