Project Nomad – Knowledge That Never Goes Offline

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.

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/

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 like the idea of an LLM that acts as a public knowledge base. But that doomsday framing on the site is pretty annoying.

In a world where this is useful, you aren't going to be spending your precious battery on running an LLM...

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

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!

Anyone thought about using a Steam Deck with this? Or explored the concept of a "Nomad Deck"?

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.

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?

what a coincidence, i am just downloading 110gb wikipedia dump on kiwix right now

>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.

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/

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.

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.

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

Great premise for a science fiction story

So how does that work?

I was expecting the game from my childhood and was disappointed.

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