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Little Free Library, part 2 | |
January 09th, 2019 | |
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I originally wrote part 1 of this build back in October [0] and | |
I have a few little things to add. | |
First, I want to call out a major hurdle I'm facing: Captive | |
Portal browsers don't allow users to download files. It's | |
a security thing. That's annoying for a library that's designed to | |
give you ebooks, but it might not be a barrier for your uses. | |
Someone on Mastodon mentioned making a video based thing, and that | |
should work just fine entirely in captive portal. | |
Second, captive portal browsers are way behind the times with | |
regard to css support. No CSS-Grid here, folks. Sadly I had to | |
fall back on some older methods to make my page pretty. | |
Speaking of pages, here's a link to the repository that houses my | |
web interface to the library [1]. | |
If you're reading this as of the moment of posting then you'll see | |
that I haven't addressed problem #1 yet. If you're finding this | |
later in time, hopefully it's all fixed for you. Here's my current | |
plan of attack: | |
- Create a very simple captive portal page that advertises the | |
little free library and instructs users to open a regular | |
browser and navigate to http://littlefreelibrary.local | |
- The generated library page will be hosted at the root url, not | |
the captive-portal location, and will allow full downloads. | |
This is going to take some testing to get right, but once it's all | |
squared away I'll update that repo to contain both pages and | |
deployment scripts. | |
Finally, I've purchased a solar battery that I'm going to try out. | |
It's a very basic solar charging battery pack of Amazon that I'm | |
not going to bother linking. It's likely not the real solution | |
here since they're notoriously bad at actually charging from the | |
sun, and when they do they overheat and destroy the battery. But | |
it will finish my proof of concept, and that's what's important. | |
Once that arrives, I'll hopefully have time this weekend to give | |
the project one last push and get it working in the woods. | |
[0] Little Free Library, Part 1 | |
[1] Little Free Library Web Source |