@Batman is wikipedia currently blocked in China? (might go there next month)

@gschenk Best pre-download the whole thing.... else xkcd.com/903

Neither google maps nor satellite map did fit gps coords when I was last time in China 2009. I wondered if that was on purpose. Haven't used Open Street map then, perhaps that's an option today.

@Criggie i did that last time.

I've downloaded as much as fit on my external drive. Before I flew I had an allnighter trying to get a server working, running some hackish/botched set of scripts to mimick wikimedia cms accessing the content.

It was a seriously bad idea. Went to bed less than an hour before I had to get up to get to the airport, then couldn't sleep on the plane. In China it all fell apart.

@Batman I've tried to get past the great firewall in an internet cafe in 2008. Used ssh to get onto my desktop at my German university. Used lynx and wget to get wikipedia and news. That worried the resident snitch of the cafe profoundly. He got quite agitated and texted a lot, with quite a lot of people coming and watching me.

Yeah - best to just not when in china, afaik.

Our company simply won't do business in china.

makes life much easier.

And if we did it would put other contracts under a lot more scruitiny.

@gschenk - don't remember. ssh tunneling and vpn's aren't necessarily reliable

the most reliable thing you can do is bring in a foreign sim card cause those are unfiltered.

also the visa process (at least for US citizens) is a bit annoying and expensive. and you'll get a random visa for the same application

i got multiple entry 1 year

but people who applied with the same answers got single entry 1 year or mutliple entry 10 years

going through security and stuff was easy though.

i was in shanghai which is ridiculously expensive

@gschenk The China GPS shift problem

Wow - China is weird.

@CristianCiupitu Cheers!

Cheers!

Gah. I just found stahlrahmen-bikes.de but almost nobody gives any kind of indicative pricing