Bryan Cockfield writes about the Kiwix open-source project, which started as an offline backup for Wikipedia and now includes other sites like StackExchange.To preserve and serve information from personal hardware, ensuring survival through internet outages and website disappearances, Kiwix is available on Linux (Docker compatible), Windows, Android, and Apple platforms.
- A separate tool called Zimit is required to generate the .zim archive files that Kiwix serves.
The Kiwix organization hosts pre-downloaded .zim files of common sites, sparing users from crawling Wikipedia themselves, a task that could take months on limited consumer hardware.
- The article points to a prior piece on building an "armageddon-proof" Raspberry Pi briefcase as suggested hosting hardware.
- A separate tool called Zimit is required to generate the .zim archive files that Kiwix serves.
The Kiwix organization hosts pre-downloaded .zim files of common sites, sparing users from crawling Wikipedia themselves, a task that could take months on limited consumer hardware.
- The article points to a prior piece on building an "armageddon-proof" Raspberry Pi briefcase as suggested hosting hardware.
The article addresses the common problem of "link rot," where bookmarked URLs eventually lead to dead pages or broken content. The author argues that traditional bookmarks and the standard "Save As" method are unreliable because they often fail to capture all necessary web assets like images and stylesheets. To solve this, the author recommends using the SingleFile browser extension. This open-source tool creates a pixel-perfect, self-contained HTML file of a webpage, bundling all CSS, fonts, and images into one document. This ensures that the archived page remains functional and visually identical even without an internet connection, providing a reliable way to preserve digital information for the long term.
The original 1965 chatbot restored on the world's first time-sharing system, ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1964-6, is running again on a reconstructed version of MIT's CTSS, running on an emulated IBM 7094.
