Populating the box

26 November 2014

The flash drive will get here tomorrow, but the router hasn't shipped at all yet so the earliest I'll get to play with the LibraryBox is Friday. I'm entertaining myself in the meantime by accumulating the things that will go in the library.

The LibraryBox site has a sort of starter kit, which has some movies (about which I'm skeptical, bandwidth- and storage-wise, but if somebody wants to pull it then why not?) and only fifty-some books. Gutenberg is, um, a little too big to mirror, so maybe I'll write a utility that keeps the index on the LibraryBox and takes requests. That'll necessitate nightly (or so) updates, but that shouldn't be too difficult if each LibraryBox has a nearby librarian - someone who can hear its wifi from their own Internet-connected computer, ideally.

(Of course, having that sort of bridge then leads me to question: what are the local Internet providers' TOS's like in regards to sharing connections? Does the air gap bypass the "don't run a shared/open wifi off your home service" clauses?)

Apart from all the fiction, mirroring the neighborhood blog, perhaps in a more encapsulated grab-and-take-with-you format, is a given. I'd mirror the neighborhood Twitter account, only it is very often tweeting links that presume a live Internet connection. Maybe some of the Pumpkin Spice bits can be repurposed into a critter that caches the tweets and caches the linked-to pages. Since I'm kind of thinking "bus stop" as a good place to put them, probably a copy of the Wichita Transit website too.

Still trying to work through how (and if) some kind of BBS service would work, and whether it would immediately degenerate into drug-deals-and-hookups if it was anonymous and/or unmoderated.

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