Speaking of self-sufficient smartphones, and today in Posts I’m Writing Because I Know I’m Going to Want to Link Them Later, here are some offline-focused apps I already have:
Games: 2048, Boomshine, Hangman, Minesweeper, Sudoku. (I prefer to use a laptop for more complex games.)
File interfaces:
AndrOpen Office: takes a ridiculously large amount of storage space (400 MB!), but if you have the room for it, a pretty good way of interfacing with the .odt- and .doc-formatted parts of your archive. (If you don’t have the room for it, LibreOffice Viewer is better than nothing.)
FBReader: A good way of interfacing with the .epub- and (if you get the extension for it) .pdf-formatted parts of your archive.
foobar2000: I used to use built-in MP3-player apps, but that forces you to change to a new one when you change phones. Then for a little while I had one that didn’t offer mass-adding to playlists and, if you tried to skip to a particular point in a track, *pretended* to work but actually skipped you to a *random* point in the track. This one doesn’t seem to have either of those problems.
Kiwix: The leading way to interface with the .zim-formatted parts of your archive. If you don’t have any .zim files (or if you do, for that matter), they will offer you some. I highly recommend downloading Wikipedia and Wiktionary. (The current version of the app is a little prone to crashing, but it’s still usable IME, and I expect they’ll fix it at some point.)
ZArchiver: For the .zip (or tarball, I guess) parts of your archive.
Things that prefer to sync with the cloud at least occasionally, but in the absence of Internet will continue running off of their (increasingly outdated) local copy of the data indefinitely:
MapFactor: Offline maps by province! OpenStreetMaps-based, so if you find an error you can (once you have Internet again) just fix it and it will trickle down with the next map update! Saved-waypoint backups to both cloud and file! Does *not* delete your maps if you haven’t had a chance to update them for a few weeks (seriously, Google Maps, what the fuck)!
Google Calendar: need I say more?
Google Sheets: Currently I rarely need my spreadsheets to be offline (a lot of them deal with online games), but it’s nice to have around for the exceptions.
Google Translate: not all functions can be made available offline, but you can still do a fair bit if you make sure to grab all the offline-language packages you might need beforehand.
Unit Converter: Internet is completely irrelevant for most of this, but there is a currency-conversion function as well. Never realised how useful a currency converter would be until I had one: lets me do things like follow Mom around Aldi translating the prices of everything she’s interested in buying, to help her decide if it’s a good deal or not.
Weather Underground: Obviously, this one becomes outdated sooner rather than later, but it’s still nice as they go.
Dropsync: Last I checked, the official Dropbox app had neither a “sync all files” option nor a “store files on SD card” option. This one does both.
Things I keep around specifically in case of being without Internet:
OffLine Browser: I haven’t really had a chance to use this yet, and I’m not sure its use case really applies to me (generally if I want a local copy of a website, I want it for the long term and portable; I don’t tend to need temporary or app-tied caches), but it might come in handy.
Avast Wi-Fi Finder: Whenever possible, use wifimap.io instead. Problem with wifimap.io is, it only offers downloadable maps by city (and doesn’t show which province-level jurisdiction the city is in, just which country; you don’t get to know, say, which of the 12 Stratfords in America it’s actually offering you), so no matter how well you predict which locations you’re going to end up in, sooner or later you’re likely to end up in a location too small to have an associated downloadable map. (In which case it’s still useful for situations where you can use the live map, like “has *some* mobile data but is looking to stretch it out by supplementing with Wi-Fi”, but if you have no Internet at all it’s useless.) Avast is much buggier, tending to lose hotspot listings, but at least it offers whole-country downloads. It’s better than nothing: just remember to take its information (*especially* information on where hotspots *aren’t*) with plenty of salt. (Take wifimap.io’s information on where hotspots aren’t with salt too, and consider fixing it where you can. I like to go out to new places and go treasure-hunting for unlisted public hotspots to add.)
Nethack: Okay, not so much something I keep around in case of being without *Internet* so much as something I keep around in case of being without a *laptop*. As I mentioned earlier in the post, I prefer laptops for more complex games; however, if someday I have to go without a laptop for an extended period, I want to reserve the right to play Nethack anyway.
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#oh look an original post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #recs
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