This may seem kinda ironic to be posting about, but when I say offline, I don’t mean strictly physical (like print books), so much as stuff that still works even when internet’s disrupted or whatever.

This may be a tell of my age in some respects, but I still enjoy downloading music, games, ebooks, or (more rarely) movies that simply work without phoning home or updating super often. There’s a weird sort of relief that I have both physical & digital fallbacks for when there’s a “storm in the clouds” so to speak.

One piece of media I’ve been meaning to look into to help in this space are maps. Maps are tricky given that they’re living documents, but I’d love to get a good downloadable/print map for reference.

Btw little protip if you’re on Android, check out Aard2 and downloadable dictionaries. They’re remarkably small, and it’s so much better than the ad-littered dictionary sites/apps, and even supports multiple languages.

  • @phx
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    51 year ago

    Would stuff that’s locally hosted count? You can actually download the entirety of Wikipedia and fit it into 22GB, which is well within the capabilities of an common SD card.

    Maps are a bigger thing. Google has apparently collected about 20PB (20 million gigabytes) of data for maps, though I’d imagine if you just need street/address/road data that might be a significantly smaller subset. Just the satellite imagery of Google Earth is about 196TB. Not sure what just the basics would take up

    • @ElectroVagrantOPM
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      1 year ago

      I’d count locally hosted stuff, yeah. I have a Jellyfin server in my local network that I use as a fallback for if internet goes down or a streaming service is having some issue. The latter is admittedly rare, but the former, unfortunately not so much.

      Regarding maps, this is why I also mentioned print maps. It can get dense if you go hyper-detailed and digital, like you mention, but we’ve also had less detailed yet still pretty useful print atlases in the past…I just haven’t taken the time to look up what some good ones might be to pick up, in case I ever just find myself in a weird situation without signal for mobile data or something. Or for some locales that they just couldn’t get a Google car down or whatever.

      • @phx
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        21 year ago

        Yeah paper maps work, I was just thinking of a way one can acquire updated maps on a regular basis without needing petabytes of storage :-)