Offline resources during internet outages?

If you're talking about a major extended outage, I would worry about having books to read, food to eat, other humans to interact with, music to listen to, and a way to exercise or at least move around outside. As a hacker you will also want some minimal low-powered computer to mess around with, because it will calm you down. Oh and a multi-band radio that also does short-wave and is crank-powered so you can keep up on the apocalypse!

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.

My partner and I live aboard a sailboat outside of reliable internet range for most of the year, we keep copies of safety guides such as Field Manuals(FM Series), barefoot doctor, plant identification guides and other repair manuals for the boat. We also have copies of all our projects, and the documentation for the languages they use.

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.

One very valuable resource that I frequent is a subreddit called datahoarder. The idea is to be your own library essentially. There are many guides that have been written up over the years, along with links to tools and best practices regarding data management. The more things you automate, the less you'll have to think about this. The biggest one missing from your list is Plex or Jellyfin, a way to organize and serve local content via a media server. That's the frontend and using it with automated downloaders like Radarr, for downloading higher quality or lower quality films of what you currently own. At some point storage is going to come into question, 10 2gb movie files is a better use of storage in this hypothetical than 1 high quality movie file. The other main thing is a website storage and cataloging tool, like wallabag or pocket.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/index

https://www.voidtools.com/

1. Books

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.

Kiwix for general stuff [1] and Zeal [2] for pure documentation.

[1]: https://www.kiwix.org/en/

[2]: https://zealdocs.org/

Putting aside the fact that such an event would be catastrophic for our civilization and would end it in bursts of Mad Max like rebellions...

.. 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.

Internet in a Box might be a good place to start: https://internet-in-a-box.org/

How locally is locally? Your country, your city or your house? And how much extended, hours, days, months?

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.

Plex.

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.

A tool like Dash/Zeal to have a searchable local copy of dev documentation.

I use it even when online because it's simply much quicker and a coherent UI across many languages.

Honestly, I think the internet/data is the least affected during electricity issues. These systems have massive government supported backup systems. I think you are more likely to run out of battery/electricity. Then, if the internet actually fails for a long time there will be some moving USB sticks of stuff like wikipedia and maps. Like in Cuba. These days you can transport petabytes of MicroSD per hour with a bicycle, if you want. Assuming it is that bad, I would more likely buy a survival guide, some do it yourself books and paper maps.

You can download libgen books through torrent:

https://www.libgen.is/repository_torrent/

But it's huge.

- Offline email client (eg. Thunderbird, Outlook) with claendar sync

- Offline contacts (I print mine out on paper every 6 months)

- Google offline maps

- Decent calculator

- QR & barcode scanner

- copy of legislation

- phone book

As someone with continual power outages (PR) I could offer advice. but it depends on how much money you have. The itch to code is nonexistant, its basically off grid living. keep everything offline (r/datahoarder r/opendirectories) every byte counts, Yes, Every single byte (No mp3's, its all opus) opus with a bitrate of 16 for audiobook/podcast (thank god for those, I can have an entire library of a podcast and its less than a gigabyte. Stick to less than 720p for videos. its good enough. You're going to be using the tablet a lot for movie viewing, 1080p is overkill. if you happen to have small power generation, dlna is usable on most devices. keep a fullstack language, there's only 2 solutions here I can think of luapower, and factor. (though factor is x86 only, which is pretty bad).

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.

Organic Maps (https://organicmaps.app/) might come in handy in that situation.

The internet was cut off for three months in my country. I had offline Wikipedia, tons of books and other media. It was more than enough for reading/media consumption but I really missed communicating with people.

Dash - https://kapeli.com/dash

> instant offline access to 200+ API documentation sets

I came across this last week from an HN thread - thank you HN!

I try to put all my tips tricks and ideas into a tiddlywiki.com as it is a full featured wiki that runs as a self contained HTML file that runs offline. Fantastic for offline documentation.

Lots of people assuming that a few days of internet outage means you're in a post apocolyptic wasteland.

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.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-60431176

Please define "extended time". I used to have frequent outages from minutes to several hours (I think 8-10 hours max), that is not really a problem if you have as a backup a phone and tethering. If you are talking about a month of outage country wide, the food, fuel for heating, a couple of guns and a thousand bullets may be what you need to survive that, because that will cause massive chaos: our logistic chains cannot work without phone and internet.

I keep a Kiwix package of Wikipedia (EN) at around 85GB, my favorite music albums, my favorites movies (MKV, with embedded SRT subtitles) all available from a low-powered Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is powered by a 20,000 mAh battery pack and could be recharged using solar power if needed.

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.

