Message boards are kind of a sub-category of case 2, just with content in “document” format as well. I think. They’re implemented slightly differently, but a low power machine can easily maintain a message board with text files and static versions of pages, as we did in the 90s.
Interesting concept regarding radio: What if you used a broadcast station overnight to transmit data blobs - think cassette tape data storage, but over the air? You could push out a decent amount of data over it.
So, say, 100kbps data rate on a FM station. That’s ~12.5 kb/s, or about 360MB over an 8 hour window - even with hefty FEC, that’s several hundred megabytes a night of potential broadcast data that doesn’t require internet connectivity.
The Matrix protocol could definitely be a good start for this, though I need to read the specs a bit more. Synapse, to be particular, is just the reference Python homeserver.
I should look at some of the static site generating tools - I’ve not checked into those recently!
Hmm… thats and idea. How about a more modern version of something like wefax weather data, but like an entire local newspaper. Instead of a direct image scan some kind of compressed data like .epub. Then a receiver is attached to an e-reader device, wirelessly downloading the day’s newspaper to your e-reader from the big antenna in the center of town.
So basically it’s public broadcast, but data, not voice. Without images it could push a lot of text to local devices. Maybe there would be a way to send requests for a digital book you’d like from the local library. Then every night the library starts transmitting the requested books of the day out, and when the ISBN you requested comes up in a packet header your e-reader starts listening and storing the data. When you wake up in the morning the book you requested is now in your tablet.
They’ve come a long way, and they’re darn handy even if you do know a lot of HTML (I don’t, and I know even less about CSS). Write pages in markdown quickly, thinking about the content instead of the formatting. A few seconds to build a site and bam: lightweight, clean looking HTML flatfiles formatted with your choice of CSS templates.
I’ve been using Pelican for my blog, as I know a bit of python and wanted to be able to poke around with it. The more feature rich and most popular (I think) SSG around is Hugo. Most Pelican templates are geared towards blogs and chronological posts, Hugo has more templates and features designed for other types of sites as well.
This is more or less how satellite internet used to work - you had a modem uplink and a satellite downlink.
I lack the large FM stations and FCC licenses to start playing with this at large scale. Might be worth messing with small scale, though. I believe you can do local FM transmission below a certain power limit, and I’ve got SDRs that can transmit…
Fidonet style blobs? A lot of the limits to transmission are FCC anyway, and frequency licensing, or you can push a ton of data with bigger channels and modern modulation.
Might be worth messing with small scale, though. I believe you can do local FM transmission below a certain power limit, and I’ve got SDRs that can transmit…