💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2024 › 202406 › 20240605-offline-news.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:25:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Newspapers are a wonderful way to share information. They are self-contained, need no electricity, last as long as the paper they are printed on lasts, and are not subject to retroactive censorship or deletion. Of course they also have downsides: they take up physical space, they consume paper, bad information cannot be corrected in situ, and readers cannot track events in real time. Personally, I feel the benefits of physical newspapers outweigh the problems, and I wish more of them were still around.
Separately, it's well-known that the Internet is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the modern world. Much of that energy use comes from huge amounts of data and information being processed as close to real time as possible. Several applications require such real-time analysis, but many people spend all day constantly refreshing Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms looking for the latest comments and entertainment. To me, that's not only a waste of time, but a waste of energy--often perpetrated by people who claim to believe that our warming climate is a serious global emergency.
It would be cool to create an offline-centric version of the daily newspaper. Of course many news companies publish digital editions of their newspapers, but some require their app or use a proprietary format, some don't contain the same information as their print counterparts, and some are little more than sets of links to read the full stories on their Web sites. I'd like to see a daily collection of plain text and image files, dropped in an FTP directory or disseminated via BitTorrent, containing all the current events and weather forecasts and sports news and local calendars one would find in a traditional paper.
I have a ClockworkPi DevTerm that I primarily use offline. I keep it disconnected from the Internet by default, and when I do connect, I only stay on long enough to transfer what I want to transfer. An offline-centric "paper" would work perfectly with it: I could download the actual files on my home server, create an NNCP bundle from them on a USB drive, and transfer the daily news to my DevTerm without ever needing to join WiFi.
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[Last updated: 2024-06-05]