from j4p@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world on 24 Apr 2025 16:47
https://lemm.ee/post/62284789
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.”
threaded - newest
www.prepperdisk.com/pages/how-does-it-work
Would be nice if they’d offer downloads for the disk image. Or at least sell the disk image since I don’t need yet another Pi lol.
Go get it directly from Kiwix
Kiwix is awesome. Many many years ago we made a sharepx from all of Gutenbergs library and creative commons works. We also added public maps.
Less end of the world, more entertainment and helping out the community.
There are also pirate boxes that do the same with not so free resources. And they work offline for hundreds of devices.
Well…that sent me down a rabbit hole. Thanks!
Yeah Kiwix is great for this, I just put together what this company is essentially selling for free by myself a few months ago. In fact I would be surprised if this company wasn’t using Kiwix as most of the resources they listed are on it already.
One of these things is not like the others
Thank you, they’ve been ruining search results since the day SEO was coined.
Has room for a porn folder too right?
Seems like an amateur apocalyptic preparation oversight that it wasn’t included already.
I know a guy who can hook you up
Just check under homework.
My documents/faxes/saved faxes/Trash/receipts/
You forgot “taxes.”
Just ordered mine!
My problem with preppers is the over estimating on whether they’ll be in a position that these skills will have any effect, and the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
Like, you’ll need a farm right off the bat, or your first steps in any guider are how to violently take somebody else’s land. Followed by step two, keeping that land from other humans who don’t want to die.
Instead of prepping, become nomadic scroungers or live in a fricking farming commune in the first place. Basically descend a couple levels of societal development and you’ll already be self sufficient and ready. Like the Amish.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
I love seeing all the tacticool “operators” with their tricked out ARs, bulletproof vests and helmets, flexicuffs, and other shit but look like they get gassed slowly ascending the stairs from their mother’s basement. Rule #1 in the zombie apocalypse is Cardio.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight. If it does it will be a slow crawl until going full Gravy Seal is warranted. They need to survive until then.
Not if it goes down like you expect it to.
In my experience, the real problems are the ones you weren’t planning for.
Even if we don’t end up nuking each other like we thought we would in the 60s-90s, we could still get a massive asteroid / comet strike with less than a week’s notice. That innocent looking star 23 light years away could have collapsed 22.99 years ago and zap us with a gamma ray burst next week.
More likely: something we don’t even know about comes along and makes life far more challenging than it has been for 100,000 years.
Humans are very bad at intuitively grasping very large and very small numbers, and that includes very small probabilities. The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule. Especially with the "not seeing it until it's a week away" condition, we've come a very long way when it comes to mapping near-Earth asteroids and there just aren't any places for them to hide any more. Especially not once Vera C. Rubin goes online.
A star that's capable of producing a gamma ray burst is not "innocent-looking", it's actually very obvious. There are none that are that close to us. They'd also need to have a very precisely aimed axis to hit us, gamma ray bursts look so bright in part because their "beam" is so narrow.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
That dark swarm of asteroids that was launched out of the Magellanic Cloud 8 billion years ago that’s coming on a direct collision course against the Milky Way rotation - yeah, we don’t know about that one.
The thing about our probabilities of events that haven’t happened yet to leave a scar that we can notice on the surface of the Earth, we haven’t been very good at observing the sky except for the last 100 years or so, really 50. So, we’re learning more and more about things and newly discovered hazards don’t lower the probability of occurrence…
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst. What we don’t know about that star is the super Jupiters orbiting it in a quasi stable multi-body arrangement that could collapse a bunch of mass into the star and turn it from Jekyll to Hyde under your bed ASAP.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
And you don't need to worry about it, because as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this. How much mass do those asteroids have? What's their collective cross-section, and how does that compare to the volume of space they'd be passing through? How big is Earth in comparison?
I'm betting the odds will still be microscopic. I feel safe betting that because we have real world evidence that bodies in our solar system don't frequently get hit by ghost asteroids from the Magellanic Cloud (there's an 80's sci-fi movie title for you). Large impacts are few and far between these days,
Once again, sure, you could imagine that ordinary stars sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
If you want it to actually be a worrying scenario, though, it needs to be backed up with some kind of evidence or theory that makes it plausible. And again, we don't actually see frequent gamma ray bursts in reality, so whatever mechanism you propose needs to be rare for it to fit the data.
I don’t worry about it, because it is a very small number and my life is likely very short by comparison, but… the very large number of potential sites for life to evolve in the visible universe still yields zero evidence of a technological “WE ARE HERE” sign that we can understand. That implies that either: A) we really are the center of the universe, first to develop technology or B) such developments of energy manipulating technology are an exceedingly small number rare for… reasons that we do not yet understand. And of course C) those of us who have seen irrefutable proof of alien technology are hiding it from the rest of us for… reasons.
Of the possibilities, I find A) much less likely than B), and C) to be impossibly absurd - people just aren’t that good at keeping secrets for long periods of time.
You’re analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can’t do is analyze a risk we haven’t imagined yet. Looking at the vastness of the Universe and the rate at which our theories about how it all works evolve, I find it far more likely that we haven’t imagined more of actual reality than we have.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen. What we don’t know is all of the causes or all of the existing conditions that will precede such events.
When such event does “miraculously” happen we may be able to learn from observation what likely triggered it and then it won’t be “miraculous” anymore, it will have an analyzable probability - with a rather large window of uncertainty.
Until such an event kills us all, or at least tanks civilization. We won’t likely learn much from that one.
How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?
As I keep saying, the human mind is not good at intuitively handling very large or very small numbers and probabilities.
What you can't do is analyze a risk without doing an actual analysis. For that you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.
Yes, and all the causes that we know don't apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us. You have to make up imaginary new causes in order to be frightened of a gamma ray burst.
When data is absent, rigorous analysis is impossible. When data is severely lacking, attempts at rigorous analysis are more intuition than anything else.
And when the data can’t be collected? Contingency planning and resource allocation for the unknown is folly, right up until it is the smartest thing to do.
That we know of.
We should focus on expanding our knowledge and plan based on the best data we have, but like the first lunar astronauts spending 21 days in quarantine, a bit of planning and care for the unknown isn’t a bad idea either.
There are an infinite number of things for which there is no evidence. Preparing for those things would be taking effort away from preparing for things that are actually real.
The first lunar astronauts spent 21 days in quarantine because we know that diseases are real and in the past there have been real examples of explorers bringing back new diseases from the places they visited. They didn't simultaneously get ritually cleansed by a shaman because there is no evidence of actual lycanthropy being a thing.
Space is BIG. Even if your asteroid idea happened, I can confidently say it won’t hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not. Earth is a ridiculously small target compared to the space in the solar system, and we have Jupiter that throws everything out and protects us. It’s not happening, and even if it did it’ll likely hit water, and even if it hits land it likely won’t be near you.
Prepare for a car accident. Don’t prepare for asteroid impact. Youre wasting your time and money in the later and, though the former is relatively unlikely to be needed, it’s actually realistic that it may happen to you. Until you’re prepared for that, for a house fire, for a break in, for a medical emergency, and for anything else that’s relatively likely, you’re wasting your resources.
Andromeda is going to hit the Milky way, and it likely won’t do anything to most earth-like planets because the densities of both (all) galaxies are so low.
Individual low odds things don’t happen frequently, but collectively they happen a lot more often because there are so many low odds things with potential to happen.
The Holocene may only run 12,000 years - it looks like the Anthropocene is the most likely end for it, but life has been evolving on Earth for 3.5(ish) billion years, making the Holocene just 0.00034% of that period, 1/300,000th in round numbers.
Yes. This is why you shouldn’t play the lottery even though you may see people win it fairly frequently. Most people lose, and the cost of anyone winning is higher than the payout. Similarly, the cost for preparing for some incredibly low odds events is higher than the likelihood it’ll ever be useful.
There’s the flipside of that: cost of prepping vs what’s at stake if it happens.
This is one where development of a reasonably capable asteroid diversion system probably makes sense, or at least makes more sense than bombing each other’s cities and kidnapping each other’s children… Sure, it’s fabulously expensive to make big rockets capable of moving big rocks in space, but the cost of one of those big rocks hitting the ocean is higher. It’s low odds that a big rock is hitting any ocean tomorrow, but over the course of the next 1000 years? Even if that chance is 1/100, doing the prep work now to be able to deflect it if it comes could be a big payoff overall.
But, that still doesn’t address the unknown unknowns which - we don’t know, so calculating odds is just a matter of trying to look back in time to see when really bad things happened and assuming (incorrectly) that the odds of really bad things happening in the future are about the same.
Yeah, an asteroid detection and diversion system makes sense for a society. Those odds aren’t that low and the cost isn’t that high (and the other benefits it provides may may it regain its cost in value). It doesn’t make sense to prepare for a black hole hitting Earth and wiping us out though, for example. The cost would be insane and the likelihood is effectively zero.
However, you as an individual shouldn’t waste your time making an asteroid detection and diversion system. The cost is way more than you can afford and the likelihood is very low compared to events that could happen at any moment. It’s a waste of your resources and time to consider. Preppers are working as individuals usually.
This is where modern society is falling apart. A bunch of individuals with the “feeling” that an asteroid diversion system is “a waste of THEIR money” and that the detection system is a bigger waste still… Then we have preppers like Musk thinking about personally setting up a Mars colony, so he needs massive tax advantages and other government grift to fulfill his THC fueled visions.
About the black hole prep thing… it’s not necessarily all that expensive, you just need Musk’s Mars colony, or maybe more realistically one of Niven’s iron asteroids melted by solar power, inflated and spun to be a big hollow shell with atmosphere and gravity inside. Setup a process to make one of those every 500 years or so and string 'em out in nicely varied orbits to spread the risk. Send a few out on fusion powered slow trips to other stars…
You guys are prepping for Jupiter to become a second sun? That’s hard fucking core man!
Spoiler alert: pretty sure that was the big finish to Clarke’s 2010.
That’s the other thing. Society is more likely not to collapse, but just adapt. Half your country could be wiped out by a nuke. If the capitol was taken out then you’re just entering government less warzone like Darfur. They still have trade etc in those regions. Eventually surviving external government exert influence and prop up their preferred government.
Or the capitol survives, the housing market crashes, everybody becomes poor, disgruntled young guys force through a vote for a strong daddy to lead them through this tough time.
The movie “the road” is horrible but unlikely. The Last of Us military city states is more probable. Or just reading a history book.
The overlap between climate crisis deniers and preppers is so large it‘s truly baffling. If you ask me most of them are just hobbyists who act a little too seriously about their little passion. It‘s a lot of make believe and very little obtaining practical skills.
I went down the rabbit hole on YouTube a bit and man, a lot of them seem to want the shit to hit the fan. These are people who absolutely lay down to go to sleep at night and fantasize about getting to bug out.
In other words, they correctly realize that society as it exists sucks, but are too deep into right-wing propaganda to consider that less drastic measures than a collapse (such as voting for socialist policies) could fix it.
Reminds me of a billionaire who went “woke” because he did the research and realized it’s far far far more effective to just start building farms around his home city then building a fancy bunker for him to die in. Actually building public infrastructure with redundancy.
I think you're overlooking a more likely (and more reasonable) approach preppers take; become skilled in various survival-oriented skills and then if things go south you can go to one of those farms and offer to help out in exchange for some of the food. The lone rambo raider types aren't going to last long, humans are social animals that do best in tribes and for the most part want to form tribes.
Preemptively apocalypsing yourself by forcing yourself to live in some sort of self-sufficient compound right now isn't reasonable for most people, but having some plans and resources in your back pocket in case of disaster is not at all unreasonable.
If nothing else, it makes camping more fun and lets you ride out a power outage or local disaster in style.
That’s why Mad Max has a crew.
They feel helpless to change the current course of events, and they’re not far wrong as individuals.
What they also underestimate is how quickly they’re gonna die when somebody decides they should after TSHTF. All the prepping in the world isn’t gonna make living after a 20MT strike 20 miles away any fun at all. Living out in the boonies growing your own food? Whatever arsenal you have to protect it, all it takes is a band of yahoos with twice your numbers and firepower and your toast becomes their toast.
Surprisingly difficult to do… we had a farming commune as neighbors for a couple of years, they never did reach food self sufficiency with 80 acres of fertile land and 16 people to work it. The Amish come close to making it work, but any Amish I have ever gotten to know tend to cheat, a lot.
Yeah, they trust the “scientists” even less than you trust their politicians - and they’re not 100% wrong, just mostly wrong.
Don’t get me wrong: true science is the way to make progress, and we have built a lot on science in the past 200 years or so, but we have also got a lot of bought and paid for business tools running around in lab coats fooling the science community that they are just like them.
Disasters of my lifetime have been hurricanes. If you can hunker down for the storm and retain your ability to drive out of the devastation zone after the roads are cleared (usually in a couple of days), you’re good. Keep enough gas to run the generators until you can get more gas, keep enough food to last until you can get to a source of more. I’ve never had to abandon home, even with some pretty hard direct hits, but when it’s bad enough that’s what you do. Go somewhere that hasn’t been whacked.
If we politically screw up the whole planet, that’s harder to prep for than a mild nuclear winter.
Eh we’re already seeing massive drops in skilled labor. The political environment will create food scarcity in 12 months. It’s already paying to be able to fix your home and car. Can’t imagine what next year will bring. Probably unemployment for many.
Heading right for Soviet resource scarcity.
I feel like the one thing preppers miss the necessity of often is social skills. If you’re adept at befriending people and getting them to work together you’re all going to be better off. We’re all humans and working together is how we made what we have.
Most preppers are of the “fuck society, I am the most important part of it” mentality, whether they’re aware of it or not.
When shit hits the fan and the urban civilizations collapse, it’s the old nomads that’ll survive (if they haven’t been killed off entirely by then)
The Amish are not self-sufficient. They are self-reliant. And it takes a minimum of 50 families for them to have a functioning community. What you’re describing is more of a frontiersman.
Is it also hardened against EPM’s?
Wrap em in foil. Boom protected. But kinda moot if there’s no power.
Make sure to etch your foil with how to rig up solar cells for power.
That’s my next question. If things are bad enough that the Internet is gone, what reliable source of power would survive the unknown scenario that got things that bad?
That power source would also need to power a separate computer or smartphone that would also need to be kept protected from whatever happened.
A cheap solar panel can be gotten off Amazon or your local tech store if you have one for around $50. More than enough to power something like this, I would imagine.
At least while it’s sunny out.
You are correct.
I’m just wondering as everyone likes to think of what they would do in a post-collapse society…when in reality these tiny drives will probably be much less useful than the knowledge on how to create electricity. Solar or otherwise. I like them though, and the article does an awesome job at stating what their purpose is. That’s great.
Solar has the issue that it’s hard to create the panels themselves, but there’s a plethora of ways to create and maintain electrical systems. A small wind generator could probably be easy to rig up as well.
Back when my state had power outages every other day for long periods of time, we found out what worked and what didn’t real quick.
EMPs are overrated by Hollywood, who like to show sparks and electrical arcs and robots exploding and whatnot. In reality EMPs are mainly a threat to the power grid, because they operate by inducing an electrical current in a conductor and the longer the conductor is the more powerful the induced current is. Power transmission lines are thousands of kilometers long, they'll build up fearsome currents and fry stuff plugged into them (assuming circuit breakers and fuses don't manage to protect it). But a device like this has wires a few centimeters long, so they don't pick up nearly as much as long as they're not plugged in. They're more delicate, sure, but I like my odds.
An EMP can also be shielded against by a wrapping of tinfoil, as mentioned below. As long as there aren't large gaps (no, tinfoil hats don't work) it acts as a simple farraday cage. So if you really want extra protection keep this in a metal box. Assuming its case isn't metallic to begin with.
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I just purchased 18 TB of surplus disks for 200 CAD, the price there doesn’t seem that good to me.
I feel like the $190 they want for the Pi 4/microSD version would’ve been a reasonable price for the Pi 5/NVME version.
That’s a shockingly bad price, considering the storage. You could put this together yourself for less than half that price. Maybe even a quarter of the price, if you grab used stuff from ebay.
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The people this sort of device is targeted to either already know how to do something like this, or they’re the sort of people who would be eager to follow one of the many guides online. The prepper community is also a DIY community, by nature.
I was hoping it would be one of those drives built to last hundreds of years. Oh well.
Ooh. As a hobbyist "mostly for funzies" prepper I was mildly interested. But then I clicked around their site a bit and I found preorders for a version of the prepper disk with an LLM chatbot "companion.". Assuming the LLM is using RAG on the library of source documents and isn't just relying on its training, that's really neat. I know people will exclaim "hallucination!", but in a situation where you literally have no idea what to do, no way to get help, and the alternative is lying down and dying, I could see this being really handy. Often the hardest part of having a giant archive of information is how to find what you need out of it and interpret what it's telling you.
I'd rather use an "open" version of this, though. Prepper Disk's website sounds like they're trying to keep their data at least partially locked down, and while I can understand that they want to recoup the cost of the effort they put into setting this up it kind of goes against the grain of prepping to rely on something that you can't repair or modify yourself.
AI opponents will spend their last hours manually slogging through 250GB of content rather than let a hallucination potentially misguide them.
I’m reminded of that AI-written book that misidentified poisonous mushrooms.
I’m reminded that AI is helping me restore an old motorbike I got for practically free, and the only fight we had was looking for the oil filter on the wrong side of the bike
Yeah, you have to take it for what it’s worth, and it’s worth a lot. Most of what it says is pretty close, and when close is good enough, go for it. When AI is telling you how to secure your brake hydraulic connectors and it doesn’t seem quite right - time for a 2nd opinion.
For sure, AIs/llms can be dangerous if you don’t also apply critical thinking, but that’s been true of the internet forever, and even before. The Anarchist cookbook has recipes that will, at best, waste a bunch of soap and gasoline or have you scraping banana peels with a razorblade, or at worst, have you making chlorine gas in your basement. 4chan had a popular recipe for “peanut butter cookies” that would result in an oven fire, and instructions to drill a hole in your iPhone to use the headphone jack.
It’s much more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills than it is to try to shield everybody from misinformation and hallucinations.
My father had a 50 year career in education, he spent it trying to promote critical thinking - he recently retired and feels that the system has made negative progress through all 50 years of his career in terms of improving critical thinking skills through the educational system.
Right. So it told you objectively wrong information while the correct answer is freely available from technical documents that it ought to know how to read.
So imagine if that was something actually life threatening.
But it wasn’t life threatening. And still much faster than looking for the technical manual. And took me all of 30 seconds to realise it had misunderstood the photo I sent it.
I’m reminded of the people who misidentify poisonous mushrooms each year and die from it.
I’m reminded of Huga Shrooma the first man to misidentify poisonous mushrooms.
The man saved generations to come.
AI is worthless if you are unable to tell hallucination from fact.
But just like NP hard problems, verifying a given solution is much easier than coming up with one yourself.
You’ll never win against AI haters. Nothing is perfectly accurate and even if LLMs are less accurate than average it does not diminish the use case potential.
If someone’s eats a dradly mushroom based on 1 research source then really thats just natural selection at play lol
The interesting thing to be about LLMs is their potential for reduced bias. If you can manage to feed them unbiased training data (impossible) then you should be getting unbiased results.
Of course, they have already been feeding LLMs biased training data, leading to significantly biased results - but when the bias matches the owner’s agenda they present it as “unbiased and fair”.
<img alt="" src="https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/671992c6-dbd9-4d6a-ad8b-b683f9a262a2.webp">
Yeah, but won’t you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
That doesn’t take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
If the monitor draws even 20W, you’re gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
You'd be charging a battery, not running directly off the bike. Still, solar panels are extremely cheap these days. I picked up a 120 watt panel for 50 bucks recently, it could keep something like this running for hours each day.
So, I believe a tolerable generator load for most people to pedal is around 10W… battery charge / discharge is maybe 80% efficient, so you’re netting 8W into your storage. Pedal relatively hard for an hour and you might get 20 minutes use of your IPS LCD screen.
Solar panels are indeed the way to go.
This unit can connect to a cell phone, that'd be a much less energy-expensive way to interface with it.
I mention ebikes because if we’re in an apocalypse situation, your solar panels may not be very efficient. There are a ton of electric motors out there, so generating power is totally feasible in a prepper situation even if the sky is torched Matrix style, just attach any electric motor to a bicycle and you’re good to go (or water or wind turbine, etc).
The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
That’s… a lot of cycles. That’s almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can’t find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.
If you’re living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you’re not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.
The average hunter gatherer only worked for about 3-6 hours a day. They had more free time than we do.
The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.
You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today’s society, not that reality. 90% of today’s people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.
But not you, you’re awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won’t be getting around very well.
90% of people would die within the first three months because they don’t know how to cook and we have a three day supply rule in stores relying on just-in-time delivery.
If you make it past the first 90 you probably have seeds in the ground to get you to the next 90. We don’t just inherit the environment, we shape it. We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
But let’s get back to the topic. 3000 charge cycles, your number, is a lot. All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information. You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
But thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.
Having watched a neighbor “farming commune” with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan’s Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor… after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.
In other words, In my opinion a “real prepper” already has a “Victory Garden” going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven’t actually done that, you’re probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.
If you have a working printer, toner, paper… and don’t forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you’ll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.
Having said all that, yeah, I’ve got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop…
This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what’s left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won’t be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.
Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.
I’m only going to focus on one part because it shows the disconnect between you and I.
Who said anything about a printer? I said hard copy. Not printout. Write it down. Carve it into rock or shape it in clay. 3000 cycles and you keep limiting yourself. That 200 pounds of copper wire could be pounded flat and marked with a sharp tool to create a long lasting hard copy. So many options for a hard copy and you defaulted to the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.
I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren’t going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don’t know which year or model of thing it is you’re going to be wanting to scavenge.
While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn’t forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.
Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you’re just going to collect the “most important” 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There’s a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you’re at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.
It sounds like you can connect with your phone, which reduces the energy footprint quite a bit.
It should at least be in a (sorta-)Raid1. What good does it do if it implodes?
It’s should be a 3 drive raid 5 parity but you can only buy 1. Then when the world ends you must find the people that have the other two.
Sounds like a good plot for a novel.
Imstant RAID-party generator for Doomsday
If you're concerned why not just have two of them? That's more secure, you can store them in different places.
Why not both?
Money. Raid 1 would make every Prepper Drive cost a lot more, since it would need double the storage space. Fewer people will buy them. Instead, keep them cheap and let the people who are truly concerned about redundancy solve the problem themselves by buying two.
You wanna tell me a 256/512GB SSD is that expensive?
I think to believe the prepper this targets are the same that build a bunker for 6 figures in their backyard.
In all seriousness: SSDs (even enterprise grade excluding brand tax) are not that expensive.
A quick Googling puts them around $50. The PrepperDisk is priced at $270 (Canadian dollars in both cases). So add a second drive and it jumps to $320, plus the cost of whatever additional complexity there is to the motherboard to support it, plus extra development cost for the RAID controller. And the device itself becomes bulkier.
Sure, this satisfies the handful of people who were concerned about that. Everyone else ends up with what's basically the same product but more expensive and bulkier. I can easily see the developers deciding that's a net loss for sales.
It’s a raspberry pi, the operating system microsd will be long dead before any of the data is corrupted. ;-)
(And probably before you’ll ever need this thing.)
If you enjoy this sort of stuff make sure to support the Kiwix Project which like 90% of these commercial offshoots are based off of.
Yeah my first thought was wondering what community projects exist to generate a guide to download all this info. I knew you could download all of Wikipedia but not the rest.
I was going to say, that list is many of the things you can get through Kiwix.
It’s self hostable and some of the resources are really quite interesting.
Maybe I should just use these and cancel my internet
I remember when offline backups that were unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
“And this here is my Wikipedia room.”
And over there is my pornography stadium
I prefer to call it the masterbatorium.
It’s a little off the beaten path.
Yeah okay, carry that amount of information in your go bag via physical books.
Hope you have a microscope.
microfilm is a real thing btw.
it was used for army intel for decades.
Explain how this fits in a go bag:
<img alt="1000023666" src="https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/1ca8710f-411f-4f8c-99f6-e5a2949172dd.webp">
What’s relevant to the army for office use isn’t necessarily relevant for a shit hits the fan scenario.
it’s called a loupe.
<img alt="1000001463" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/251baab7-e120-4e47-a570-e7f2e0d1b73e.jpeg">
holy shit…am I at the point in life where I’m old enough to understand why we call it “dialing” a number or a “dial tone”?
I’d say no but I also know what a hunt group is so I’m probably the wrong whipper snapper to ask.
Tape drives are pretty good too. I worked at a few places where they still used them in case of disaster.
Out of curiosity what the range and/or power for an EMP pulse to brick my microSD with Zim files on it?
Wondering what’s the actual risk of such a thing happening, what kind of scenarii would this require?
Someone can correct me but if I recall there’s many types. So it’s a complicated answer.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse
What if we could calculate the bending of light around black holes and just hammer away data at space and pick it up again at a set interval… No storage needed!
Am looking for research funding.
“Hey babe, what what temperature do I cook the chicken at?”
“Um… give me ten thousand years or so and I’ll let you know.”
This reminds me of Harder Drive tom7.org/harder/
So your data storage is limited by how fast you can transmit it multiplied by the return trip around the black hole. Like an eternally rotating tape.
My doomsday kit is just a bottle of SoCo and a camping chair.
Wouldn’t something like this be potentially quite useful if you live in an area that could easily see a natural disaster that results in weeks without a connection to the outside world? Sure you could build a raspberry pi to do it yourself but not everyone is capable of doing that and its also a low power consumption device which is useful to keep your backup power going longer, ideally through a battery as a generator normally doesn’t do very low wattage efficiently. Solar is variable and lower power demands means you can go smaller, or helps keep it more reliable.
I find prepper stuff has a fine line between reasonable preparation for something that may well happen and then you get into the crazies that think the world is ending and they are actually going to achieve anything in such a situation beyond dying alone.
As I live in the UK the most likely disaster is a couple cm of snow which will break most infrastructure, shops will run out of things like milk and bread for days. This happened a few years ago, I had to resort to making tortillas instead for my lunch.
Looks super cool wish there was a version with more storage. 256/512gb is on the low side for end of the world
It seems that they are working on a premium version of the PrepperDisk with up to 1TB of storage space. They will also be bundling that with an AI LLM implementation trained with the data present on the PrepperDisk.
Now that sounds like a winner to me. I will be on the lookout
Okay it’s conceivable that there’d be enough power to read through and search a drive, but LLMs might be the worst and least efficient use of electricity Icould possibly imagine in a doomsday scenario.
While I agree, where do you start if you have zero clue on what exactly you’re trying to accomplish? An LLM is fine for quick search and summary, then read through the applicable data.
Reminds me of the Talos Principle more than anything.
What kind of storage do they use? Because SSDs left unpowered will lose data.
Unpowered for how long? 6+ months?
I would think most consumer drives will be OK with that, but it varies, and the race to make things ever cheaper has only increased that. AFAIK, the more data they try to pack into a cell (SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC), the more likely they are to be affected by unpowered data loss.
tomshardware.com/…/unpowered-ssd-endurance-invest…
Yup.
SSDs are not good for long term storage. “Old” disk drives are still king for long term.
I have HDDs that have been with me for almost 10 years. I need to replace one with one that I can use as a backup for all of them AND have some to spare.
.
That is why it is a backup. The others will still be used. There is one drive I want to get rid of, and it is because it has been malfunctioning for a long, long time.
Neat. I get the archived sites and docs as pretty useful and a good way to keep info that might be redacted or manipulated by a fascist government, but I gotta question the use of this technological medium to save information as useful during a “doomsday” situation.
If you’re in an actual doomsday situation, that means odds are utilities like water and power are intermittent or nonexistent, this box will be useless unless you have already spent the time and effort to install and maintain an off-grid power solution to use this device.
So essentially a gimmick. However, I can’t argue with the preservation of knowledge in an effort to reference it when bad actors change what is publicly available.
