Ready made prepper combo kits - grid collapse

Off-Topic (In the weeds/General Discussion)
41

This is one must-have:

And a can opener another one.

Female hygiene products … yeah, it is sometimes remembered too late.
Contraceptives another one people tend to forget.

Then we have - off the top of my head, “low hanging fruits” if you want:
Extensive medical kit for all emergencies. The trick here is morphine for really bad situations.
How to deal with dental issues …
Antibiotics … you can get some at a fish store, apparently the same can be used for humans.
Having a few key books on the above subject matter is a very handy idea.

Vitamins and minerals.
Food that is light in weight, freeze-dried, energy bars, to also store in copious amounts, long shelf life.
Stuff to be able to start a fire under any conditions … and the knowledge to make a fire anytime anyplace with no firestarters in the rain.
Books on what plants in SA are safe to eat, and use.

Additives to store fuel (petrol/diesel) for extended periods of time, need to factor in months.

Sanitation, how to handle that safely and securely for the family.

Tents and warm clothing, bedding for months.
How to wash clothes/bedding.

Bug repellant, bug bites … snakes.

Think of an extended camping trip into the vast open unknown no support whatsoever available, to be able to survive.

Then some self-defense classes, and some weapons that don’t need bullets. :wink:

O, lest I forget … one needs to be able to move fast to a new safe place, so the weight of the stuff is important.

Unless you have a few cashed stores already stored in other safe places … staying in cities is a bad bad move. Unless you have a lot of “friends” agreeing on working together. Gangs will survive very well in these circumstances.

EDIT:
Portable AM/FM radio, the windup types.
2-Way radios.
Solar panels charge small devices, weight the issue
Compass. Maps.

And with everything above, if you have not “trained” on it all, “walked the talk”, the it is going to be a very tough learning curve, very.

42

O, and don’t fall for “Need to take some seeds with”.

By the time you have the soil prepared, and the seeds planted, watered, and protected, you have months to wait.

And the amount you need to plant to sustain one person, yeah, rather speak to a farmer on that subject matter. It is not as simple as having some seeds and you are “sorted”.

43

I put it to you that operating a radio is much less complicated than operating a cellphone. Put a modern smartphone and a 2-way radio in front of a 80 year old who had minimal exposure to both in their life, and see which one they figure out first.

The only reason why Whatsapp is easy to you is because you have been practicing it for a long long time so that it comes naturally these days and our kids gets raised with devices in their hands, so it’s something they don’t even think about twice.

As others said this is something to ponder on, yes radio takes some practice, but then ponder making it your mission to get some practice / exposure to it.

In my opinion in a black out scenario cellphone networks will be the very first thing which goes belly up, heck with the current load shedding many many tower batteries can’t even keep up.

Next thing which will go is water, no electricity and municipalities can’t pump water, also no electricity and municipalities can’t pump suridge.

No electricity and stations can’t pump fuel, rerefineries can’t pump / process etc.

44

LOL.I’m a pensioner who did time “up north” and whose last duty for the then SADF was “signaller”. Which basically meant that I know which button to press when I want to talk, and I know the phonetic alphabet.

Whatsapp is a lot simpler, though I grant that there is a cut off age past which people seem to have a problem with anything that has a touch screen.

45

Another titbit ito water, one could fill up the baths in the house with tap water, if the water supply goes down before the reservoir/pipes run empty.

Something like this:

Expand to all clean plastic holders, and wash basins.

#Day Zero we had some experiences, some areas in SA have no clean drinking water, so they have experience already.

46

I told my wife, if she needs to put in the middle of a place, she will not survive, I will because I was learned at a young age to do it. Voortrekker kampe het jou ander goed geleer and was put in the wild for a few days to learn to survive. This back side mountains that our capetonians looking at every day, there is allot of stuff there that you don’t know off.

I was wondering if someone will mention the Karoo. I got few family members and friends that owns farms that side, and they in the middle of nowhere, so that will be on of my options because they life totally offgrid.

47

I don’t say this to be disparaging of real signallers, but to make the point that there is a big difference between keying a mic and saying “say again, whiskey tango delta” and setting the whole thing up. I can do the first, I have little chance of success with the second.

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48

@JN.V interesting thing you mention here. I got a guy in CPT side that I buy my Audio valves from, he is into old radios to. Some really nice stuff in his collection. He told me and showed me, One of his old radios, will play a radio station about 5pm in the afternoon that is broadcasted in the states side of the world

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49

hi @TheTerribleTriplet , dis sommer 'n gadget daai… food grade, hehehe, dit hang af hoe honger jy is :crazy_face:
any case, gewone water met bietjie jik in is 100% of as jy daai pillitjies ingooi of deur 'n filter sit of kook, sorry guys in the non afrikaans speaking world, you missed nothing :rofl:

50

Nope, they started providing clean water in Africa, for kids. That caught my attention. Can only speak of LifeStraw.

Jik and water purification pills, man, they taste bad, definitely for “hang af hoe dors jy is”. :slight_smile:

But, having said all that, typing it here, if one has never done any of it, it can cause more harm than good.

51

Indeed, it’s called short wave listening, unfortunately one of the many things which is also slowly but surely dying out.

For example if you Google BBC World short wave schedule, you will see that BBC World broadcasts on different frequencies to different continents at different times in the day. I’m not a big short wave guy, but if I recall BBC World gets broadcast around 7.25 MHz in the evening from around 16:00 to 20:00, but only to Africa, their broadcast to America during that time is on a total different frequency and earlier afternoon they can be heard around 9.6 MHz if I remember.

We had a huge short wave station in SA which was shut down in 2019 because it was deemed uneconomical to continue to operate and maintain, back then there was talks that the BBC wanted to buy it and modernize the entire station, but I don’t know if that ever happened.

In the late afternoons / early evenings a quick way for me to gauge if the 21 MHz amateur band is open to the US, is to tune to around 21.45 MHz, if I can hear the short wave station broadcasting from America, then I know conditions are good and I can talk to my American tjommies.

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52

I have no problem with water storage, 10 kl in tanks and 60 kl in a irrigation dam which is pretty clean, but problem is I need electricity or diesel to pump water.

A while back I read a article on a simple borehole pump gadget you can build yourself which works with compressed air, apparently you can even pump water using a fietspomp if nothing else is available. Unfortunately my borehole is way too deep 130m so the pump probably won’t work. One day when I have a spare 130m coil of 40mm pipe and another coil of 15mm pipe lying around, I actually want to give it a go.

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53

The depth of the borehole and the water can differ due to the artesian effect. My borehole is 100m deep and the water is 12 m from the surface.

I have also used a 120m head submersible pump direct on solar that was less than 400W on another seep borehole with deep water.

So there are many options before you are stuck.

54

I’ve had a good think about this. Thank you.

Well, there was a bug, or a type of bug. It wasn’t one big bug, the danger was multiple instances of something that sounds quite trivial - representing years with two digits for the date.

So 15th November 1998 would be stored as 15/11/98 or 151198 or 981511,. you get the picture. This was more likely to happen in older code and data, but how much of that was around? Some, for sure, but the only way to know if you had a problem and how big it was was to go looking for it.

One example: Do you remember how years ago PCs used to be sold as “IBM compatible” and it was a good thing to be “IBM compatible”? Well, that original specification that those manufacturers were seeking to comply with was actually silent on two digits of the date as it was to be stored in the bios. It was explicit about having two writable memory locations for the year, so the machine could transition from 90 to 91 to 92 etc. It said nothing about the centennial digits (the 19 in 1993). So there were PCs built that had a proper, rolling, 4 digit year, and others that met the minimum specification and had a hard coded 19. Both were compatible. By the late 90s it is doubtful that anybody was building PCs in that way, but also not impossible that there were still some in the field, or that the BIOS code lingered on in some controller somewhere.

Old code? You betcha. I personally fixed a rather strange piece of code that took the date, extracted the year from the date, reduced that year to 2 digits, then started counting back to 94 (really 1994).

So in December 1999 that code would have counted down
99
98 (IE 99-1)
97 (IE 98 -1)
etc
Until it got to 94. Then it would have exited that loop.

But anytime after midnight on 31 Dec 1999 it would have gone
00
-1 (00 -1)
-2 (-1 -1)
etc
and was not heading towards 94.

This was in a programming language that we knew to not have a Y2k problem, and with a dabase that we knew to not have a Y2k problem, running on a machine with no Y2k bug in the BIOS nor OS. A text book case of old (or just badly designed) code still running on an otherwise non-problematic system.

There were all sorts of manifestations of this (2 digit years) all over the place. So it wasn’t one big bug, it was, as I said, lots of instances of a decision made for various reasons.

It is true that the dire predictions did not come to pass. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a problem in the first place. We might say that because of the dire predictions and the attendant publicity and, I’d bet, in many cases, legal advice, IT teams made a concerted effort to test and either fix or upgrade. And so in the end it largely didn’t happen (I did hear of small businesses running old DOS applications on old PCs, or with very old cash registers, that had some problems).

Interesting how our minds work. We seem to have gone done a line of thought that only allowed two scenarios

  1. TEOTWAWKI
  2. Nothing happened because the whole thing was a hoax.

The third possibility, what I say actually did happen because I was there and I was part of it, that people worked diligently (it was mostly pretty tedious stuff) and fixed their systerms in time, didn’t seem to occur to us.

