Not really a file server distro, a wireless access point and router combination that intercepts any http/https request and sends it to a certain web server.
I'm a little more confused around the goal. It's designed to share eBooks in places that have no infrastructure, maybe not even a reliable electrical grid. Okay... but share with what? People in those parts of the world aren't running around with iPads.
No, they're running around with phones. Phones really have revolutionized the world, all the way down to that one remote village with one phone to share with everyone to let them call in to see what price their crops will bring or whether heading into town will get them all slaughtered. I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handin
I don't have a smartphone. Are there places in the world where people pay for smartphones without any sort of data plan whatsoever?
Smartphones still can do a lot with just WiFi, and there are a lot of places with "free" wifi in generic metropolitan areas.
I know quite a few people with little-to-no data plan; i.e. many with no data-plan at all, and a significant number of people with very little (a few hundred MB)
Even the "small" data plans are used only for apps like Maps or Mass-Transit info (stuff that you may need while not near wifi); for all of their browsing and such while out of the house, they'll stop in at a Starbucks or som
I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handing them out.
There's probably still a lot of the candybar phones still around, but it was the Huawei IDEOS 8150 that took on the laptop-killer role in sub Saharan Africa all the way back in 2011. They were a quiet revolution in that part of the world, with locally-developed apps for everything from agriculture to healthcare, from disaster response to business and more. This stand-alone WiFi library would be ideal for those areas.
This guy got $33,119 from Kickstarter and now he is selling the "Starter Edition" for $150. The starter edition is, in a nutshell, a router that costs $31.24 on Amazon and a stinkin' 16 gig flash drive with some free books from Gutenberg.org on it. And he even wants to sell custom 3d printed boxes for $50 more and little stickers that say "Library Box" that he charges 5 bucks each for. Why do people feel compelled to fund such greed?
That's a particularly cynical way to look at it.:-)
I have talked elsewhere about the budget for the Kickstarter, but something like 80% of the total went directly towards fulfilling the rewards, and almost 10% comes off the top for Kickstarter itself and Amazon for processing. Plus the 4% or so of backers that didn't pay, and you're getting a pretty narrow window of $$ here. If you think that people doing Kickstarters are getting rich, you've never done one yourself.
The typical router that we use is $35 or so most days (varies a lot on Amazon), but you have to pay development somehow. Typical markup for commercial products is in the 300% range after you do production, then wholesale price, then retail...this is within that rough amount ($35 for router, $10 or so for USB, plus packaging and such).
And that, of course, doesn't take into account actually paying anything at all for development time.
All of which ignores the fact that, of course, it's an open source project that anyone can use and install at will. All of the code we've produced is available, for free, for anyone to modify and fork at will.
Trust me, if you actually looked at the numbers, there is nothing happening here that isn't by the skin of our teeth.
This is nothing more than a USB stick gussied up into a router.
Are suggesting that remotely located people have ethernet, but not USB? Why bother including the router at all and why not just ship out a USB stick by itself?
After all, "Anywhere there is a lack of open internet access, LibraryBox can bridge the gap of information delivery."
Why do I need one of these? Seriously, I want one, and I could buy the hardware off Amazon for $35 and download an installer for free to make my own. I just can't think of a single legitimate reason why I should have one beyond "it's really neat". Help me, geek brethren and sisthren: why do I need to buy and set one of these up?
This one is too hard to defend. Sometimes I've been really enthusiastic about small and/or useless stuff on crowdfunding sites and early access stuff, but this is simply overpriced off the shelve hardware with a sticker...
Well, as long as there are people willing to send money to them, I suppose it's a "good" idea from a commercial point of view...
To clarify: I want to buy my own $35 hardware and install the downloadable firmware on it, not pay a 300% markup for someone else to do it for me. The project itself looks neat, not the commercial product itself.
These would be more interesting if they had more clever features. Uploading and downloading files doesn't seem interesting enough on its own.
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
It would take a critical mass of users for something like this to be
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
Ooh, like a cross between Freenet [freenetproject.org] and FidoNet [fidonet.org]? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.
I see several post on here that talk about how we've been able to do this for quite some time now. I can think of several other devices that do the same thing as what this guy made.
This kind of thing is really good to push onto people that do not have the technical prowess to make their own, or at least follow some instructions on making your own.
As others have said, any real geek would just buy the cheap router, load custom open source software, and do exactly what he did for a lot less.
I see several post on here that talk about how we've been able to do this for quite some time now. I can think of several other devices that do the same thing as what this guy made.
Yep, just like the Aptus Classroom Without Walls [col.org] (sorry, PDF only - not my site) or any one of a dozen other attempts at this.
