Feeding the library

29 November 2014

The LibraryBox is all loaded up and sitting in my front window, broadcasting its wifi name to the world. Or at least to the houses around me; I don't live near a high-traffic area. I'm figuring on putting it where it'll cover the center-of-the-neighborhood bus stop, and see what it does. I can count on at least four different places that would happily let me plug it in.

The puck is adorable, but that site would be a better candidate for the more conventional router with antennae for better range - they're cheaper, too. Three of those places are storefronts that could tuck it in a window and plug it in. The puck is good for mobile; I can plug it into a USB adaptor and power it off the car, or off a USB battery pack and carry it around. That's kinda cool: a bookmobile, and/or a master library that will update the others whenever it's brought into range.

Now I'm trying to decide exactly how to mirror the neighborhood blog (which, coincidentally, is me). I'd already been trying to figure out how to reduce the blog's footprint - WordPress is a pig, and there's no real need to run a dynamic site when most of it is never going to change. There are a couple of plugins that generate static pages, but they both have issues. I keep trying to remember what tool I used to use to slurp websites into a static file for offline use back in the dialup days, but it's not coming to me. All I can remember is Mhonarc, which I used around the same time to archive Phoenyx mailing lists. I guess I could write a Perl script to do it, but I hate to reinvent the wheel. Heck, I should probably just trawl through Wayback for old /Matt's Script Archive/ stuff. That's probably where it came from.

Whoa. Apparently I don't even have to use the Wayback Machine: Matt's Script Archive is still around. Hi, 1996!

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