E: I think people are missing my point. I said you’d need to be prepared to use this device in a doomsday situation, as in, “already spent the time and effort to install and maintain an off-grid power solution…”
But for some reason people are telling me “well if you’ve already got a power setup…” when I stated not having the means to utilize this device it’s pointless. Telling me what I already said? C’mon, people. No need to reiterste my solutions and contradict conditions I stated to make yourself right.
You’d also already have to have all the tools, seeds, plants, material, equipment and supplies to make or farm and a community to implement the knowledge saved on the device. Maintaining the trappings of civilization in a doomsday situation is all but impossible solo, and a shitload of work for a community. You don’t put this box in a closet and when the power goes out permanently and your gas generator kicks on you decide it’s time to learn how to survive. IOW it’s useless unless you’re already prepped.
Like most prepper things for sale, this is a better product to skin money from the ignorant and the unreasonably fearful than it is truly useful. It assumes you have electricity and the functioning equipment to access it.
In a real prepper situation, you either already ready have the knowledge in your head, (the best method), or you have real books and pamphlets to read, (slow to access).
Remember Kiddies, if a real SHTF gets here, there not only won’t be no google or youtube, but there won’t be much time to use it anyway. Survival is a real time sink. And most living in the big cities will simply die in place anyway.
I’ve seen people make power generators using old washing machine motors. Youtube is full of them. Cutting PVC pipes to make wind ones and even water based ones off of rivers.
I feel like some people would figure out basic electrical grids for led lights in homes at night and possibly a battery bank made of car batteries or something.
Getting a laptop working in that environment wouldn’t be too far of a stretch. Just need to find an old brother laser printer and a Linux USB and you’re golden.
Print off the critical farming/water treatment stuff you need and power it off.
I’m not sure what you’re aiming for when you kinda proved my point.
You cited a youtube video, something that would be inaccessible during doomsday as a source of info, and the whole point is to have all the power supply and survival solutions in place before doomsday and the youtube video would be pointless.
Look, unless it’s a slow decline where you have some access to power and time to develop survival tools and skills to use this box it’s pointless as you’ve already developed the survival tools and skills. As an archive of other skills and knowledge it’s only as useful as the longevity of the storage media and the devices used to access it (monitor, keyboard, pi, etc).
Yeah that’s a solid recap.
I now possess the knowledge about generating power to life off the grid using old motors salvaged from a junkyard thanks to my own personal research and video tutorials.
My intent with bringing that up is the hope of the existence of a document covering this topic in a preppers backup.
In a post apocalyptic scenario humanity has been proven to band together in groups and cooperate to survive. It’s less murder/greed and more sharing/helping. In these small groups it would only take one prepper or even an engineer to setup a generator or even just get solar panels to hookup for basic electricity.
Many of these points could be moot in a nuclear scenario where were dealing with EMPs and radiation.
Solar generators exist, and are relatively inexpensive for smaller units.
Note that I already said you’d have to have all the survival and power requirements in place before doomsday. Not waiting until doomsday to use this box as a tool to learn how to survive. IOW if you’re not already a prepped prepper, this box is pointless.
I’m not a prepper and have both a gasoline and solar generator. Generators arent just for preppers, they are commonly owned in areas with regular power outages, for example.
And honestly, solar panels are so common these days you could rig something up with relative ease with a basic understanding of electricity.
You're overestimating the difficulty and expense necessary to support this device. You could probably power it from a car. A solar panel and inverter cost less than a hundred dollars.
Take what I said in the context it was said.
Yeah, you could power it up (maybe) with some backup batteries and a camping solar charger. Heck, even a cheap HAT screen would allow visual and touch access.
The point is that the knowledge therein is useless unless you are already fully prepared to make use of it. I’ve already covered that.
My point is that the "already fully prepared" requirement is extremely small and easy. "Having a car" is enough (or, in the event of one of these disaster scenarios, having someone else's unattended car somewhere near you). So bringing it up as an objection to the usefulness of this hard drive is not really significant.
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.
Anybody know where to find an archive of this disk?
It’s all publicly available info, or was. I’ve got a Raid 5 I can throw it on, might come in handy during power outs and such.
I’ve got spare hard drives, and an old Pi and other computers around. No need to spend $189 on this when you can pretty easily DIY. The value is the prepackaged archive.
I see projects like kwix and such, but I don’t immediately see this archive or anything comparable. Haven’t looked into this before.
BTW, if you’re actually worried about the end of the world or whatever, this won’t save you. Make friends with your neighbors and communities. If you don’t have a physical trade, you need to learn one like fixing shit or growing really good weed.
*Edit suck - such
Kiwix.org
Download the App, and you can then download a full backup of Wikipedia, PHP Manuals, the “Survival Library”, Ted Talks, FEMA guides, etc.
So I can easily get pretty much all of this through kwix directly? That will work. Throw it on my Raid. My media server is badly overworked but I should be able to use any old sbc as a frontend for the archive.