I am right at this moment putting together the ground work to deliver tablets and computers to some of the most remote areas in the developing world, and we've been looking very carefully at this kind of stuff. Right now, we're leaning heavily toward just reappropriating the software and using better hardware. The big problem with this kind of server-in-a-dongle is that, although it'
The "library" is a selection of starter content from archive.org, project gutenberg, and openly licensed content from other sources (Cory Doctorow's corpus, for example). The content itself is largely secondary to the project, and my expectation has always been that people are putting their own set of content on their Librarybox. With that said, I am working to find interesting educational content, and have talked with Project RACHEL (http://rachel.worldpossible.org/) which works very well on a LibraryBox
With that said, I am working to find interesting educational content, and have talked with Project RACHEL (http://rachel.worldpossible.org/) which works very well on a LibraryBox. I would love to be able to provide "content packs" of educational content for various levels and uses.
Interesting. We're evaluating RACHEL too.
But please do give some thought to performance. It's underrated as an issue.
Most people - even many of my colleagues - think that something, anything is better than nothing. And that's true, as far as it goes. Our immediate challenge is getting broadband internet to a part of the world that doesn't have any automation whatsoever, unless you count horses. It's quite remarkable the lengths they're willing to go to in order to see their children's lives improved. But i
Is the performance limitation you mention about the number of wireless connections, or the processing power?
I tried several such devices with the intention of prototyping my own software, but either their CPUs were underpowered or they were unreliable. I got Debian on a GK802 for instance, installed in the internal SD-card so leaving the external slot free, with a USB WiFi dongle in addition to the internal WiFi so that it could work as a gateway to certain web content while serving its own applications. Th
It's open source, anonymous, keeps no records, and acts as an off-line file-sharing system. you can pack it in your lunchbox, or even smaller. You can have it sitting in the bottom of your backpack, and have everyone in the food court up/downloading *ANYTHING* without worrying about getting nailed by "The Man". I don't think that it would be that hard to have it securely wipe it's storage clean at shutdown or startup, so there is no evidence of anything being stored on it, in case of seizure. It's been out for over a year and runs on multiple platforms.
As another poster noted, LibraryBox is a fork of Piratebox (done with the blessing of the Piratebox creator, for what its worth). In fact, the lead developer on both projects is the same person.
The Kickstarter funding allowed us to create an entirely new installation process for LibraryBox, which was then backported to PirateBox after the fact. LibraryBox has also produced an internationalization process for the UI that's going to be ported back to Piratebox in a future release. We've freely shared code back and forth at this point.
Why a fork in the first place? Because I wanted an anonymous sharing device that was more friendly for use in library and educational situations. Anonymous uploading isn't exactly a welcoming idea for sharing in those circumstances.
...are gradually replacing computer operators, even on communities like Slashdot, because time and aging and dying and stuff. Those gadget users who don't understand GPOS's and don't want to...they want stuff like this. To me, it looks like a waste of time, but maybe they'll make some money. Not with my help, though.
If I have my just laptop and no Internet connection ( besides LibraryBox) I can connect to the LibraryBox wifi signal and goto a set IP address and see and potentially download all the content?
I guess I'm not getting it. Wouldn't an old android phone with an SD card running a web server be the same thing, pretty much for free? It seems like it would be a great use for all those old phones sitting in drawers. They're compact, low power and come equipped with touchscreen interfaces, powerful processors, wifi capable and SD card slots (most of them). Hell, these days even a new one can be had for a lot less than this, the last android phone I bought was $99 retail (no contract) and it had a 5" s
Wouldn't an old android phone with an SD card running a web server be the same thing, pretty much for free? It seems like it would be a great use for all those old phones sitting in drawers. They're compact, low power and come equipped with touchscreen interfaces, powerful processors, wifi capable and SD card slots (most of them).
Meet my old Galaxy S1. It also serves as a remote control for my router and my desktop.
I'm pretty sure all the software I use on it for those things is available on G-Play, even. There's probably better/more secure stuff from alternative sources, but I am fortunate enough to live in a building whose inhabitants seem blissfully unaware that there's even a 5GHz band (since I appear to have it all to myself), so I'm not real worried about anybody leeching copies of old Green Acres shows or what have you.
If you a interested in this sort of projects, I recommend checking Bibliotecha for the RPi. Developed by students and enthusiasts interested in light electronic publication sharing infrastructures. It's all free software, humble and to the point:
Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections.
Do we really need this? (Score:0)
Re: (Score:3)
Not really a file server distro, a wireless access point and router combination that intercepts any http/https request and sends it to a certain web server.
Re:Do we really need this? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, a file server service running on top of OpenWRT with a HTTP capture portal? I remember doing this with a WRT54G way back in the day...
Re: (Score:2)
It's a piratebox. An open-source tool for this already exists.
Re: (Score:2)
not quite, it doesn't allow uploading of files
Re: (Score:2)
Do we really need yet another file server distro?
I'm a little more confused around the goal. It's designed to share eBooks in places that have no infrastructure, maybe not even a reliable electrical grid. Okay... but share with what? People in those parts of the world aren't running around with iPads.
Re: (Score:1)
No, they're running around with phones. Phones really have revolutionized the world, all the way down to that one remote village with one phone to share with everyone to let them call in to see what price their crops will bring or whether heading into town will get them all slaughtered. I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handin
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:0)
I don't have a smartphone. Are there places in the world where people pay for smartphones without any sort of data plan whatsoever?
2 out of 3 of us have smart phones in my house and don't have a data plan for them. So, yea... Canada.
Re: (Score:0)
My mom, who's deaf, has a smartphone and has no data or voice plan. She does, however have wifi in her house and uses Pinger to text.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't have a smartphone. Are there places in the world where people pay for smartphones without any sort of data plan whatsoever?
Smartphones still can do a lot with just WiFi, and there are a lot of places with "free" wifi in generic metropolitan areas.
I know quite a few people with little-to-no data plan; i.e. many with no data-plan at all, and a significant number of people with very little (a few hundred MB)
Even the "small" data plans are used only for apps like Maps or Mass-Transit info (stuff that you may need while not near wifi); for all of their browsing and such while out of the house, they'll stop in at a Starbucks or som
Re: (Score:3)
I doubt they have an iphone 6+, and they probably have a candybar nokia, but cheap androids are only getting cheaper and will be in more hands as they do, especially when you have whatever idealist kids going around handing them out.
There's probably still a lot of the candybar phones still around, but it was the Huawei IDEOS 8150 that took on the laptop-killer role in sub Saharan Africa all the way back in 2011. They were a quiet revolution in that part of the world, with locally-developed apps for everything from agriculture to healthcare, from disaster response to business and more. This stand-alone WiFi library would be ideal for those areas.
http://singularityhub.com/2011... [singularityhub.com]
Libraries (Score:0)
Each town typcially has a library. Try it!
Re: (Score:1)
The best part is that they have "books" that don't require power, batteries, or firmware upgrades!
Re: (Score:2)
No, the best part is the 3D rendering. It's as if you were looking at a real book with real pages!
Re: (Score:2)
No, the best part is the 3D rendering. It's as if you were looking at a real book with real pages!
Revolutionary! Bringing the BookBook [youtube.com] to the masses is an admirable goal.
Roblimo! Wow! (Score:0)
Waasssaaaabbee!
Hey, man... When's Katz comin' back, huh?
Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:0)
Two words: impulse spending
Re:Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Why do kickstarter funders fall for this? (Score:0)
Because people who are not talented or bright enough to achieve their goals throw money at them until they are achieved.
I don't get the point (Score:0)
This is nothing more than a USB stick gussied up into a router.
Are suggesting that remotely located people have ethernet, but not USB? Why bother including the router at all and why not just ship out a USB stick by itself?
After all, "Anywhere there is a lack of open internet access, LibraryBox can bridge the gap of information delivery."
I just don't get it.
Justify my love (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You.... don't?
This one is too hard to defend. Sometimes I've been really enthusiastic about small and/or useless stuff on crowdfunding sites and early access stuff, but this is simply overpriced off the shelve hardware with a sticker...
Well, as long as there are people willing to send money to them, I suppose it's a "good" idea from a commercial point of view...
Re: (Score:3)
To clarify: I want to buy my own $35 hardware and install the downloadable firmware on it, not pay a 300% markup for someone else to do it for me. The project itself looks neat, not the commercial product itself.
Re: (Score:2)
These would be more interesting if they had more clever features. Uploading and downloading files doesn't seem interesting enough on its own.
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
It would take a critical mass of users for something like this to be
Re: (Score:2)
Like maybe a kind of mesh network/anonymous proxy capability or some kind of distributed file system where you could subscribe or publish content that would get automatically replicated between devices when they came in range of each other. Maybe some kind of messaging/bulletin board communications.
Ooh, like a cross between Freenet [freenetproject.org] and FidoNet [fidonet.org]? I'm in. I don't know that this is the right software, but PirateBox shows a lot of potential and runs on the same hardware.
We aren't the target audience... (Score:0)
I see several post on here that talk about how we've been able to do this for quite some time now. I can think of several other devices that do the same thing as what this guy made.
This kind of thing is really good to push onto people that do not have the technical prowess to make their own, or at least follow some instructions on making your own.
As others have said, any real geek would just buy the cheap router, load custom open source software, and do exactly what he did for a lot less.
