GB: Guide
The Guide
A more advanced user manual to the Guide can be requested from the New Arrival's Office, utilizing forms z67 and z67-9-A.
When a refugee arrives, besides having to meet the most wonderful race on all of the galaxy - the Vogons -, crying for their lost family and world, and faced with a reality many refuse to be true, they are given few gadgets. One of them is the Guide.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It's already supplanted the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for two important reasons. First, it's slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover.
And you’d be surprised with the things you can do with it. The Guide works as a cellphone, personal computer, recorder (visual and audio), dictionary, internet and GPS, translator, and allows you access to the network; to those who don’t know what any of that means, I advise you to finally try out your guide: write the word you don’t know and hit “search”. Allow the Guide to guide through it.
As said above, it allows you to post to the S.S.Thor Intranet (called by many Refugee’s network), meant especially to refugees in order to know each other, interact, work, share and act like idiots. The guide keeps records of every single post made to this refugee Network, which means if you wish to know if you were once on the Thor, you can actually read what “you” wrote (as long as you have a lot of patience or know how to properly function with the server and programs used).
The Intranet works based on a program called FlamingFerret, which can be found on every computer on the SS Thor, and can also be installed as a plug-in for the guide. The first time you sign in you will be asked to provide a user name, and you'll also be given the option to have one randomly generated based on your data. No posts to the network may be deleted due to a glitch, the same glitch that will not allow us to change our usernames on the guide. While it’s impossible to delete what you’ve once posted on the Network, you can turn it private - such option can be found in the Post’s settings.
The guides have a parental filtering system as well, which automatically locks any improper post from whoever has the filter on.
These guides are cheap and anyone, even non-refugees, can have one. If you lose your guide, you can quickly get a new one by filling out hundreds of forms that you will hand to the Vogons, or you can hope a maintenance robot will eventually find it and return it to your place of residence.
It's also to note that you can change the Guide as you wish, add new programs, modify the interface and its looks. You can add additional security (to both your physical machine or to the work you keep in there) and you can connect it to other interfaces, such as actual computers, cellphones, or even your coffee machine if for some reason you wish to try it out.