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.”
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.
This reminds me of Harder Drive http://tom7.org/harder/
“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.”
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
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.
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.
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.
The odds of a civilization-ending asteroid or comet hitting Earth in the next century is minuscule.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely, based on the information we have today.
Right. You have to dream up counterfactual fantasies in order for it to be a problem.
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.
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,
That we know of the mechanism that produced the burst.
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 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.
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.
That’s why Mad Max has a crew.
the under valuing on steps we could just take to not have this future in the first place.
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.
live in a fricking farming commune in the first place
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.
Or, you know, voting for politicians who listen to scientists.
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.
Anything beyond being self sufficient for a month is overkill in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
https://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
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.
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!
Has room for a porn folder too right?
Seems like an amateur apocalyptic preparation oversight that it wasn’t included already.
Just check under homework.
My documents/faxes/saved faxes/Trash/receipts/
You forgot “taxes.”
I know a guy who can hook you up
It should at least be in a (sorta-)Raid1. What good does it do if it implodes?
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?
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.
Imstant RAID-party generator for Doomsday
Sounds like a good plot for a novel.
WikiHow
One of these things is not like the others
Thank you, they’ve been ruining search results since the day SEO was coined.
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.
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).
This unit can connect to a cell phone, that’d be a much less energy-expensive way to interface with it.
It sounds like you can connect with your phone, which reduces the energy footprint quite a bit.
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.
Is it also hardened against EPM’s?
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.
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.
I was hoping it would be one of those drives built to last hundreds of years. Oh well.
Not sure if this is allowed, but I had to see if this was true, and also if it was expensive- it isn’t!
(I do not work for, or with anything involved in this)
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.
That may be true; but not everyone knows how to.
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.
I just purchased 18 TB of surplus disks for 200 CAD, the price there doesn’t seem that good to me.
Just ordered mine!
