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.”
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. Otherwise it’s useless.
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.
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.
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’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).