Archiver Updates & Release Notes

The prebuilt shelf that LAST LIGHT downloads on first run. This is data, not code: there is no program in it. The app fetches it, checks it by length and then by hash, and unpacks it into its own data directory.

size 73196259 bytes sha256 85dacb04a56693295ffe23e2251f746a7250a366a475469eb1ce4fda43181e5c

What is on it, 5,955 documents:

• 5,934 Vikidia articles (https://en.vikidia.org), under CC BY-SA 3.0 or the GFDL, the same terms as Wikipedia.
• 21 survival and reference PDFs, 4,189 pages. Most are works of the US federal government and so are not under copyright in the United States: FEMA, USDA, EPA, USGS, HHS, the Army's Borden Institute, Oak Ridge. Two are public domain by age (Harding 1907, Gibson 1881, Hasluck 1917). One carries a written grant on its own page (the SODIS Safe Water School manual).
• Three of those 21 are Hesperian titles under CC BY-NC-SA: Where There Is No Doctor, Where There Is No Dentist, A Book for Midwives. Non-commercial.

Two plain text files travel with it. ATTRIBUTION.txt carries the Vikidia credit and licence, which a share-alike licence requires and which the app enforces: it refuses to unpack a bundle that does not have it. SOURCES.txt lists every document and why it is free to pass on.

Anything whose terms could not be established in writing was left off rather than guessed at. The corpus this was cut from holds 109 PDFs; 88 of them are not here.

The first run can now go and get its books.

0.1.0 shipped with nowhere to fetch a shelf from, so a fresh install served, said the shelf was not here and refused to download one. The shelf is published now, as its own release on this repo, and this build points at it.

shelf https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/archiver/releases/tag/shelf-v0.1.0 size 73196259 bytes sha256 85dacb04a56693295ffe23e2251f746a7250a366a475469eb1ce4fda43181e5c

5,955 documents: 5,934 Vikidia articles under CC BY-SA 3.0, and 21 survival and reference PDFs that are free to pass on. The download resumes if it breaks, is checked by length and then by hash before anything is unpacked, and is unpacked through a filter that refuses absolute paths, parent traversal and links. A bundle with no ATTRIBUTION.txt in it is refused outright.

All three shelf constants read the environment first (LAST_LIGHT_SHELF_URL, LAST_LIGHT_SHELF_SHA256, LAST_LIGHT_SHELF_BYTES), which is how a mirror gets pointed at. Nothing else changed, and the app still works with no device, no network and no corpus.

The off-grid library, packaged for the Tiiny App Farm. Ask a question in plain words, get an answer built only out of the books on the device, with the book and the page printed under it. When the shelf does not cover the question it says so instead of inventing an answer.

This is the books half of the archiver repo. The notes half ships separately as tiiny-brain and is not affected by this tag.

What is in the farm build:

• ask and cite, browse the shelves, look a subject up by name
• no ingestion. Turning a PDF into text needs poppler, reaching poppler means starting another program, and the farm's archive scanner refuses a tree that can do that. The desk tool in the same repo still ingests.
• a prebuilt shelf instead: downloaded once, resumable, checked by length and then by hash before anything is unpacked, and unpacked through a filter that refuses absolute paths, parent traversal and links.
• with no shelf yet it serves and says so, and offers to fetch one.
• Python standard library only.

The shelf URL is still a placeholder. Nothing has been published to fetch, so --download-shelf refuses and says why rather than reaching for something that is not there.

python3 last-light --serve [--port N] python3 last-light --selfcheck python3 last-light --shelf

Loading notes should not have been a terminal command, and now it is not.

The empty board carries the door: "No notes yet. Point Tiiny Brain at a folder of markdown", with a button. The same button sits in the top bar and the same panel is under Settings. Give it a folder, or browse to one from this machine, and one press runs the walk, the filing, the chunking, the embedding on your Tiiny and the name index, telling you which of the five it is on. The board redraws itself when it finishes. Point it at the same folder later and it only does what changed.

The five commands still work exactly as they did. They are just no longer the only way in.

Every step that cannot run now says which step and keeps what came before it: a Tiiny nobody has set up, a Tiiny that did not answer, a Tiiny answering and serving no embedding model, a folder with no markdown. The names are built either way, so a sleeping Tiiny costs you the ability to ask and nothing else, and try again picks up where it stopped. An empty board is never left without words on it.

Three faults turned up on the way and are fixed here: a load started before the device was configured used to leave the page saying "loading" for ever; the board could stay empty after a load while the numbers under it counted the new notes; and the two routes the page polls no longer wait on the database during the slowest step. Two different vaults with an Inbox at the top now stay two notes. …

A fresh install could not answer its own first two questions. /api/vitals and /api/settings both count rows in entity, and nothing on the cockpit's path created that table, so on a database nobody had built an entity index in the query raised, the handler dropped the socket, and the browser showed ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE with an empty page behind it.

• Every table the app owns is now created on every connection, by one function the three modules share. A fresh database and one left half built by 0.1.1 both come out complete.
• A route that raises answers 500 with the reason instead of closing the connection in silence. The traceback still goes to farm.log.
• The corpus moves to the data directory the farm keeps beside the version folders, so an index survives an update. ARCHIVER_HOME still wins and a plain checkout is unchanged. Your notes were never involved: they are markdown files in your own folder.
• /favicon.ico answers 204 and the page carries its own mark.
• First CI: the tests and the selfcheck run on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Your own notes, held by the machine on your desk.

Point it at a folder of markdown. It reads every note, works out which names keep turning up, and draws the ones that keep turning up together. Click a name and its neighbourhood pulls forward. Ask a question and the answer cites the notes it came from, or says plainly that nothing it retrieved covers it.

Two ways of answering sit behind that box, and the split is the point. "What did we decide about X" is a retrieval question, so it goes to nearest-neighbour search. "Who is Richard" is not. Search hands the model whichever notes name him near words that match the question. What answers it is every passage that names him at all. So a who-or-what-is question about a name the archive knows reads the mentions instead, and the answer says which path it took.

Write a note from inside it and the note lands in your own vault as markdown, gets chunked and embedded, and is answerable a few seconds later. Your notes stay plain files in your own folder the whole time.

The light in the top bar tells you whether it is working: whether the device answered, whether embeddings ran, whether the answering model is reachable, and whether every chunk is embedded. It names the one that is broken instead of making you read a log.

This archive is the notes half. The same engine turns a shelf of scanned PDFs into citable text, which needs poppler and an OCR engine and is not in here, because an app that only …