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.
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
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.
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 :-)
I held on for awhile, keeping collections of various kinds of things. Eventually I stopped and transitioned to steaming services for the convenience, and have subtly regretted it ever since.
You just have such a less personal relationship with the media, it really serves to cheapen it a little bit.
Same. I used to have everything on my own computer or physically but was limited by hard drive space so I moved to Tidal.
I listen to music with much less intentionality when using tidal compared to my own music player so I’m currently questioning streaming services.
Less is more. I can buy less music, but I listen to it better.
Less is more. I can buy less music, but I listen to it better.
This is me having listened to some of the same few albums for several years now. I only just realized as Janelle Monae is releasing a new album that I’ve been repeatedly listening to songs from her last album ever since and yet it still feels so damn fresh. So it’s not even that I’m not keeping up with current music, I just tend to savor it.
OpenStreetMap has some pretty good offline maps. You can download them region by region so you don’t need the whole world at once.
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Yeah, a future where things are less online or hybrid models are my interest too. I have an insecurity about change for simple things such as maps for instance. Having an offline variant just helps in making sure my day is consistent if there’s no time to try new things/updates that changes the whole UX im used too.
If you find a decent offline map program for Linux, be sure to let me know. This seems like something that could be useful.
Not linux, but an interesting mobile solution. Can probably port the android version to linux https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps. Found another for desktop/linux, but no routing features: https://github.com/heldersepu/GMapCatcher
Never stopped buying DVDs. I pick 'em up at thrift stores for a buck or two. Now I have a huge library of movies including many cult films that can’t be found to watch through any service. Love picking a movie off the shelf to put in.
DVDs are sick. They may not be the highest fidelity but they’re much more convenient to rip (many PCs can still be found with regular cd/dvd drives whereas I don’t know of many with blu-ray drives) and store (lower fidelity means the rips take less space, aayy!).
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Oh wow, literally shrinking them! What devices do they work in these days? I’m guessing you have something that can play them.
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