Internet for the occasionally online
Intermittency in my bandwidth not in my sanity
2017-04-09 — 2025-06-28
Wherein the Internet is cached for off‑grid intervals, read‑only Wikipedia and manuals being stored, and news being relayed by satellite unto a Raspberry Pi with e‑ink when shutdowns are imposed.
Keeping bits of the internet around for when we go off-grid. See also: sneakernets, low-bandwidth hacks.
This is a tricky problem, and partial solutions are everywhere. Many solutions are unidirectional. For example, we can get read-only versions of Wikipedia for offline use in our remote mountain village; but there’s no easy way to send our updates back to the version on the main internet.
Also, we should cache the internet for offline use even if the net is nice right now, because nation-states are wargaming to destroy the internet, and we regular people will suffer when that happens, and we won’t be able to get the YouTube instructional videos on how to survive the apocalypse when it does.
1 Offline automatic file sync
Some of the file sync options I mentioned also work as sneakernets. For example: git-annex, and Syncthing.
2 Offline Knowledge
As far as I can tell, there’s no way to contribute changes back upstream. But a reasonably simple, well-curated option is to use the Kiwix offline Wikipedia, which can give us everything— minus pictures—or only “medical” articles, or only “school” articles and so on.
Slate has a nice write-up of how this all works.
Kiwix is baked into Project NOMAD - Offline Knowledge & AI Server / Crosstalk-Solutions/project-nomad “Project N.O.M.A.D is a self-contained, offline survival computer packed with critical tools, knowledge, and AI to keep you informed and empowered—anytime, anywhere.”
N.O.M.A.D. is a management UI (“Command Center”) and API that orchestrates a collection of containerized tools and resources via Docker. It handles installation, configuration, and updates for everything — so you don’t have to.
Built-in capabilities include:
- AI Chat with Knowledge Base — local AI chat powered by Ollama, with document upload and semantic search (RAG via Qdrant)
- Information Library — offline Wikipedia, medical references, ebooks, and more via Kiwix
- Education Platform — Khan Academy courses with progress tracking via Kolibri
- Offline Maps — downloadable regional maps via ProtoMaps
- Data Tools — encryption, encoding, and analysis via CyberChef
- Notes — local note-taking via FlatNotes
- System Benchmark — hardware scoring with a community leaderboard
- Easy Setup Wizard — guided first-time configuration with curated content collections
N.O.M.A.D. also includes built-in tools like a Wikipedia content selector, ZIM library manager, and content explorer.
3 Offline omnibus
Kolibri is an open-source educational platform specially designed to provide offline access to a wide range of quality, openly licensed educational resources in low-resource contexts like rural schools, refugee camps, orphanages, and non-formal school programs.
4 Offline software manuals
devdocs.io is an excellent offline cache of API docs that works in our browser.
Even more comprehensive are the specialised apps Dash (macOS, US$25) and Zeal (Linux, Windows, open-source).
5 Offline news
I can’t tell whether Fallback is a viable project or an art project designed to make a point. Filip Visnjic’s review gives an overview: it caches online news in case a government monitoring internet activity imposes an internet shutdown on a restive population.
Fallback is triggered by powerful forecasting algorithms providing a backup right when it is needed. “We constantly monitor the probability of Internet shutdowns worldwide” — Quifan tells CAN. The prediction is done by trend analysis of the appearance frequency of certain keywords in the online world.
[…]the system scrapes headlines and articles from news platforms, encrypts it, and sends it over satellite to the Portal devices (Raspberry Pi Zero W with E-ink Module). Portal receives data over satellite, decrypts it, formats it into news articles, and provides its own WiFi access point where no Internet is required.
6 Offline file-sharing
PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box! PirateBox project is following a few simple goals.
This page lists certain peer projects.
Yes, check out Aram Bartholl’s fantastic Dead Drops. There are also several forks of the project, including Jason Griffey’s LibraryBox (actually nearly 1:1 and working together), the Bibliobox and the CoWBox (CoWorking Box). A new C.H.I.P based PirateBox fork is AnyfestoCHIP (Project-website). In addition, there are several projects which focus on education, creating an offline network, but are not based on Piratebox: