Thursday, May 8, 2025

This is the thirty-ninth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. The wind is currently blowing in the direction of technology and media.

Earlier this week our refrigerator died. The temperature alarm went off, even though we hadn’t opened it in a while, and it kept going up. The freezer was getting warm too, which wasn’t good at all. Fortunately, we always carry a spare refrigerator, and emptied out the bad one into the one we kept with us and brought 1400 miles across the country. We also have a chest freezer, so no food got lost, thanks be to God. Why do we have so much food storage? Well, when you have to make everything from scratch, you need a lot of raw ingredients.

That mechanical failure made me think about what would happen if the internet were to suddenly disappear (there was a point to the story!). EMP attack, AI singularity, whatever actually did the trick, what if I woke up and it not only didn’t work, but was completely gone for the indefinite future? That would require some changes, like for one I would have to go find a new job, since I work remotely for a technology company and not only would I be unable to access any project resources, the projects I work on are all server-based applications that would become irrelevant.

I would also want to make sure that all of the rest of my data was safe. As a family we use a lot of offline devices: MP3 players, ebook readers, gaming handhelds, digital cameras, all of which store their data on removable media and would be unaffected by the loss of connectivity. Media that doesn’t fit on the device is stored in a cloud backup system, but that storage is mirrored on a good old magnetic-disc HDD on my recording desktop PC. It’s all secure.

My writing would be safe, too. While I usually draft and edit in Zoho Writer, which is web-based like Google Docs, there is an offline option where the data is stored to disk also. Once I’m done with a story, I have so many PDFs, Epubs, and ODT files from formatting and publishing that the work is backed up several times over.

I used to use Scrivener, which stores documents on disk as you write, and really enjoyed the organizational features. All three of my primary books and several of the current short stories were written with Scrivener, and the ebook versions came directly out of it. I wish I could recommend it more, but the lack of updates made me find another solution. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was a stable product, but I kept running into a bug that made me force close the app every time I tried to use it, but only once. I also never reported it, so that’s kind of on me.

I keep a lot of worldbuilding info and other data in Zoho Notebook, a major competitor to Evernote, which fortunately has an offline feature too. About the only major thing that I would lose is this newsletter here, since it doesn’t have an easy way to export posts as PDF, like other mailing list providers I’ve used. I suppose I should start saving those emails that I keep getting every day. I always debate opening my own newsletter emails. Will it throw off my stats for the day if I read it too many times? Hard to say.

Our modern reliance on streaming, cloud-based services works great for most people, but I can’t help but think ahead and make sure I’m covered in case it all goes away. Having books and DVDs and music CDs is a great idea for offline preparation, but there’s a lot you can do with the services you already have. Of course, the argument can be made that if the internet is out, the power grid will probably have also failed, so you couldn’t run a computer anyway. That may be true, but there are great solar and hand-crank chargers out there!