Huh, that reminds me where just about every disto came with package of a bunch of linux-related howtos, I learned so much from them back in those days

I have lots of military publications saved as PDFs. The US Army and Marine Corps provides for free tons of manuals of a massive number of niche topics. The majority of them are not applicable for most people, but there's a number of these manuals that I think are worth having on hand in case of long term outages or catastrophic events.

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...

I use SingleFileZ to store web pages for future reference, and have Recoll scan them to search through them.

I was thinking it would be a good idea to buy an actual encyclopedia on CD or as a download, because then you'd have vetted information, but it seems all of the old encyclopedias either no longer exist, or are online subscription services only.

During a recent move, I found my WikiReader [0] from 2009 at the back of a drawer. Tossed some new AAA batteries in it and it fired right up. It contains a fairly complete offline copy of (2012-era) Wikipedia and some reference material for survival, medicine, farming, and repair of various mechanical and electrical devices. Remarkable little device for the $20 I paid for it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader

You may want to read this article by a couple living on a boat https://100r.co/site/working_offgrid_efficiently.html

All the -dev packages for your programming language(s) of choice. Plus any other development tool or environment you've ever thought might be useful someday, or that you might want to learn.

I really enjoy Secure Scuttlebutt for interacting with friends (social) and journaling. It is offline first, so I can write out my thoughts and respond to other people while away from the internet, and it will sync up when I have a connection.

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.

Offline wikipedia for android:

https://github.com/itkach/aard2-android#download

Books and a hand-powered/solar rechargeable light, so you can keep reading at night.

Although there might also be sufficient light from the civilization being burned down outside your window.

useful how? for work? leisure?

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

raspberry pi (some low energy home computer) serving nextcloud, offline wikipedia and OSM.

Interesting question but I wonder what would be the risks on the infrastructure in Europe ? IMO, apart from Eastern Europe (and still), the major risk would be on energy cuts. But in this case, that means that you would need to have an autonomous way of producing electricity for running these local ressources. Maybe physical books are more reliable ?

Hum, pardon me to being harsh but the best offline resource is your desktop(s)/homeserver(s) storage witch need something more than software to massively download on-line resources, like a design to be useful offline.

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.

For me, it's also about having a complete operating system that I can install fully, with all softwares working, without relying on the internet, on different systems. A BBS-like system for local users would be valuable, even a short-wave or wifi system to share stuff with the local community.

Save webpages offline in MHTML format: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-webpages-offl...

Have a think about what scenario are you preparing for - 8 hour outage or more? Up to 8 hours, the LTE power generators will keep the bases station online (in practice a lot longer, usually, but not guaranteed). If you need more than that, is it to keep you productive or what?

Offline documentation browser like https://kapeli.com/dash or https://zealdocs.org/.

I should probably put a copy of cppreference somewhere local. edit: https://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives

> I have a feeling that the risk for different infrastructure problems has increased here in Europe.

And how will these be stored? My (crude) understanding has been that the increased risk is for general power outages, not just the internet...

I have feeling that we will all get Kivix, and wikipedia. Like we all bought toilet paper for lockdowns.

Better strategy is to some get music , some get movies, some get e-books, some get software , etc... You pick it at random.

Kivix? https://library.kiwix.org/?lang=eng (beware, some packages actually won't work offline )

If you work locally there is no problem. Buy a personal computer.

That depends entirely on your own personal usage patterns. Why don't you just turn off your router for a day and observe which are the resources you access most often?

I always keep a fresh copy of Endless OS image around. https://endlessos.com/

I'm running a local transparent package cache. Both because it's much faster that way and because I can reinstall things without internet.

Good tips in this thread, I have relied on books for offline periods but some other documentation can't be a bad thing to add to my library.

1. get linux apt-get repository if you need software while offline. Whole thing has 70-80 GB.

2. get some HDD space, for sneakernet style sharing.

I was without internet for awhile.

If you have a TexLive installation you have many thousands of pages of excellent manuals in PDF form.

1] Download a list of all members of Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace etc

2] Go round their house and blame them

z-lib also had a large collection.

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)

One thing to consider would be ways of archiving the pages you've already visited such as with tools like Yacy and ArchiveBox. The comment thread and associated post here have good info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848566. I was curious about looking into this to get full text search for my own browsing history, though other people take this a lot further and attempt to archive all the content they come across and find useful

If you enjoy command line and TUI, I've collected some offline resources as 'ks'.

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...

Never heard of books?

briarproject.org .. App for messaging over Bluetooth.

Books and e-books.

yarn cache installs

Books. Christ.

If you use Linux, download an entire copy of a Linux distribution, source and binaries.

Books. Get a library card.