One example of what went on (in, I’m sure, many organisations). Remember what I said about the grey area in the spec of the original IBM PC. How do you mitigate against that? For a home user you can download a piece of freeware, run that, and then do the necessary. But for a big corporation? We literally tested the BIOS of EVERY intel or AMD based computer in our organisation. (good job we didn’t find any Apples). Seperate tests would be run for things like MS Office version (because early versions did have a Y2k bug). Another team was tasked with identifying smart controllers in the network (say for lifts or air conditioning) and seeking information from manufacturers. A massive effort, repeated many times across the world.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

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55

I consulted to an outfit, a fairly large SA IT outsourcer at the time. The Y2k bug was such that they were asked to develop a PCI board to change the bios and fix the mess.

A few dedicated staff was hired, people with embedded microcontroller knowledge, some ex military projects that was designing, building and writing code for Gun drives (yes that is a thing) and target tracking systems doing fire control, in tanks. Olifant and Rooikat were some of the systems they worked on. I helped recruit some of these people.

Long story short, a few long months later a bunch of these cards were produced and tested, successfully at that. Small scale production began but they also imported as a hedge, some other cards as solutions. That project lost a few Million due to not selling nor installing many cards.

I ended up buying some of the tools used during the development of those cards, still have em today. On item in particular, a Tektronix OScope I use regularly. Taught me a lot on embedded systems and product development….

Groetnis

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56

Exactly. I think many people misunderstood what Y2K really was. What it means was that many many software developers had to go over their code with a fine tooth comb and make sure it could operate after the roll-over.

In many code bases the bug would have occurred multiple times too!

In many cases, you can even take the code and do a simulated run, with a set of dummy data, in order to find the most glaring instances. You could run multiple test migrations of data… there was so much that could be (and was) done to make the transition seamless.

A lot of what people thought would happen, simply didn’t happen because all the obvious stuff everyone thought of was already covered, tested, and fixed multiple times over. I mean, do people really think we cannot just roll the clock forward on a processor and do a trial run? :slight_smile:

The real problem was that one such a mistake might have been overlooked in one important system, causing data corruption that was only caught hours or days later.

So now we again get to that old formula: Risk = Likelihood x Severity.

In the end, all the work done by the software people lowered the Likelihood to something very small. The severity was however quite high, for some critical systems, and hence everyone remained a little careful: As they should have.

57

Exactly what my team did.

We built a mirror image of our in-house, “bread & butter” system that we could run isolated from the WAN and were backing up sometimes multiple times a day.

We had a paper model with all the accounting already done. Buy this, transfer that, sell the other, numbers should look like this… and we did exactly what you describe. Just kept pushing the system clock forward.

We tested past January 1st, actually. There was a side issue about leap years (was 2000 a leap year or not? And thus how many days would it have in February?) and we decided to run the test system through February and until it rolled over into a simulated new financial year.

Then we took one last backup and let the auditors run a fine tooth comb over that system.

It was during this process of capture, backup, check, repeat that I found the loop I described in an earlier post.

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58

The same thing happens when we argue about climate matters. If the model predicts the world is ending in 30 years, and in 30 years the world didn’t end, an awfully large number of people assume that is because the whole thing was a hoax. In reality, the model probably assumed that the carbon output would accelerate at the same pace as it did 30 years… and that didn’t happen because at least some people got scared. Similarly the hole in the ozone layer. A scary large number of people think it was a hoax (because “nothing” came of the prediction). The reality is that the world reduced their CFC emissions drastically and thus avoided the prediction…

For whatever reason, the hard (and quiet) work of thousands of people is never really counted :slight_smile:

On that topic… this picture came across my social media feed again. It is a picture I took of an article in Engineering News, September 2014, while I was at a hair dresser waiting for a snip. While I was reading the article, I thought: Wow, this sounds so familar!

engineeringnews
engineeringnews960×720 176 KB

Well… it should be familiar! I wrote the darn thing! Version 1 was all me, man alone, when working for a small outfit, who worked for another management company, who worked for yet someone else… all the way up to the few people mentioned, mostly the brass with political connections.

That’s the way of the world :slight_smile:

59

The curse of the self-un-fulfilling prophecy…

It has happened many times (CFCs, CO2, Y2K, Covid, etc) where people act to prevent/mitigate the prophesied doom, which is then mitigated (or in some cases delayed). The the fact that the prophecy did not come true is then proof positive that it was a hoax.

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60

:rofl: hence i got immunized… turned out to be a hoax :joy: