Found a click or two in looking for storage and other system requirements:
What About Raspberry Pi?
Project NOMAD is designed for more capable hardware to support local AI.
If you're looking for a Raspberry Pi-based solution, check out Internet
in a Box — it's a great lightweight option for basic offline content.
Project NOMAD is for when you want the full experience: GPU-accelerated
AI, comprehensive content libraries, and a professional management
interface.
Sounds like I should look at one of the other options mentioned there and in this thread, assuming their libraries and maps are basically the same. I'd like the “comprehensive content libraries” while travelling or when otherwise away from a reliable connection, perhaps with a useful management interface for easy updates and such when on good connectivity, but just in a format I can click or grep through. While I'm assuming I could just turn off, or otherwise ignore, the LLM side, just not having it in the first place would be more efficient.
Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful.
I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his kingship.
I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.
Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.
I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.
I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility).
But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.
And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.
My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them.
That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.
This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst."
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
In a doomsday scenario one wouldn't need a "rebuild all of civilization" book, but more a "basics like building a fire, filtering water, repairing a car engine, basic wound treatment" and such book. Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
> Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
The installation seems a bit cumbersome and unfriendly to non-technical people. If it's self-contained, it ought to be simple and platform agnostic, not tied to Ubuntu or a specific OS. I'll fork this and re-frame it into a SPA with a Tauri path.
I am actually only vaguely familiar and I was wondering about that every time I saw the format referenced but never bothered to check, your comment is informative!
I come from a time when internet connectivity was not permanent.
It was only available a few times per day when you connected via the phone line. My first ISP gave me an allowance of 20 hours of internet per month.
You would dial-up, check the news, check your email, read a page or two, download what you had to download, and then disconnect.
The internet was very slow by today's standards, and the connection would get lost very often.
It was during that time when it was drilled into my head that the network access comes and goes.
That it should not be taken for granted.
So a lot of the stuff that I use nowadays, I also have in an offline format.
I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use.
I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful to me.
Obviously it's not enough for a major catastrophe but it's better than nothing.
I'm by no means a prepper, but I also believe that each of us should be prepared for short term disruptions of various kinds. The network should not be taken for granted.
I travel a lot and do the same. Yes most places have internet. But I don't need much. And it's easier to have an "offline" folder with docs you need compared to carrying around a satellite dish. Also works in an airplane.
Mine contains language, library and game engine docs. Sometimes I back up some sites completely. But it's getting harder to do that as many sites block crawling now.
> have in an offline format. I keep offline docs either in pdf or in html format of most of the programming languages and frameworks that I use. I keep the source code of various projects that are essential to me.
This is such a good idea. Thanks. I'm going to start to do the same.
> I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful
I've been using Zim Wiki for years; back then there was nothing better available and now I can't be bothered to migrate formats. Plus I've already contributed a bunch of plugins to Zim :)
20 hours? My first internet (actually not even internet, it was called eWorld) gave you 4 hours a month… which actually was ok because there wasn’t much to do on it, and you couldn’t go long without someone in your family accidentally picking up the phone anyway, and everyone would be mad if you kept the phone line busy for very long, too.
Yeah, that is normal for me too. If i find any article that i think is interesting i use SingleFile to download a local copy and ytdlp to download any video i find interesting/informational (e.g tutorials/howtos/etc). I avoid cloud-based stuff, preferring to use local/desktop software instead (and 99.9% of it is open source). And when it comes to AI i use local models only - with inference engines written in C++ (to avoid the dependency hell that is Python - which for some reason seems 100x worse when it comes to AI projects too).
And yeah, i have downloaded Wikipedia (in ZIM format) :-P
It isn't really for some doomsday preparation reason, it is just that sometimes the internet doesn't work (it doesn't happen often but it does happen) or i do not have internet access for whatever reason or stuff simply disappears/changes.
In fact just yesterday night i wanted to lookup how something is done in Bash and after trying to search for it, i noticed my Internet wasn't working (it took ~1h to resume, it was quite late in the night). So i just started a local LLM and asked that instead :-P (i do have the info manuals for bash - and other stuff - installed but they are a PITA to search if you don't know exactly what you're looking for).
One thing that annoys me though is that it is basically impossible to have an offline copy of a modern Linux distro. Sometime during the late 2000s i bought the full set of Debian DVDs, but Debian stopped providing ISOs years ago. Of course with how big distros are nowadays you'd probably need something like 100 DVDs :-P. At least there is Slackware.
There's a company which sells something like this, as "Prepper Disk".[1]
In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.
I like that it's an SD-card based RPi: something known to fail under completely normal usage
For the margins a $280 MSRP allows you'd think they'd at least try a little bit: maybe hook people up with the RPi Compute Module which has eMMC onboard
I've looked a few times over the years but can't find it online. National Archives probably has it somewhere, but not indexed where Google can find it.
I think there’s a difference between doomsday framing and preparedness.
Offline access and local models aren’t about assuming collapse—they’re about treating knowledge as infrastructure instead of something implicitly guaranteed.
