Number vier June 2024 – Quarterly(-ish)
Want is straight in your inbox? [mailpoet_form id=”4″]
Kiwix is free for you, not for us
Free software is both Free as in Beer (you don’t pay for it, never will), and Free as in Speech (code is fully open-source and you can do whatever you want with it);
We collect no personal data, and display no ads. Never will.
But running a non-profit is not free. If you find Kiwix useful and would like it to go on, and before we get started, we need you to pitch in if you can.
Support Kiwix
New content available for download at Kiwix
Links will take you to the online library where you can download the zim files, but you can download the zim files from your within favourite Kiwix app.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal COVID-19 book pack. SMBC is a great nerd comic (on par with XKCD, albeit very different) that I highly recommend. The Wienersmth released a free collection of books (e.g. Science: Ruining everything since 1543) so that people would not die of boredom during the 2020-21 lockdowns. We’re still around, and so are the books. LINK
- Bootstrap and Python documentations, along with two full textbooks: Open Data Structures and Algorithms. Pretty serious stuff. If a book ever were to make me cry, then it probably would be one of these. BOOTSTRAP, PYTHON, DATA, ALGORITHMS
- Music Editions by Christoph Dalitz. Tons of religious scores and sheet music for the masses (pun intended). LINK
| Not in English |
- Scientific alliance (Андивионский Научный Альянс): Russian SciFi, I guess? LINK
- Marxists Internet Archive, in German and/or Spanish. Quote one of my teachers: “There are more Marxists than people who have actually read Marx”. Don’t @ me. LINK
| Tired |
- The CIA World Factbook has been temporarily retired as we found out a bug in the way maps were (not) scraped or displayed.
You are always welcome (even encouraged!) to ask for a website to be made available offline, in any language. Just open a zim request (just make sure it is under a free/public domain license before you do) : LINK
No but seriously, who are you?
Everyone who signed up for this newsletter was asked to tell us where they first heard about Kiwix, and what food would keep them awake at night.
So, yeah thanks to everyone that pitched in and big up to Nic, who as a true Englishman ignored the food part of the food question and recommended the Bramble (1½ oz genever, 1 lemon juice, ½ oz sugar syrup, ½ oz crème de mûre (blackcurrant), and of course plenty of crushed ice (not cubes)).
More seriously though, we would like to know a little more about you guys because not being able (nor willing) to spy on you makes it a lot harder to understand what it is you want. So we’ve come up with a short, five-questions survey to figure out your broad geographies and use cases.
Ask away!
Network down? Not anymore
A surprising amount of you lots seems to be working in the IT sector, and a few explicitely said they used Kiwix as a backup resource.
So just in case, we’ve packaged every single IT-related zim file we had into a hotspot image that can be purchased and installed on a Raspberry Pi. There’s about 150GB worth of every Stack Exchange and various documentations, and will only set you back $25 (while giving you a neat way to make this FOSS donation you always wanted to do). FULL LIST or LINK
Not us, but still cool
- A dataviz of the most common pin codes. Of course 1234 tops the list, but number 4 will surprise you. LINK
- The University of Cambridge has a neat map of all medieval murders that were recorded in… Oxford. “A gang of scholars kills a fellow scholar in School Street” sounds a lot like the Bloods vs. Crips with PhDs, but remember that those goons where the best and brightest England had to offer in the year of our Lord 1303. LINK
- Today in headlines that were written for Kiwix users: “Google’s newest office has AI designers toiling in a Wi-Fi desert“. LINK
Ongoing work
- New releases: Wikimed for Windows/Linux, with the link preview (also available in the Kiwix PWA). Updates and fixes as well on Kiwix for Android, macOS/iOS, and Kiwix-server. LINK
- Three students were selected to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code (where Google sponsors their internship with us). Improved download testing, desktop and Youtube UI on the menu. LINK
- Zimit 2.0 is undergoing a soft release (it will be official in a couple of weeks), but so far so good and we’re quietly re-generating existing zim files with the new tool. It is also better at capturing content, so expect a broader variety of releases. Most importantly, this also means that the dreaded Service Workers error message is about to become a thing of the past. LINK
Thanks for reading! Feel free to to share your feedback for improvements. You can also subscribe to the newsletter directly by signing-up via the form on top of this page (or drop us a line to be added).