Heck, we could just
Re: (Score:3)
I see several post on here that talk about how we've been able to do this for quite some time now. I can think of several other devices that do the same thing as what this guy made.
Yep, just like the Aptus Classroom Without Walls [col.org] (sorry, PDF only - not my site) or any one of a dozen other attempts at this.
I am right at this moment putting together the ground work to deliver tablets and computers to some of the most remote areas in the developing world, and we've been looking very carefully at this kind of stuff. Right now, we're leaning heavily toward just reappropriating the software and using better hardware. The big problem with this kind of server-in-a-dongle is that, although it'
Re: (Score:1)
Wikipedia text is 40 GB (Score:2)
A recent article noted that the full text of Wikipedia is 40 GB. With a 64 GB or larger stick, you could have Wikipedia and a lot more.
Re: (Score:2)
With that said, I am working to find interesting educational content, and have talked with Project RACHEL (http://rachel.worldpossible.org/) which works very well on a LibraryBox. I would love to be able to provide "content packs" of educational content for various levels and uses.
Interesting. We're evaluating RACHEL too.
But please do give some thought to performance. It's underrated as an issue.
Most people - even many of my colleagues - think that something, anything is better than nothing. And that's true, as far as it goes. Our immediate challenge is getting broadband internet to a part of the world that doesn't have any automation whatsoever, unless you count horses. It's quite remarkable the lengths they're willing to go to in order to see their children's lives improved. But i
Re: (Score:1)
Is the performance limitation you mention about the number of wireless connections, or the processing power?
I tried several such devices with the intention of prototyping my own software, but either their CPUs were underpowered or they were unreliable. I got Debian on a GK802 for instance, installed in the internal SD-card so leaving the external slot free, with a USB WiFi dongle in addition to the internal WiFi so that it could work as a gateway to certain web content while serving its own applications. Th
I like PirateBox better (Score:4, Interesting)
http://piratebox.cc/ [piratebox.cc]
It's open source, anonymous, keeps no records, and acts as an off-line file-sharing system. you can pack it in your lunchbox, or even smaller. You can have it sitting in the bottom of your backpack, and have everyone in the food court up/downloading *ANYTHING* without worrying about getting nailed by "The Man". I don't think that it would be that hard to have it securely wipe it's storage clean at shutdown or startup, so there is no evidence of anything being stored on it, in case of seizure. It's been out for over a year and runs on multiple platforms.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If you look at the docs for the librarybox, you will notice that it is just a modified piratebox.
Re: (Score:0)
I was going to call BS, but then I noticed the following on the "build your own" page:
Run the command: /etc/init.d/piratebox avahi
Re:I like PirateBox better (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
I just looooove when the people being bashed in the comments come up defending their position! Thanks a lot for all the info griffey!
Re: (Score:0)
I'm more impressed that Ken Griffey, Jr. has a slashdot account.
Gadget users who think they are nerds... (Score:2)
...are gradually replacing computer operators, even on communities like Slashdot, because time and aging and dying and stuff. Those gadget users who don't understand GPOS's and don't want to...they want stuff like this. To me, it looks like a waste of time, but maybe they'll make some money. Not with my help, though.
How is this different (Score:0)
than my 32GB Kingston Wi-Drive or the HP Pocket Playlist knockoff that came later (and I also have for some unfathomable reason)
So LibraryBox works like this? (Score:2)
Yawn (Score:0)
Whatever this piece of shit is
Why? (Score:0)
I guess I'm not getting it. Wouldn't an old android phone with an SD card running a web server be the same thing, pretty much for free? It seems like it would be a great use for all those old phones sitting in drawers. They're compact, low power and come equipped with touchscreen interfaces, powerful processors, wifi capable and SD card slots (most of them). Hell, these days even a new one can be had for a lot less than this, the last android phone I bought was $99 retail (no contract) and it had a 5" s
Re: (Score:3)
Wouldn't an old android phone with an SD card running a web server be the same thing, pretty much for free? It seems like it would be a great use for all those old phones sitting in drawers. They're compact, low power and come equipped with touchscreen interfaces, powerful processors, wifi capable and SD card slots (most of them).
Meet my old Galaxy S1. It also serves as a remote control for my router and my desktop.
I'm pretty sure all the software I use on it for those things is available on G-Play, even. There's probably better/more secure stuff from alternative sources, but I am fortunate enough to live in a building whose inhabitants seem blissfully unaware that there's even a 5GHz band (since I appear to have it all to myself), so I'm not real worried about anybody leeching copies of old Green Acres shows or what have you.
Bibliotecha (Score:2)
Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections.
http://bibliotecha.info/ [bibliotecha.info]
tplink (Score:0)
look like tplink http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3020