If current frontier online LLMs are made inaccessible due to a local or global cataclysmic event running models locally will be the least of your concerns.
This isn’t prepping for anything it’s cosplaying as a vault dweller.
P.S. Having TED talks as part of the “educational” curriculum of this project is probably the biggest circle jerk imaginable.
There are internet and electricity outages in many places over the world, controlled and uncontrolled. Also natural desasters take out infrastructure at least temporarily.
One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:
"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."
"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."
Doomsday may not be the end of the world, but simply living in a country where you're being unjustifiably bombed by a foreign government lead by a delusional sociopath, and so access to information sources becomes limited.
I'm a fan of "civilization in a box" kinds of projects. However the ZIM file format leaves a lot to be desired in 2026. I've been exploring a refreshed, alternative approach: https://github.com/stazelabs/oza
I do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
Well yeah, but, hypothetically speaking (and just for the sake of pure curiosity) - what about "no sun" scenario, such as nuclear winter or something similar?
If I gonna face an apocalypse, I would choose Panasonic Toughbook 55 with NetBSD + printed manual for OS. I will have an eternity to compile everything they provide in pkg archive from scratch :)
I recently watched a video talking about how much censorship there is currently with everything on the internet and how massive web pages and databases of information are just completely evaporating. I am not personally one of those "everything is burning to the ground" people, but it's getting hard to not at least see where those people are coming from, given recent events. Honestly, if you have the space available, getting this is probably not the worst idea ever.
It might be an interesting idea given that the Steam Deck has reasonable amount of RAM/GPU. The main issue for a knowledge base might be the lack of a physical keyboard though.
Not sure how good of an idea a Steam Deck would be for this. If you can't access Wikipedia, I imagine a replacement for its unprotected glass screen would be harder to come by if you drop it.
Missing a chance to note (or configure for?) installation on a Raspberry Pi --- that'd make an affordable option to leave powered down, but ready to go in an EMI-shield/Faraday Cage.
They specifically state that they’re aiming for a “fatter” model that expects higher-end hardware, and other projects like Internet in a box already target rpi-style devices.
I think there are technically some 3 bit byteshape quants that are aimed specifically at running up to 30B MoEs on the 16GB Pi 5, so it would be possible to do something reasonably fat at very low speeds and extremely short contexts (like 4k maybe). One of those 32 or 64GB Rockchip based boards would do better, but there's rarely usable software to go along with them.
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
I like this idea! I don't need the LLM bits, and want it to run on an old Android tablet I have lying around. Can anyone recommend similar software where I can get wikipedia / street maps / useful tutorial videos nicely packaged for offline use?
The ones mentioned in this thread all use Kiwix for off-line wikipedia, OSM for maps, Khan for educational videos. It looks like internet-in-a-box is aimed at working well on low-powered devices, whereas nomad expects beefy hardware and includes local AI. Not sure how WROLPi differs from internet-in-a-box.
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
I mean, technically they use Kolibri for educational videos and exercises. A lot of them do come from Khan Academy, but we do a lot of work to make an offline first education platform, and also bring in a huge swathe of other open educational resources.
See I really want this in a simpler format. Like a single file embedded database on my filesystem that I can point a single/or few tools at for my model to use when it needs.
I get the hate on AI for many reasons (hype, resource greediness, threat to civilization, etc), but having a local LLM that could help guide and reason about the data within seems like a win, especially if it's optional.
This is really cool. Having offline Wikipedia + local LLMs in a single bundle is a great combo for emergency preparedness. Do you have any benchmarks on how it performs on lower-end hardware? Curious about minimum specs.
I've used Kiwix to archive Wikipedia articles on an SSD before, and it made me realize how utterly useless Wikipedia is if you don't have a powerful search engine to get you to the pages in the first place.
I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his kingship.
OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
Both of which are available at Wal-Mart.
I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food.
I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.
But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years.
And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters.
My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone.
This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them.
Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Ref
Sounds like a good read.
Interesting mental exercise. It was explored in A Canticle for Leibowitz[0], novel in 3 parts (Fiat homo, fiat lux, fiat voluntas tua), the first set in the immediate post nuclear-war world, second 600 years after towards the end of the new middle ages, and the third 600 later in a typical futuristic scenario. The first part covers the religious efforts to preserve knowledge (even if said knowledge was not understood), and the second in the new renaissance from wielding such knowledge.
I wonder how LLMs, with their mistakes and all, would play a role in rebuilding civilization. Most media these days is not prepared for staying stable for 20 years, not sure how much and for how long it could be preserved. Perhaps mechanical hard drives in certain isolated environments?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
https://a.co/d/0ieNUmhB (Not a referral link)
In the meanwhile, wikipedia ships wikidata, which uses RDF dumps (and probably 8x less compressed than it should be).
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Database_download
There is room for a third option leveraging commercial columnar database research.
https://adsharma.github.io/duckdb-wikidata-compression/
Mine contains language, library and game engine docs. Sometimes I back up some sites completely. But it's getting harder to do that as many sites block crawling now.
