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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.”
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.
WikiHow
One of these things is not like the others
Thank you, they’ve been ruining search results since the day SEO was coined.
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
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.
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.
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.
2 weeks of food
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is just an ad for that device. Title made it sound like there’s a run on storage devices.
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
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.
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.
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.
I plan to be the jerking guy at Vesuvius if the nukes fall.
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.
Reminds me of the Talos Principle more than anything.
Now that sounds like a winner to me. I will be on the lookout
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.
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.
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.
