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.”
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.
512GB for the bargain price of $189?? Why are we shilling what we can download via torrent for free?
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 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
I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.
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.
Related reddit thread interesting enough https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/gqvuwm/serious_question_best_way_to_empproof_usb_sticks/
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’ ?
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.
This is stupid.
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.
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.
as I said, the human mind is very bad at intuitively grasping the implications of very large or very small numbers.
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.
Go ahead and actually calculate what risk there might be from something like this.
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.
sometimes miraculously pop like balloons to spray us with liquid death.
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.
Of the possibilities, I find
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.
You’re analyzing a risk we could imagine, what you can’t do is analyze a risk we haven’t imagined yet.
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.
Not miraculously, we know some of the causes that make this happen.
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.
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.
I can confidently say it won’t hit us, because the numbers are so much in favor of them not
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also society isn’t going to collapse overnight.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
more important to protect and promote critical thinking skills
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.
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”.
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
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
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
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 love this idea. I couldn’t help but think of the innernette though.
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.
Tape drives are pretty good too. I worked at a few places where they still used them in case of disaster.
microfilm is a real thing btw.
it was used for army intel for decades.
Explain how this fits in a go bag:
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.
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.
unaffected by EMP were everywhere.
They called them books.
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.
