For those that don’t know what the sneakernet is it’s essentially transferring data through physical means. For example I would occasionally download TV shows to a hard drive for a friend who didn’t have access to the internet after they thought they cancelled their subscription to their ISP and acquired hundreds of dollars of debt. You can find a Wikipedia page for the term sneakernet here.

Have any of you set something up with your neighbors or family? I’d include LAN setups where content as shared as part of the sneakernet. Kind of similar to how stuff has been distributed in Cuba.

  • Tregetour@lemdro.idEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Last Christmas I gave a family member a flash drive containing ~10 high quality movie encodes, basically a shorlist of the year’s personal highlights I reckon they’d enjoy too. I don’t know if they’ve used it, but I’m going to make a habit of it until I hear otherwise. A drive for a handful movies is cheap enough to not worry about if it’s never seen again. Give them a large capacity drive however, or access to a Plex server, and paralysis of choice occurs.

  • Prison Mike@links.hackliberty.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    In high school I used to pass USB flash drives in an Altoid can (to protect it), good times.

    I also used to be the CD-R guy (and later DVD+RW) for my group of friends, I was really into .cue sheets and putting hidden tracks on those (including dumb shit like seeking back in the middle of a slow song would reveal heavy metal or something).

    These days I host a Tailscale network — unfortunately with residential upload speeds being trash, I’ve moved all my Blu-ray rips to Storj and set up a WebDAV gateway on a VPS (running Tailscale). It’s fast as hell but I’m not in love with decrypting on the VPS.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I sneakernet shows to my buddy who doesn’t torrent. A couple of thumbdrives that we’ve been passing back and forth for about 5 years

  • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down a highway.

  • maxprime@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m a teacher and I have a USB stick full of textbook PDFs. It wouldn’t be cool to email them on my professional account but sneakernet is the ultimate VPN lol

  • Twend@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    My upload speed is horrible, so I download items, compare my stuff to my friend,(freefilesync) then copy to an external ssd for them to import.

  • interurbain1er@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Back when I lived in Dubai, around 06, you’d go to some well known parking spots and some Indians guy would come to your car with a bunch of burned DVD in giant binders with all of the latest release, classics, complete series…

    That was useful because internet was pretty shit and expensive. If I remember I was paying €120 a month for a theoretical 2Mb.

    And there was even a “special” binder for that famous vin diesel movie. I guess he was very popular because it was very large binder that lots of people asked to see every week. It’s weird to me because pitch black was clearly his best and the only one worth rewatching but, every single week, people really seems excited to buy a new copy of xXx.

  • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.orgEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    The problem I’ve run into is versioning, determining which collection is most “ahead”. We’ve had a large drive which was once used collectively by my family, but with everyone moving around it’s been demoted to a more downstream status.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I send my mom a USB flash drive with photos periodically because it’s easier than getting her to use Google photos and I don’t have to manage more social media garbage.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Shiiiiiiiit, transferring stuff via physical media takes me back to high school. It was mostly porn videos to my friends, never charged a dime, only asked them to give me a blank CD

    Haven’t done anything like that since I finished college. During those years, it was mostly sharing ripped versions of games that we could play straight from the USB stick on the college computers, mostly Counter Strike 1.6 , much to my distaste as I much preferred other games like Digital Paintball 2 and Age of Empires 2. Also a bit ironic that, despite all of us being CompSci students, I seemed to be the only one who was willing to endure the “pains” of setting up a SNES emulator so we could play Bomberman over the LAN.