www.submarinecablemap.com VS web

Hillsboro, Oregon's network connections have a lot of advantages. It's worthwhile checking it out here: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ --Katie

Now you can say that you've 'seen' the internet. You can see the map here

Looking at this site there are 3 companies that own/operate undersea cables to the US

This unfortunately won't get you the whole picture, but using some tools you can determine how your traffic is routed in one direction, and possibly the geographic path it takes as well. For example, in mine, I can see based on the names that I know my traffic is going through Equinix San Jose (equinix-sj), then likely to Palo Alto (pao1, palo), then to Los Angeles (lax). By looking up who owns what IP addresses, I can also see that my traffic goes from my local ISP (Sonic) to Telia, then to Amazon. While concerning, you can effectively ignore all of the hops that say "Request timed out." as those just mean the hop wasn't responding to pings (or in the case of the very end, the game server itself likely doesn't respond to pings). Unfortunately though, this is only half of the picture, as this doesn't let me see the path from anets servers to me. For that, I would need an AWS instance with similar routing rules to anet's servers. Still, this may be useful, as I'm guessing your traffic is using a submarine cable to get to anet's servers in the US. These unfortunately often have issues or maintenance that can cause measurable connectivity impacts - I'm in the US and we have a node on the NLNOG Ring, and we get alerts of connectivity issues with Europe on a regular basis.

Well. Significantly more than that due to latency from switches etc and also because of the fact that there's so little land along the equator, meaning there's only one cable that travels roughly equatorially. It's from Fortaleza, Brazil to Kribi, Cameroon: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

If you set up a bunch of good first-surface mirrors, I'm pretty sure you could get to pretty much the speed of light. You'd have to put them pretty high up in the air to avoid hitting things (a problem for cables as well, obviously) but putting the beam 2km in the air would still only lengthen the path by 4pi km, or .03%.

I have always found it very neat that the propagation speed of a light wave in glass is roughly the same as electrical waves in a coaxial cable. Both are shockingly slow compared to air/vacuum, but for completely different reasons. In both cases the advantages in signal integrity are immense.

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; likewise it's not possible to accept money without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal. (Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things doesn't mean you can't run your web app on a single tiny server, and that outsourcing the basic underpinnings of your web app, like the OS, runtime, and database to some cloud service, or that resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, will result in complexity and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

Hey a little later to the party here but I'm really enjoying this. I started reading a book with it and while I agree with others it's not great for grammar it certainly shows me many new words without requiring me to read at a glacial pace.

PS: You should def try to include some books from https://standardebooks.org/ which are much nicer formatted than the ones you're using from Project Gutenberg.

Good luck and I hope you can keep building this out. Already the update to tap anywhere to close the word definition is a nice improvement :)

A number of e-book platforms are discussed on my blog, which dives deeply into the technical nuances of typesetting a few[1]. Ultimately, I typeset a classic from Standard EBooks[2], Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde[3].

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

[2]: https://standardebooks.org/

[3]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

As an aside, for anyone looking for free classic books to read on their various eReaders, these are very well done: https://standardebooks.org

It is the same when you download a kepub book from standardebooks.org. You will have the epub file with kepub features.

> https://standardebooks.org/

Standard Ebooks is seriously impressive. One of my favorite sources of books in the public domain.

I’d also add in addition to this excellent list of DRM-free ebooks, it’s always worth looking into borrowing a book from the library via Libby/Overdrive.