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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
little off topic while i have like minded people reading this.
What if we build what i am calling WWTN (World wide text network). very low bit rate network that can at most send sms level data its a packet routing at lower level (possibly MAC addr is a hash of pub key of node like p2p networks work but fully p2p not ISP backed, censorship resistant. Reticulum + LORA + ... actually global.
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!
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 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 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.
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.
So this thing is based on Kiwix, which is based on the ZIM file format.
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/
And for those who are only vaguely familiar, this ZIM file format is not the same as the https://zim-wiki.org one.
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!
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.
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.
[1] https://www.prepperdisk.com/
I had thought of building those exact Civil Defense devices a few years ago. Maybe it’s a viable product?
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 like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.
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."
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-...
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.
That feels more like resilience than pessimism.
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.
This is not just a random idea.
AlexNet -> Tansformers -> ChatGPT -> Claude Code -> Small LMs serving KBs
Large LLMs could have a role in efficiently producing such KBs.
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.
You’ll be hanged from a construction crane if they’ll catch you with this project in Iran… :)
What Gulf state do you live in? UAE?
little off topic while i have like minded people reading this.
What if we build what i am calling WWTN (World wide text network). very low bit rate network that can at most send sms level data its a packet routing at lower level (possibly MAC addr is a hash of pub key of node like p2p networks work but fully p2p not ISP backed, censorship resistant. Reticulum + LORA + ... actually global.
someone come up with better name than WWTN tho
In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...
Solar cells work no matter what, I agree that maybe less processing is more useful but LLM is uniqely useful as well
This is not true for me. I would want an LLM after the apocalypse. I'd become like the Wizard of Oz, the all-knowing oracle.
No need for a battery, you just need someone to hit the pedals on that dynamo.
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!
ZIM or not, I think the “LLM as optional sidecar” part is the right idea.
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.
Closing on 40 acres in Panama for an eco-resort.
I was planning to build my own offline repository, but will check out this repo.
For anyone wanting the video explanation from the creator, watch: https://youtu.be/P_wt-2P-WBk
Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?
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.
It has built in microphones 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.
True, but I always give my devices a protective glass and put them in rugged armor. Broken screens never been a problem for me..
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 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?
A friend made this years ago. I never used it but the idea is awesome.
https://github.com/ligi/SurvivalManual
>Knowledge That Never Goes Offline
>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.
Two different uses of "offline", I think. From my own understanding:
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.
My guess is
>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.
Really clever targeting of a niche. I’d be interested to hear if they find success!
See also:
https://internet-in-a-box.org/
https://wrolpi.org/
Also https://kiwix.org/en/about/
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
I’m convinced that the multitude of off-line Internet tools is a ploy to keep any one of them from gaining traction
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.
what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now
It could use some own wisdom not to use nodejs..
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.
Why does it have to have AI? Ugh.
Because if you're stuck in your underground bunker, who else can you talk to?
You can use Kiwix, OpenStreetMap and Kolibri as an AI-free equivalent. Adding AI to those is exactly the differentiator of this project.
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.
turns out I have the same setup (sans local LLMs - they are pretty useless on 2018 cards) but in Obsidian :)
whatever I think might be useful later, I capture through the web clipper extension. [0]
[0]: https://obsidian.md/clipper
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.
Great premise for a science fiction story
So how does that work?
It never goes offline by already being offline.
I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.
Yeah, that game was really ahead of its time. I still hold out hope some indie studio will attempt a spiritual successor.