Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
As someone who is generally on the more prepared side, the use case for most stuff falls far short of “doomsday”. There is a ton to be said about things that are just generally useful in adverse situations. I’ve lived through a dozen or so storms that took out power for a few days (longest I think was 2 weeks). It’s usually not a complete blackout everywhere.
Point being: I can see it being useful to have a bunch of info in something easily portable to say, double check breaker wiring helping your friend fix some stuff after the storm. Look up the emergency AM/CB/NOAA radio freqs. I have a lot of the resources on this thing on a server, but that’s not mobile and would eat a lot of power just booting up. To package it nicely in a form factor like this would probably run me just about $189.
But the overall point is I think this falls on the extreme end of practical preparedness but I can absolutely see the use. Honestly the most practical thing on there are the books. Again, usually if a community gets hit bad you wind up with people that have power having a bunch of people stay over. Being able to allow multiple people stuff to read would help kill time.
All of that being said, its a distant second to the critical items that, again, have a huge range of uses: A solid first aide kit, 2 weeks of food (even if it’s not awesome). I realize that’s a luxury for a lot of people, but money is much better spent there first.
Strayed off topic a bit, but it’s because while I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to plan for SHTF scenarios, I do think we’re going to see a general decay (but not elimination) of public services/utilities and an increasingly pissy climate. I think it’s important for people to not fall into the bunker-prepper fantasy OR write off being more prepared than they’re accustomed to.
Jars of peanut butter. Stuff is so calorie dense, ready to eat, protein, sturdy plastic containers for shoving into backpacks. A couple jars will do for only a few weeks.
Downside is that it doesn’t last quite as long as dried beans and rice. But beans and rice take up alot of space and I don’t eat enough to rotate out years supply worth in time.
Plenty of humans to eat as well. Don’t discount what the wild animals around you can provide.
Lmfao, that’s what I mean, it makes way more sense to plan for the scenarios where you won’t be forced to, you know, resort to canibalism.
I’m a big fan of just augmenting your floating stock at home. I make a point of buying a few extra cans every-time I grocery shop, a few extra boxes of pasta etc. I focus on things I may actually cook with so I’m rotating stock. Diced tomatoes, canned beans, those tomatoes with green chilies in them. I’ve got some canned meat that I almost never cook with (a just in-case thing), it gets rotated through making dip during football season, but it’s there if I need it. I’ve also got textured vegetable protein (which is more for camping/a vegetarian I dated and tried to learn to cook for). Again, it’s a luxury for some folks (both for budget and space reasons).
But that was my point. This may not be you but it was surprising to me in early covid how many people just didn’t keep food around. Also spices, like it’s great to have rice and beans, but you’ll be a lot happier if you make sure you’ve got chili powder, hot sauce, soy sauce, etc.
Sure there are “grab and go” scenarios, but it is far more likley someone might need to put together some meals in a less than ideal situation. Being able to do, say, mac and cheese with some shredded canned chicken and hot sauce with a side of green beans goes a long way to keeping spirits up.
I didn’t grow up super rural, but it’s just the way my house was. One reason was the weather, the other was my mom was amazing at stretching a dollar. She’d buy when there was a great sale, and we’d have 4-5x of whatever the item was downstairs. So you’d wind up eating Christmas themed breakfast cereal until like May, but it also meant there was just a bunch of reserves.