Hi everyone. I just stumbled on Outernet last night, and I’m floored that for one this project exists and second that I hadn’t heard of it. In reading I found news from various points in the project’s lifecycle, and I’m curious what content can be available on just 10 MB a day? Originally I was reading 1 GB a day, and this sounded amazing, but how much data and content could trickle in on just 10MB a day? Was multimedia like music and podcasts sacrificed? Some of the sample screenshots I’ve seen showed Democracy Now, This Week in Tech, and various eBooks. Given Democracy now comes out almost daily and could just itself consume the 10MB what kind of content is squeezed into this space?
Personally I’m anxious to see books, audio podcasts, news, and educational content given we have two small kids. Also being a ham radio operator I’m anxious to check out the APRS features. Also how can I get involved? Are there any development options to help with?
Well, the first harddisk I ever bought was 20MB (cost a fortune) and you would be AMAZED what was on there. If you don’t use big multimedia data, but information in not too voluminous PDF’s or txt files, you can transfer A LOT of interesting information each day. For example: 20MB could be twenty e-books coming in each day.
Being raised with computers running with very little storage (I had a spread sheet program, a Pascal IDE and a wordprocessor on a computer system in only one 64K PROM), we did a lot with very little space.
Back to Outernet: As I understood it, the key concept of Outernet is to bring interesting content to places without Internet. I believe that if you really look into it, it is amazing and astonishing what you could share using only 20MB each day. But do not expect HD multimedia contents…