This is such a good idea. Thanks. I'm going to start to do the same.
> I keep a local wiki with notes on various things that are useful
Can you recommend a good wiki software?
I've been using Zim Wiki for years; back then there was nothing better available and now I can't be bothered to migrate formats. Plus I've already contributed a bunch of plugins to Zim :)
https://obsidian.md/
https://zim-wiki.org/
And yeah, i have downloaded Wikipedia (in ZIM format) :-P
It isn't really for some doomsday preparation reason, it is just that sometimes the internet doesn't work (it doesn't happen often but it does happen) or i do not have internet access for whatever reason or stuff simply disappears/changes.
In fact just yesterday night i wanted to lookup how something is done in Bash and after trying to search for it, i noticed my Internet wasn't working (it took ~1h to resume, it was quite late in the night). So i just started a local LLM and asked that instead :-P (i do have the info manuals for bash - and other stuff - installed but they are a PITA to search if you don't know exactly what you're looking for).
One thing that annoys me though is that it is basically impossible to have an offline copy of a modern Linux distro. Sometime during the late 2000s i bought the full set of Debian DVDs, but Debian stopped providing ISOs years ago. Of course with how big distros are nowadays you'd probably need something like 100 DVDs :-P. At least there is Slackware.
In the 1950s, US Civil Defense had a set of microfilms on how to rebuild society. These were packaged with a sunlight reader and stored in larger fallout shelters. Someone should find one of those.
[1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/
They mentioned it in their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_wt-2P-WBk&t=350
For the margins a $280 MSRP allows you'd think they'd at least try a little bit: maybe hook people up with the RPi Compute Module which has eMMC onboard
FWIW, my pi-hole server has been running 24/7 on a Pi Zero with the same micro-SD card for some 4-odd years.
Offline access and local models aren’t about assuming collapse—they’re about treating knowledge as infrastructure instead of something implicitly guaranteed.
That feels more like resilience than pessimism.
This isn’t prepping for anything it’s cosplaying as a vault dweller.
P.S. Having TED talks as part of the “educational” curriculum of this project is probably the biggest circle jerk imaginable.
One "popular" example for those whose horizon doesn't extend over US country borders:
"Hurricane Katrina devastated communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, incapacitating telephone service, police and fire dispatch centers, and emergency radio systems. Almost three million customer phone lines were knocked out, telephone switching centers were seriously damaged, and 1,477 cell towers were incapacitated. Most of the radio stations and many television stations in the New Orleans area were knocked off the air. Paul McHale, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, summarized the damage by stating, “The magnitude of the storm was such that the local communications system wasn’t simply degraded; it was, at least for a period of time, destroyed."
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...
"Our preparedness culture must also emphasize the importance of citizen and community preparedness. […] Thus, citizens and communities can help themselves by becoming more prepared. If every family maintained the resources to live in their homes without electricity and running water for three days, we could allocate more Federal, State, and local response resources to saving lives. Similarly, if every family developed their own emergency preparedness plan, they almost certainly would reduce the demand for outside emergency resources. As the 9/11 Commission Report states, “One clear lesson of September 11 is that individual civilians need to take responsibility for maximizing the probability that they will survive, should disaster strike."
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-...
AlexNet -> Tansformers -> ChatGPT -> Claude Code -> Small LMs serving KBs
Large LLMs could have a role in efficiently producing such KBs.
I do think having an LLM as an optional "sidecar" is a useful approach. If you can run a meaningful Ollama instance alongside your content, great!
The durable asset is the knowledge base itself. A local model can be useful on top, but it should stay a layer, not become the dependency.
I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
Thank you for sharing
An industrial grade Jetson Thor would probably be the ultimate platform for this if you ignore the money part.
https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
https://internet-in-a-box.org/
https://wrolpi.org/
I used it on a long train trip. There was no internet due to drone attacks, and with Kiwix I could browse pre-downloaded Wikis
Maybe it's like linux distros: all based on the same software, but optimized for different use-cases or preferences.
>What is Project N.O.M.A.D.? Node for Offline Media, Archives, and Data
That's the first header, and the first sentence of the first paragraph, and I'm confused.
To "go offline" means for something to become inaccessible that was once accessible "online". ("Offline" is an adverb.)
Meanwhile, an "offline" thing is one which is usable even without ever being "online". ("Offline" is an adjective.)
So it becomes:
> "Knowledge That Never [Becomes Inaccessible]"
> "Node for [Accessible-Without-Connection] Media, Archives, and Data"
But definitely confusing to put them right next to each other like that. You'd think a copyeditor would flag it or something.
>Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
Means
>Knowledge That Never becomes inaccessible to you
While the next offline means you can access it even if you don't have access to a wider network.
At least that's how I would read it.
whatever I think might be useful later, I capture through the web clipper extension. [0]
[0]: https://obsidian.md/clipper