Both open field reports fixed within a day (#30, #28), and the distribution story finished: desktop apps that torrent out of the box, mirror nodes that can carry the whole catalog through an internet blackout, and an almanac that tells the truth about every date it shows. Rounded out with a sharing panel that's rock-solid and honest, and BitTorrent that actually seeds what it says it will.

Highlights

• Desktop apps torrent out of the box. The Mac and Linux apps now ship their own BitTorrent engine, signed and notarized with the app. Every install shares the load with the Kiwix mirrors, automatically.
• Your router opens the door. Like every real BT client: automatic UPnP port-forwarding, a port open/closed indicator, and a retry button, right in the BitTorrent settings. DHT is on, so magnet links and trackerless swarms just work.
• Mirror mode is real now. Flip one switch and Zimi seeds your whole library, uncapped, and archives the torrent for every catalog item — a single mirror node can bootstrap ZIM distribution for an entire offline network. Turning it off stops the mirror seeds (ordinary ratio-capped seeding continues) and never deletes the backup.
• Built for the day the internet isn't there. Every install keeps an offline copy of the catalog and a magnet link per installed ZIM. The catalog browses, searches, and installs from LAN peers with zero connectivity.
• Honest seeding. Seeds survive restarts, and the seeding panel shows snagged ones in red with the reason instead of hiding them.
• The calendar is yours, wherever you are. Click your location on the almanac map: national holidays follow (17 countries + a worldwide set), season names match your hemisphere, and equinoxes are computed to the minute. A new "About this data" section states the precision of every date on the page, in all 10 languages.
• The world clock is alive: 28 cities, one per UTC offset, each card tinted by its local daylight with solid sun/moon marks, the selected city glowing, and a digital card beside the analog clock — split-flap seconds, date, and timezone (PST/CET) included.
• The BitTorrent port is editable in place — change it and the engine respawns on the new port with UPnP re-mapped, live. Peer names apply instantly too (no more restart notes), and Mirror shows its progress while it seeds your library and backs up the catalog.
• Panels stopped blanking themselves (#30): the manage UI no longer trips Zimi's own rate limiter, and a rate-limited response keeps last-known content instead of clearing the page.
• Downloads are stubborn now: they survive server restarts, refuse to start when the disk can't fit them, and flip their catalog card to Installed the moment they land.
• Standing maintenance: catalog, port mapping, seeds, and magnets refresh themselves every 12 hours — no visit required.
• One control for sharing speed: set a max up/down rate right in the BitTorrent card (0 = unlimited); it governs downloads, personal seeds, and mirror alike. The Server → Sharing panel is now rock-solid — no layout jump, instant toggles, and status lights that never lie.

Added

• Global up/down bandwidth caps for BitTorrent, set in MB/s in the Sharing panel (0 = unlimited). Applied to the whole aria2 engine — downloads, seeds, and mirror — so one pair of numbers governs all sharing speed. Live-adjustable without a restart.
• Desktop apps torrent out of the box: the DMG and AppImage now ship their own aria2 sidecar (hash-verified static build on Linux, relocated Homebrew build on macOS, codesigned and notarized with the app). The BT-first default finally applies to every install, not just Docker.
• Port health in BitTorrent settings, like a real BT client: an open/closed/unknown indicator for the listen port, automatic UPnP port-forwarding (on by default, stdlib implementation, fails soft), and a retry button that re-maps and re-tests on demand.
• True mirror mode: turning Mirror on now seeds your whole installed library — aria2 hash-checks each existing file and seeds it in place, uncapped, using saved .torrent files (works offline) or the catalog's torrent URLs. Seeds whose file an update replaced are retired automatically. Mirrors also archive the .torrent for every catalog item (~40-80 MB for the full catalog), making a mirror node a complete offline index: any ZIM can be fetched, verified, and re-seeded with no internet at all.
• Post-world resilience: the last good Kiwix catalog persists to disk and stays browsable when the internet is gone (with a quiet "showing catalog from " note), and every BT download keeps its infohash, magnet link, and .torrent file so ZIMs can be re-seeded into offline swarms later.
• Honest seeding: completed BT downloads re-seed from the library file itself (the old in-place seed died silently on restart), and the seeding panel shows snagged seeds — errored or file-missing — in red instead of hiding them. Mirrors especially.
• Nearby warns when it can't work: Docker bridge mode advertises an unreachable container address; the Nearby card now says so and the ZIMI_NEARBY ip= field (or host networking) fixes it.
• The almanac states its precision like an encyclopedia: a new "About this data" section covers algorithms, calendar accuracy, and coverage in all 10 languages. Equinoxes and solstices are now computed (Meeus, verified to within ~1 minute of USNO reference times) instead of pinned to fixed dates, with hemisphere-aware season names — October is spring in Sydney.
• Every install keeps the post-world basics: the offline catalog copy plus a magnet link for each installed ZIM (infohash extracted from the catalog's torrents); mirrors additionally keep the .torrent files for the whole catalog. Turning Mirror off stops the seeds but never deletes the archive.
• Standing maintenance every 12 hours, no visit required: the offline catalog refreshes before it goes stale, the UPnP port mapping renews at half-lease (it silently expired after 24h otherwise), and magnet manifest / mirror seeds / torrent archive stay current.
• DHT is on by default (opt out with the ZIMI_BT dht= field): trackerless peer discovery makes magnet links usable and keeps swarms findable if the Kiwix trackers ever disappear. The routing table persists across restarts.
• Thumbnails prefetch gently in the background after a catalog fetch, so browsing doesn't trickle images in one at a time.

Fixed

• Downloads and settings panels no longer blank themselves (#30): Zimi's own rate limiter was counting the manage UI's polling against the anonymous budget. Clients with a valid manage credential — or any private-network client on a passwordless instance — now get 10x headroom (ZIMI_RATE_LIMIT_TRUSTED), snippet fetches ride the roomier content bucket, and a 429 keeps the last-known panel content instead of rendering an empty state. The Server pane also no longer embeds the live seeding list, which used to grow and shrink under you — seeds live in the Downloads tab.
• BitTorrent actually seeds now. A completed BT download re-added its library-path seed before removing the staging torrent — same info-hash, so aria2 rejected the add as a duplicate and no seed was ever created (the staging torrent then snagged "file missing"). Now it removes then adds. Downloads that finish over HTTP (or fall back from BT when a torrent has no live seeders) seed too, instead of silently not sharing.
• No more double entries in Downloads. An in-flight BT download used to surface as both a download card and a "seed" card under All; the seeding view now excludes still-downloading torrents, and a completed download that's now seeding shows only its seed card.
• Fresh builds show up immediately. The service worker keys its cache on a content hash of the app bundle, so any deploy — even within the same version — installs a new worker that clears the stale cache. Previously same-version deploys served old JavaScript from cache.
• The random button doesn't no-op. An unlucky ZIM pick could return nothing and leave the dice looking dead; it now retries across a few sources (and the client retries) so the first roll always opens something.
• The almanac speaks world, not American (#28): Gregorian holidays are an international base plus one region pack (17 countries + EU catch-all) picked from the browser locale/timezone — a British calendar shows Guy Fawkes Night and bank holidays, not Thanksgiving. Clock changes follow the region's real rule. The timezone picker grows from 16 to 28 cities covering every UTC offset in common use, including Central Europe ("Italy uses UK time" is fixed) and the half-offset zones, translated in all 10 languages.
• Your location drives the calendar: click anywhere on the almanac map and the holidays follow — Italy gets Ferragosto, all offline. A quiet caption says whose days are showing, and each national day carries a country tooltip.
• The world clock is alive: each city card is tinted by its local hour (day, dawn, dusk, night) with a small glyph — the grid reads as a band of daylight matching the map's terminator.
• Picture of the Day no longer shows yesterday's picture (the Discover cache keyed on the UTC date while content used the local date).
• Closing the reader now restores the underlying view's URL — a reload no longer reopens the article you just closed.
• Downloads survive restarts: pending and queued items persist and resubmit at startup through their validated entry points, resuming partial files. Downloads refuse to start when they would fill the disk (expected size + 2 GB floor, or the disk-pressure threshold).
• Passwordless instances accept management commands from the local network only; public clients must set a password first. Instances with a password are unchanged.
• RTL article/ZIM titles (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi) no longer reshuffle neighboring punctuation in LTR chrome.
• Cross-ZIM duplicate suppression is regression-tested (bundle + subset libraries), and every locale file is CI-locked to the English key set so untranslated raw key names (#25's bug class) can't recur.
• Server startup no longer blocks on the BitTorrent sidecar: backend spawn and LAN discovery moved off the critical path, and the aria2 RPC probe is deadline-bounded. A half-dead process squatting the RPC port could previously stall startup for minutes (hung the desktop app at launch and the CI release smoke test).
• SIGTERM (docker stop, systemd) now exits through cleanup handlers, so the aria2 sidecar is reaped instead of orphaned.
• Test suite no longer spawns real aria2c sidecars or makes live network requests; a leaked sidecar from one run poisoned every later backend start on the same machine.

Upgrade

docker pull epheterson/zimi:latest
docker compose down && docker compose up -d

Or pip install --upgrade zimi for Python installs.