January 12, 2024 archive

Tonight here in northwestern Vermont we’re supposed to get the double trouble of heavy, wet snow and a windstorm with winds up to 49 mph (79 kph). The combination will undoubtedly cause trees to fall, taking down power and Internet cables. Forecasters are expecting power outages all across the state.

In these moments, I often think about what we would do in an extended power or Internet outage. Specifically, I think about:

• How can we access Internet content offline? (Without a connection)
• How can we communicate without Internet or telecom connectivity?

In this newsletter, I’ve got a couple of thoughts….

Accessing Internet content… offline.

Given that we store so much of our information online – what do you do without a connection? Do you have local repositories / copies of all your critical files?

But also – what if you want to look up information? Say… from Wikipedia? How do you do that?

Readers who have been around for a while may be already saying “That’s simple, Dan, I just use curl, wget, or something similar to pull down a copy of a website!”

And yes, you can do that. It works.

But there’s a far more elegant solution – Kiwix!

Kiwix is software that lets you download Internet content so that you can read it offline. It started out focused on Wikipedia, but has expanded since then to cover other sites. The cool thing is that you can use Kiwix in several ways:

• On a desktop computer (Mac, Windows, Linux)
• On a mobile phone (IOS, Android)
• On a Raspberry Pi (which you could then use with WiFi to serve as a local hotspot)

(There are also browser extensions for popular browsers, which could work with a server product they offer, or simply with the “zim” files stored in a folder on a drive..)

You then download the appropriate packages of content (“zim” files) and… ta da… you are using the site offline!

If you have a free 109 GB, you can download the entire 6.3 million articles from English Wikipedia and have your own offline copy. They also have packages of all sorts of subsets of Wikipedia – the top 100 pages, various sections, with-and-without images, and more.

The Kiwix library currently has hundreds of “books” that you can download for offline access. (At this moment, it says “1010”, but that includes multiple different download options for many of the sites.) There is also content from TED Talks and more.

The nice part is you can just have Kiwix on your mobile phone with some site content – and then as along as you can keep your phone charged, you can have access to all the Internet content.

Kiwix is a nonprofit organization primarily supported by users and foundations (including the WikiMedia Foundation) and they are doing good work. I do encourage you to check them out!

There are of course other solutions out there for offline access of Internet content. Do you have one you like? If so, please drop me a note – I’m always curious about solutions people find.

Messaging without Internet connectivity

I often wonder – what would we do if we had an extended power outage for multiple days? It’s been a while, but we have had ice storms that knocked out power and Internet for several days … or even longer. We saw some of the extreme storms last year that knocked out connectivity for days or weeks in other parts of the world.

Like all good Vermonters, we have a portable generator that we could use to provide some electricity. We live in an area with many homes that would probably get attention from the utility companies and so might not be out for too long.

But what if we were? How could we communicate with other people in our area if we didn’t have Internet or telecommunications?

One option of course would be to get a Starlink antenna. They can work with minimal power and so we could use it to get Internet access and be able to communicate with others. If other people in the area also had Starlink dishes we could be able to connect.

I do think there is tremendous power in the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems to add another layer of resilience.

BUT… that requires people to have the Starlink equipment, pay for subscriptions, etc.

What other ways are possible?

I don’t have a specific answer yet myself that I have worked with.

But I’m intrigued by what the folks involved with Meshtastic are doing. As they say, it is “an open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.”

It’s pretty cool! It’s based off of using “LoRa” hardware and unlicensed spectrum. The Meshtastic documentation does a decent job of explaining what it is all about and how it works.

WARNING! This all gets über-geeky and dives down into building your own hardware, installing your own software, etc. If you like that kind of thing, it’s awesome. If not… you may just want to skip ahead.

I was going to write more details… but I found that someone else already did! By way of a Mastodon post, I found that a person going by the name of “Hydroponic Trash” has written “a guide on building autonomous, off-grid, encrypted, and solar-powered communications infrastructure that lets you send text messages without any cellular or power infrastructure.”

You can view it at:

• Building Autonomous, Off-Grid, Encrypted, and Solar Powered Communications Infrastructure

(Yes, it’s on Substack… but you can still read it, and the person is working on make a PDF available on his website.)

Fair warning that as he gets toward the end, he gets into use cases and you may not agree with his politics. But if you focus on the first 3/4 of the article, it’s fascinating to see all the parts and pieces that can create this kind of low-power, off-grid communications network.

I’m personally hoping we don’t get to the point where we need systems like this… but given the increasingly extreme weather we’re seeing, who knows! I’m glad there are people out there working on solutions like these.

What other communication ways have you seen to add resiliency to our communications?

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button and you’ll get future messages.

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Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.