#kiwix

Kiwix is open source software that lets you read wikipedia and other websites via downloaded zim files of their content, useful if you have spotty access to the live version on the internet.

It's basically a program that lets you download local copies of a lot of free and open-source resources on the internet. And if you don't have the space to download all of wikipedia, you can also download just certain sections of it

The different stackexchange sites are also very light on size (total space from all my downloads right now is about 3 GB)

You can get it on phone or on your computer. You can also select which things you search in the search bar (e.g., I might be interested in finding out information about planets, and want to search on the astronomy stackexchange instead of the worldbuilding stackexchange - or vice versa!)

Do you remember… Ello? For a brief time in 2014 to 2016-ish, it flared up as “the next emerging social network” and even as a “Facebook-killer”. And then it flamed out… and… in the summer of 2023, it disappeared completely as the site was taken offline. I was all in with Ello for a time! Kind of as Mastodon is today for me, Ello was where I was focused on posting and engaging. And then it…

Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are! Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by…

just started to play around with this kiwix app and a bunch of openzim/zim files. the openzim or zim files are kind of like a read-only database. so far, i’m doing searches and it’s really fast! really surprised. what’s under the hood? the zim files are lzma compressed files too? the searches feel like xapian stuff.