My plans. Plans for everything, and plans for those plans if they fail, and tertiary plans. I love plans. SOPs (standard operating procedures). I’d rather have a solid plan for everything reasonable (and some unreasonable) than all the gear in the world with no plan. Plans documented, memorized, printed and digitized. I had a very logistics-heavy role in the military, and as a civilian with a family in this day and age of so much uncertainty, I’m honestly more focused on them than I was when I was serving.

It’s definitely a cool option for complete off-grid comms. There is the option to use MQTT as well for messaging, but that requires internet to work. I’m planning for no internet, so that’s what I ‘train’ with. You can make it so you are on the ‘open’ channel for anyone to jump into, directly contact individual nodes, and/or make ‘channels’ that only other people with the same encryption key can access for group chats. No subscriptions or anything else, plus there are a ton of different hardware types available, antennas, and other options. And overall, fairly inexpensive to get started.

The only real ‘difficult’ part is if you live near a mountain range. Without other nodes from other people around the peaks or setting up repeater nodes yourself, getting past mountain ranges isn’t going to happen.

Right now, a Heltec 3. Better antenna though, mounted on a pole. I have an even better antenna coming soon with a cable so I can move the unit inside and have it on one of my solar batteries, since the little 3000mah one is good, but won’t last long.

One thing to consider, especially for long-term planning, is those power banks are NOT user maintable. If the screen dies, the ON button fails, or the inverter craps out, that’s it. It’s a brick. With DIY setups, if a single component fails, you can replace that single component.

And also, you can make a portable DIY battery bank! I made one using a secondhand rolling tool case I bought in Facebook for $15!

Yeah, there may be things in it that are… Perhaps not meant for distribution. I’m conflicted, because as much as I’m not all “yay, piracy” (at least when said property is readily available for a reasonable cost), if there’s a situation where things do collapse, schools and education is still going to be important. Not just K-12, but more advanced higher education. Libraries may end up being raided and having their contents burnt by morons looking to stay warm in the winter, and I don’t have nearly enough physical space to hold even a tiny portion of the digitized books.

Just like facts.

Have you considered dropping down to a chest freezer and mini fridge when needed? The two combined can pull as little as 50-60W (each about 25-30W on average). A full size fridge draws a lot more since they’re a lot less efficient. The chest freezer especially is beneficial since worst case, when properly filled, can go 3 days or so without power and still remaining ice cold.

one of those better be a new Stargate

Fucking scary shit. Now, it is simply “liking” content Reddit doesn’t like. Soon, it will be upvoting things that the government doesn’t want you to see, or paints them in a bad light.

Once I have everything a bit more organized, I’ll do a full writeup including parts used. I need to sort of redo… well, everything! My new greenhouse build is taking place on a different part of the property that will let me take better advantage of the space, and I need to move it all to accommodate. But, it will be a lot more organized as a result as well. I have a data rack that I repurposed that can hold 1,500lbs. It’s wheeled so I can move it if need be, but to be safe, I’m going to put enough pieces of reclaimed pallet wood underneath the frame to sort of take the pressure off the wheels themselves. The rack will also make it easier to expand battery capacity, since each shelf can hold either 2x 24v 100AH batteries, or 3x 12V 100AH batteries.

I’m very excited to start the greenhouse up, especially it will be a self-contained, automated, solar powered dream. 4x IBC totes totaling 1100 gallons with UV disinfecting lights, fed by a well with a filter and the tap located inside the greenhouse (to avoid freezing in the winter), with the well having both an automatic pump to draw water as well as a manual one if needed. Hydroponics set to keep the plants hydrated, with the capability to have a wood stove to keep it warm for winter growing (which will also heat the water in the totes via copper pipe around the stove pipe with a 12v pump cycling water, a double plus since water is a great thermal battery!). All managed by my Home Assistant server, but I can always manually turn things on/off as well with 12v timers and switches.

Yes. 1.2TB.

Just uploading it not even 2 1/2 times would put me back on their list of shame

Which is my hope, hence the reason why I want to have it back up. It’s a great resource to add to an offline database.

Oh, these definitely aren’t available on there. I’m mobile now, but let me see if I can share a screenshot of just the directories…

Over 40,000 books!

It isn’t so much that I’m using a torrent. It is the sheer size of everything!

I have an absolute ton of ebooks I’d love to make available, but it’s nearing 600GB just for books and PDFs alone. It used to be linked on the Prepper subreddit, but unfortunately it looks like the owner took it down. I’d host a torrent, but my ISP is already giving me the side eye for how much I’ve pulled the last couple months.

Any ideas on how to host this, outside of the US? I’d rather not put it behind some paywall, and this is a huge amount of data, but man… I’d hate to see it be gone from availability. I might be able to set aside one of my family Outlook accounts since it has 1TB allocated, but I’m concerned it would break everything off into 2GB chunks randomly. Maybe if I use 7zip to zip everything into 2GB chunks?

Any ideas or suggestions?

I hope not. A lot of us just joined, or will be joining soon, especially given Reddit’s move to start banning people who even upvote content that Reddit doesn’t like. I myself jumped here from Reddit this morning. Same username.