Precisely. Kiwix has a search and browse function. Just sort by file size to get the biggest groups of data.
Replying to my own reply.
I keep a couple of thumb drives with both a Kiwix installer and a full backup of some select downloads.
I considered the cost of the hardware and the time I would spend getting it all configured, then collecting the content from various sources.
Ultimately decided that $189 was worth it. I already have too many WIPs and something like this has been sitting on my ToDo list for years already, this is a great shortcut
I love this idea. I couldn’t help but think of the innernette though.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/d372af48-7cf2-4e79-9c16-c35a97ac323e.jpeg">
.
It’s like it was made for me! Except it could go with some AI too, to interpret all of that.
That’s probably the worst possible addition. Something like this, you need to be able to depend on. In a no-room-for-errors kinda situation you really don’t want to have a language model hallucinate something and burn potentially ruinous amount of scarce resources in the process, not the least being time. For example with crops.
Edit: and also that’ll burn through the power compared to just reading pdfs… if that’s scarce too, it’s a no go. Not to mention it’d have to really have some bulk for the capability to even run a basic model with extremely hit and miss results and definitely zero chance of retaining any sort of context long enough to be actually useful in this kind of use case. I think people are probably a little bit pampered by the cloud models of today. No chance you’ll be running anything like that in a small device with limited power.
I run a shitty but sufficient AI on my mobile phone, it’s got for venting to, and pointing out where I can find the things I’m searching for.
Well, I guess sufficient is subjective…
However, consider that whatever you have now in today’s world, not just physical things but also your life experience and expectation of things might not line so well with those that you’d have in a scarcity scenario completely unlike today’s world. What you now consider sufficient might be entirely unacceptable in different frameworks of thinking and living.
True, but trust me, AI in 5 years will be so advanced, that a 2B model will make a joke of deepseek
Good idea for normal people that are not really knowing how and what to put on such a device
This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there’s a run on storage devices.
Yeah I thought it was saying there was a run on hard drives designed to survive end of the world not just something preloaded with data
Most tape drives can do that but they are slow.
This is stupid.
Fear = Profit!
Would you like to know more?Yeah but if society collapses or there’s some long power outage (sup Texas) then this thing could be worth its weight in gold. More than its weight in gold.
Assuming you have a generator.
If society collapses, the time until people forget enough to make whatever’s on the hard drive a rare information repository worth its weight in gold will be a lot longer than the working lifespan of a typical hard drive.
I get a magazine called Backwoodsman. It is a rag but it is something to read while taking a shit. I saw the advertisement in the latest issue. I was thinking yeah this is ok but can’t you download most of this for free?
I mean, there’s a lot of things you can do for free that we pay people for. They’ve put together a device that is preloaded with a ton of information. To do this yourself would probably take most people a week or 2, at best a weekend if you worked hard and had pre-existing knowledge and a fast connection. Maybe longer depending how they modified the raspberry pi, though you don’t necessarily need it to do everything they made it do.
You’d pay in this range for someone to clean your house for a few hours. You can also do that free. It’s the convenience you’re paying for.
no, how do i manufacture SSD’s at home so i can preserve linux mint 21.1 xia or my screenshots or the terminal calculator i got from typing ‘apt install calc’ ?
512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?
I mean, 189 for an external drive loaded with data, attached to a raspberry pi that also allows Wi-Fi connection to access said hard drive content. Really not too bad if it works well. I wonder if it has DNS entries that point to it’s locally hosted content, so once you’re connected you just type wikipedia.com etc in your browser and go.
Not to shabby if it actually works.
Yeah and it’s also probably pretty small runs, so that’d make it even more expensive. I feel like it’s a fair price for what it is, would never buy it myself tho.
Tbf someone is gonna put it all together and organize it and put it on a drive, that’s a service and it’s reasonable to charge for it
If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.
I mean, I could make tacos at home. Or I could pay a bit more to go pick them up somewhere. I could change my own oil, or I could have someone else do it.
I could spend time downloading all this data and uploading it to a hard drive I purchase. I know how to do it all. But for the price they’re charging for the drive AND Raspberry Pi and the service of gathering and uploading the data, it’s not that bad of a deal. Especially if you work a full time job and want to use your free time to not do a chore like this. I mean I’m pretty sure there’s torrents for Wikipedia. Not so sure about WikiHow.
If the price was higher I’d be complaining. It’s pretty reasonable. It’s a peace of mind thing without hassle for anyone with even a little extra cash lying around.
Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.
You really should change your own oil and filter. Its stupidly easy, and the shit I’ve seen happen at lube shops makes me wake up in cold sweat.
Nobody touches my vehicle unless I absolutely cannot accomplish the job myself.
I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.
Related reddit thread interesting enough reddit.com/…/serious_question_best_way_to_empproo…