- Post apocalypse. No internet, no digital piracy. You managed to save one laptop that’s in your possession. What’s that one piece of data that you would’ve wished survived alongside you and your laptop, be it video, audio, executable or whatever? No wrong answers!
My answer: Stargate SG-1 (TV series), some 🔞 content and Linux.
- No post apocalypse, just the real world as it stands today. What’s one piece of data that you have been hunting for a long time but still haven’t been able to find or obtain it? No data shaming!
My answer: Erutan’s discography in .flac 😥
For post-apocalypse? 君の名は。. Even if it’s in Japanese, with no subtitles. Don’t threaten me with a good time. I used to watch it that way. I still would, but I found some really good subtitles. The film was released outside of Japan as “your name.” (the full-stop is part of the title both ways) but I prefer to call it by its original name in the original glyphs. Both of my computers and my phone (all Apple, so cloud sync) type it if I type the initials of the romanised version of the name (Kimi no Na wa.), period and all. Text replacement, any computer/phone can do it, but it’s nice to have the cloud sync.
White whale? Honestly I don’t have one anymore. I used to have a couple, but I found them. There was a movie I was trying to find for years and years, and a game as well, and I’d Google things and it would never come up. These days, you can just ask ChatGPT and it’ll tell you what it is. Now, if it’s something I know what it is but I haven’t obtained it yet? I’d have to say FLAC copies of every record, tape, or CD I’ve ever owned. That includes my siblings and parents as well, so I could throw it on my Plex server. My mother in particular had to get rid of 250+ records. Would be nice to have all that back, digitally. I think I have the important parts of the collection.
Everyone should know how absurdly lightweight the old games are. You can have basically every console game rom from Atari 2600 to Nintendo 64 and fit it all in a single dvd (you could even include the emulators, in appimages, apk and .exe). These games are still great, many aged pretty well and all of them will run in any potato with screen.
on a no-internet scenario, you could give a kid an old phone full of games that a lot of us dreamed to have acess when we were children. you can transform an actual piece of trash into a machine that carries childhoods of multiple generations. that’s just beautiful.
There are RetroPie images “out there” that contain a full Linux distribution, the emulators, the games, and a ten-foot interface. That’s actually what RetroPie is. It’s Linux and EmulationStation, which is like RetroArch but for TVs. RetroPie is just one option. There’s another, but I can’t think of its name. They’re competitors, but they’re not enemies, and neither of them are charging. It’s like different Linux distros, they just have different ways of doing things.
It’s stupidly easy to set up. Once you run it for the first time, it boots directly into EmulationStation, and asks you to configure whatever controller you plug in. That’s best, but you can use Bluetooth controllers, too. Once your controller is set up, you choose the system you want, then you pick from a list of games. ES can be configured to show a screenshot of the game, or a video of it being played, or a TV ad for the game, either on its own, on an old CRT TV, in an arcade cabinet, or other formats, and there might be text telling you about it. It’s very nice. Very “Netflix of gaming” kind of look/feel. Of course you can set favourites and have those in their own menu on the top level.
Shame Raspberry Pis and memory cards are so expensive these days.
If that Android phone has USB-C, it probably has HDMI out. Hook it up to a hub first, then HDMI to HDMI to a TV from the hub, then connect controllers, and a charger. (One of the USB-C’s on the hub should be marked “PD” for power delivery, or have a lightning bolt. FYI you can also connect a keyboard and mouse via a USB-C hub to an Android phone (or iPhone) and they’ll just work. Android because Linux kernel, iOS because macOS base. Android isn’t Linux and iOS isn’t macOS, but the inverse is truer than people think. Just not in the ways you actually want (e.g. my iPhone should become a Mac when plugged into devices, because the MacBook Neo has the same guts that are in my iPhone, literally).
But even with a relatively old, relatively cheap Android phone, all that is possible. I have a Galaxy S10 (2019) and all that works.
I suppose the most important thing to have post-apocalypse is a copy of Wikipedia.
For those that don’t know, use Kiwix to easily download a copy of wikipedia:
Truer words have never been spoken.
The hordes of home videos my dad and me created and all the pictures of family and friends I was able to save.
That’s beautiful! Have you actually digitized any of it? I began doing that a few years ago with my mom, listening to and recording her telling stories about each and every picture. I think I used some cheap - but not of low quality by any means - Canon scanner for the digitizing. My whole family seemed to appreciate the collection. We’ve done about 200 pictures so far. Only… A thousand left? 😅
The videos me and my brother digitized a couple of years ago when we were at my parents over Christmas. Now I have them all on my PeerTube instance with private access for friends and family.
The pictures not yet.
Having your mom recorded commmeting on the pictures is a very cool idea!
