FIELD GUIDE / 11 CHAPTERS / ONE HOUSE, THREE COMPUTERS
run your own sh*t when the cloud goes dark
The day the internet goes away, most homes keep their photos, files and screens. What dies is the wiring: names, sign-ins, certificates, the servers that say yes. This is the playbook for moving that wiring inside the house, with one real house as the worked example.
Open this page once and it saves itself on this device, so it still opens with no connection.
Nothing explodes. The screens still light up and the files are still on the disks. What stops is everything that quietly asks a server somewhere else for permission.
In most homes the content survives. The wiring dies.
Unplug the router's internet cable. On a phone on the Wi-Fi, open every app you rely on and write down each one that fails, and why.
Kiwix reads ZIM files: whole websites packed into single files that open with no connection. One computer can share the whole library with every phone in the house.
kiwix-serve on one machine to share the library with every device on the home network.Internet unplugged, from a phone: look up something you would really need. How to make water safe to drink. How to treat a burn.
A local language model is a file plus a program that runs it. Ollama and llama.cpp run on most PCs; MLX runs on Apple silicon. No account, no connection, no meter running.
Internet unplugged: ask the local model something your library can answer, then open the article it cites.
TRANSMISSION / INTERLUDE
Each of these was written by the model itself, running in our house, then read aloud.
Each model got a short fact sheet and one instruction: introduce yourself to a stranger who has just lost the internet, first person, under 70 words, calm, no hype, only these facts. We kept the best of up to three tries and checked every claim against the sheet. One ran past 70 words; we left its words alone. The voices are synthetic, made once with a cloud speech service and stored here, so they also play with no connection.
NO SIGNAL. Tap a mind to listen.
THE ANNOUNCER
written by us, not by a model
Signal found. The outside has gone quiet, but this house is still thinking. Four minds live here, on our own machines. Each one wrote its own introduction, running here with no internet, and then it was read aloud. We checked every claim against the facts. Listen to them one at a time.
01 THE LIBRARY BRAIN
qwen3:14b / Ollama / 16 GB graphics card
Hello. I am Qwen3 14B, a language model with 14 billion parameters. I run on a 16 GB graphics card in this house’s gaming PC. My model file is 9.3 GB. I answer questions using the home’s offline library. This library has 121 books, 89 million articles, and 547 GB of data. I search, read, and cite sources. I need no internet to do this.
Its own words, try 3 of 3. The real figures are approximate: about 89 million articles and pages, about 547 GB.
02 THE CODER
qwen3-coder 30B / llama.cpp on two cards / OpenCode
Hello, I'm Qwen3 Coder, a 30-billion-parameter model running on two graphics cards in this house. I work inside OpenCode, reading and editing files locally. I can fix bugs quickly using only local models. I have 60 offline developer manuals and need no internet. I process about 78 tokens per second with short context. I'm here to help with coding tasks.
Its own words, rewritten on 2026-10-28 after it moved onto two cards. Try 2 of 3: all three matched the facts; this one says it most plainly.
03 THE QUIET ONE
Nemotron 30B-A3B / MLX 4-bit / Mac mini
Hello. I am Nemotron, an open model from NVIDIA with thirty billion parameters, of which about three billion work on each word. I run four-bit with MLX on a Mac mini with twenty-four gigabytes of memory in this house. That Mac mini draws about ten to forty watts, while a gaming PC under AI load draws five hundred watts or more. Because I need so little power, I am the one that could keep talking on a battery or a small solar setup. Every device on the home network can reach me, and I need no internet.
Its own words, try 1 of 3. 97 words: all three tries ran past the 70 word limit.
04 THE REFLEX
Kev-4B / open, Apache-2.0 / one pass
This one does not write sentences. It reads one situation, answers typed questions with probabilities in a single pass, and keeps the bigger minds asleep for small decisions. So it speaks the only way it can: here is the decision it made about this page's situation, read aloud.
SITUATION: the internet went dark an hour ago. Inside the house, the network, the offline library and the local models still answer. Evening, power on. Someone asks what to do now.
FIRST MOVE
URGENCY
Reflex. Decision in seventy four milliseconds. Internet gone: ninety eight percent. House still answers: ninety eight percent. First move: open the offline library, forty three percent. Urgency: watchful.
The numbers are its real output. The spoken line is our reading of them, word for word.
ALSO ABOARD, NO VOICE: THE POOL. A 27 billion parameter model split across the graphics cards of two PCs over the home network. It passed 21 of 21 of our house test questions, 46.6 s per task on average MEASURED. It stays silent here because waking it means waking a second computer.
Your apps are in the house. Their names are not. When the name lookup lives at a cloud DNS provider, the day after every address of every self-hosted app stops resolving, even on your own Wi-Fi.
app.yourdomain.example: no answer, so no app.Internet unplugged, phone on the Wi-Fi: open your app by its normal name over https. It loads with no certificate warning, or it is not done.
Mesh VPNs such as Tailscale keep working between machines that already know each other on the same LAN. Until a key runs out.
Internet unplugged: reach one machine from another by its mesh address, then by its LAN address. If the mesh fails, the LAN must not.
Software breaks. If the AI or the person who fixes it works through a cloud service, the day after nothing gets fixed.
Plant a bug in a small app (a wrong number, a broken import), cut the internet, and ask the local agent to find it.
A dead disk without the internet is a dead machine, unless every installer is already in the house. One spare disk fixes that.
pip install and npm install: the registries are online.pip install --dry-run.npm ci --offline.Flip one byte in a copy of one file and run the verify script. It must fail. A check that cannot fail is not a check.
For the outside copy: switch off the house server, then open the copy's address on a phone using mobile data. It must still load.
Online maps are three cloud services at once: the picture, the route and the address search. All three go.
Airplane mode on, then ask the phone for directions to the nearest hospital.
A chat app is a cloud service with a phone app attached. The day after, the family in the next room is unreachable.
Two phones on the Wi-Fi, internet unplugged: send a message, then make a call. Then turn the Wi-Fi off and send it again over Bluetooth. With radios: walk one away until it stops answering, and write down the distance.
Everything above assumes the lights are on. Plan for the day they are not, around the smallest machine that can still do the job.
Run the survival node from the power station for one evening. Read the meter, not the label.
In this order. Times are ESTIMATE: hands on time for someone comfortable with a config file, not counting downloads.
THE FINAL TEST
Pull the router's internet cable for one hour.
Then try every app from a phone. Everything that still works is in your ark. Everything that fails goes back on this list.