Tag Archives: Preparedness

The Path to Minimalism

By | | Minimalism
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Lately I’ve been binge watching everything I could find on YouTube about the minimalism lifestyle after my girlfriend mentioned my – let’s just say “untidy habits” and the collections of stuff and preps that I have in my rooms.

Let’s be clear, I don’t own a house and am currently renting 2 bedrooms where I keep everything from my stove, fridge, bed, computer system, cutlery, BOB’s and my stocks of food and water for disasters. It’s quite the collection if I’m honest, however the “stuff” on the floor was kind of getting old. There was a point where I couldn’t even see the floor – but not because of a lack of tidiness but moreso the lack of storage options and furniture.

I’m not even an untidy person, being an OCD clean freak it’s a strange kind of “untidy”. I know where everything is but due to a lack of storage all the gear I own is in it’s own storage location – on the floor.

Over the weekend I have been busy head down in my rooms picking up one item at a time and deciding:

Decisions
• Do I need this to survive?
• Do I have an emotional attachment to this item?
• When have I last used this item?
• Is it a tool?
• Is it worth selling?

Then I put it into a pile based on what I wanted to do with it, those piles are as follows:

The Seven Piles
• A keep pile
• A rubbish pile
• A sell pile
• A give away pile
• A take to work pile (or other location)
• A decide later pile
• A “to digitize” pile

The keep pile is for all the items I have strong attachments to, currently use weekly or that I will use in the future for sure – such as my preps. (Debatable that that will be used, but still…)

The rubbish pile is for items that I don’t need and is just considered clutter or those items that haven’t been used in months.

The sell pile contains items that are worth some money that I wish to get rid of and make a little back on. Remember that if you can’t sell them after trying you should just give them away or throw them out and not just believe you’ll try again at some point in the future.

And the give away piles are for items in decent quality that someone else might like to own. It also feels good to donate items to people in need and you know that the item will have another life away from home.

The take to work pile means I store the items at work – these generally include items which I have to keep for 7 years such as travel receipts, medical certificates, excess food I can eat at work and a few other small items.

The decide later pile is for complex items which requires more thought as I try to go through the pile of items as fast as possible so I don’t well up feelings and attachment for them again.

The “to digitize” pile is for cards, documents, certificates or nostalgic items from past events which I want to remember but I don’t need the physical item, therefore I take a picture of it and discard the item.

Sorting
While going through my items I found there were a lot of tough decisions and I found myself picking up the same item multiple times because I couldn’t decide on it. My mistake was having a “decide later” pile which I had to keep going through to whittle it down to nothing again, but unfortunately most of that pile ended up as keep… for now.

The most difficult item to get rid of is my Obutto R3volution gaming desktop which is tremendously heavy, large and hard to dismantle. Not only that but my screens and pc are extremely embedded with it with cables intertwined around it and the screens screwed to the stand. I hope I can sell it as the buttkickers (which add a level of vibration to the seat and footrest) are probably worth a fair $500.

Over the time I have been cleaning up I feel the weight literally fall off as I throw each additional bag in the bin and sigh with relief. It gets much easier the more you clean and feel like you’re making a dent in all your possessions, and it inspires you to continue and become more critical with your decision making.

Just a note – buy the extra heavy duty garbage bags so they don’t break open when you lift them. I’m so glad I bought these as my other bags were getting holes in them and were beginning to split open before I bagged them in the heavy duty ones, because I own a lot of sharp electronics.

At the end of the weekend I ended up with 4 bags of items I could throw out – some were even electronics that I had never used such as a 4 port switch. Fortunately for me I don’t have any really strong attachments to most of my items except a few of my electronics due to their multifunction nature such as my phone – which I would never throw away unless I had a replacement anyway.

Aim
My aim is to have two backpacks worth of camping / preparedness gear, one suitcase worth of clothing / electronics, one storage container of misc gaer such as power tools (to build my tiny house with), cables for my pc, pens, paper and books and finally 8 or so food storage containers which contain a weeks worth of food for 1 person each which I will be storing in my tiny house when it’s complete.

I also have a few large items such as a typical king size bed, a folding camping bed, a tent, a swag, two fans, an air conditioner and a few small pieces of portable furniture. I hope to remove the small pieces of furniture when I’m near the end of my cleaning but there’s a lot of items I can’t really make a decision on due to it being preparedness based such as my camo net.

My absolute aim is to have one “Mazda 2” sized car load of stuff I own and nothing more – which will require me to cut out a large amount of the furniture and remove the bed entirely. Another motive for reducing the amount of things I have is simplicity, happiness and being able to fit it all into my tiny house, as well as not being fixed to one location and I can pick up and go within 1 hour if required in an emergency.

I will be blogging a more detailed article on how one can be both a prepper and a minimalist at the same time even though upon first glance they may appear to be complete opposites. Preparedness is about stocking up on everything you will need in the future and minimalism is about having only what you need at the current point in time and nothing more.

Concealed Storage

By | | Preparedness Blogs
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When you’ve accumulated a lot of valuables in your house such as spare cash or precious metals you begin to run into the problem of where to store it, the most common way to store them would be in a safe or small vault of some kind. These are quite hard to break into if made of solid metal, however it’s extremely obvious to any criminal. I looked into storing my valuables inside disguised products such as the below Heinz Can of beans, it’s inconspicuous on the outside but has quite a nice amount of space inside for about 30 oz of silver and a lot of paper notes as well to prevent rubbing on the inside.

Heinz Beanz Tin
Fig1. – The Heinz Beanz Tin.

But open up the bottom…

Heinz Beanz Tin Interior
Fig2. – The inside of the Tin.

There’s quite a lot of different designs you can buy, I purchased mine off Ebay from Britian and noticed a tomato soup can, spaghetti can, a dictionary, coke can, a fake candle and even a fake rock for storing things outside which is probably more fitting for a key. It costed me $30 AUD and you could make your own for cheaper quite easily by hollowing out any common object.

It would be best to also have a safe in your cupboard with semi-valuable items in it to trick criminals into believing they have the best loot.

Silver Coin Stockpile

By | | Preparedness Blogs
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Lately I’ve been slowly adding to my silver stockpile due to the low (relative) prices this year. Currently it’s at $16.16 USD on the 27th June 2018 and dropping which is quite below its mean of $16.50 but not by much.

Some of the uses of silver include:
• Bartering
• Water Purification (Kind of)
• Colloidal Silver (For Health Issues)
• Antibacterial

Remember that either way you look at it, silver will always be an investment and you can sell it later on for almost the same amount if you need some quick cash.

Gold is useful as well to store large amounts of cash, but there’s not a lot you can buy with that much money in a SHTF scenario. Most of your transactions will be small change for cans of food, water and survival gear – which you should already have stocked. Currently Gold is at $1253.74 USD which is a little lower than average but then again gold has fewer uses than silver in a survival situation. However it is worth it to have at least one oz of gold handy.

Cash on the other hand will depreciate very quickly in a disaster, people will soon realize this piece of paper isn’t worth the value written on it by the Federal Reserve and value will shift back into valuable metals which can’t simply be printed into existence. When this occurs the three most valuable entities in the world will be Materials/Possessions, Precious Metals/Gems and Skills/Experience.

Don’t forget to keep your valuables safe and secure in a hidden location either in a safe, under floorboards, at the back of a wardrobe or buried in the back yard. You could perhaps find some extremely strange places to store valuables too, such as inside a hot water tank where it will not only stay safe but slowly purify your water. The only problem with that is getting them in and out but at least you won’t be inclined to spend them.

Yellowstone Earthquakes and Eruptions

By | | Preparedness Blogs
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There’s been a lot of hype around Yellowstone lately with its increased activity and fears it may blow into the first modern super eruption which could cause the next ice age. There is also an ongoing eruption at Hawaii at the moment where people are being evacuated due to the slow flowing lava heading into towns and destroying houses which doesn’t help the doomsday theorists waving their arms and saying these are signs. I’m no seismologist and haven’t been to Yellowstone but I have seen the Supervolcano movie by BBC One which pretty accurately goes through what would happen if this monstrosity were to erupt. The effects were widespread across the globe with few survivors near the epicenter of the disaster and a LOT of ash everywhere preventing travel, plant growth and plummeting temperatures. If you wish to watch it I’ve added a link to it below on YouTube.

Supervolcano 2004 BBC One

There’s a lot of great information throughout as it’s a documentary style movie, such as knowing only a few inches of pumice can collapse a roof and half of that if it’s wet, as well as its effects on our bodies if breathed in. It’s a far fetched movie for this event to ever occur in our lifetime at the scale it’s depicted, but great for fine tuning your preps if you live near an active volcano as it may contain information you never knew.

I’m in Australia where there’s almost no danger of any volcanos or earthquakes to be of much concern, the nearest volcano to Brisbane is in New Zealand and that’s a little smaller than Yellowstone. However there’s never any reason to slack in your preparedness duties as even the most remote possibility of an event could still happen. I recommend looking into volcanic disasters and buying one extra item this week to compliment your gear if you don’t have one of the following:

• Air Filter Mask or N95 Mask and spare filters (For rock particulate)
• Goggles (If you don’t have a full face filter mask)
• Road Flares (For visibility during any disaster)
• Duct Tape (To block car air vents)
• Heavy Duty LED Flashlight (To see and signal through the thick ash, 2,000+ Lumens Recommended)
• Radio with NOAA Weather Station

You might also want to take a look at this list of countries ranked by natural disaster risk, I was surprised to see that Australia was rated higher than the UK, US and Canada at 4.22% chance.
Interestingly the highest is Vanuatu at 36.28% and the lowest is Qatar at 0.08% risk.
Country Natural Disaster Risk

Another very useful map is The Global Risk Map where you select what natural disaster you want and it will display the current risk or the history of that disaster in an area you specify.
Global Risk Map

Stay prepared!

Char Cloth Attempt 1

By | | DIY Projects
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So recently I tried to make some char cloth for use in fire lighting with flint, however things didn’t go exactly as planned when the entire can started to melt in front of me…

Preparedness Categories
Fig1. – The melted tin can.

At first I thought, how hard could this be? Put some cotton into a can, drill a hole and burn it a little but apparently there’s a few more complications than this, but hopefully it’ll teach you a little more about doing it successfully if you run into the same problems.

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Fig2. – Smoke coming from the tin prior to it burning through.

The first mistake was the use of an aluminium can which prior to this I didn’t know that aluminium has a low melting point of about 660.3°C (1220.54°F). Even then I’m pretty sure those cheap metal tins off eBay that often come with tinder in them isn’t even aluminium but some sort of aluminium alloy. I’m not even sure if this cheap gas burner can reach those temperatures as the highest I’ve recorded mind getting to using isobutane is about 450°C. It is quite thin walled which makes it easier for the heat to just burn straight through it, at least I will fix this on my second attempt by using a proper steel container.

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Fig3. – The orange-hot base of the tin prior to melting.

Looking at figure 3, it gave me an idea to do a photo shoot of just the smoke sometime as the patterns it creates could create some wonderful and intricate artwork if blown the right way. I’mm add this to my to do list of photographic experiments and find a way to make smoke a little more interesting to look at as an artform.

Anyway back to the topic at hand, I’m certain that the char cloth was destroyed during the melting of the tin, however I tried to light it anyway and got a glowing orange ember which randomly seemed to wander around the char cloth a little before extinguishing after a few seconds. I’m not sure if this is normal or whether char cloth is supposed to have a flame once lit instead of whatever you call that orange ember thing. (Pic below)

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Fig4. – Three glowing parts after using a flint rod on the cloth.
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Fig5. – The ruined char cloth.

I only realized after salvaging the char cloth that they shrink to about half their size, which means I have to double the cutout size to get a decent tool for firelighting which will also fit nicely in a survival kit. The cloth also crumbles more readily than a lantern mantle which is a nuisance, but that could be a sign I “overcooked” it to the point it’s useless. Overall it was a valuable learning experience and I’ve got a few more things to buy before attempting creating char cloth again such as a better can, cotton which I’m sure is cotton instead of a questionable t-shirt which “claimed” to be 100% cotton.

The Preparedness Encyclopedia

By | | Preparedness, The Preparedness Encyclopedia (TPE)
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Since I first began researching preparedness I’ve been concatenating what I know into an Excel sheet to help refresh my mind when I need to remember what I’ve previously learnt. For example if I forget what ratio of Calcium Hypochlorite I need to add to water for the initial solution.

Preparedness Categories
Fig1. – The categories in The Preparedness Encyclopedia.

Each section seen above has a link you can click to jump to the section shown as well as subheadings when you get there to jump even further into the content you are looking for. An example being “Water > Acquiring Water”. The aim is to find any information you are looking for quickly and easily. Alternatively you could also use “Ctrl + F” to search for what you want if the wording is precise.

There are 11 columns of space of information, I chose this number because there are a lot of “10” row data fields and I usually add a description in the first column to give context about the row. There is also another 11 rows beyond the divider in the middle to allow for comments, discussion and answers which is used in the Entertainment section. Overall the column number goes to “AC” after which it’s then cut off to prevent unnecessary scrolling.

This document has slowly been growing over the past few months until now where it’s 10Mb. I carry this around on my phone at all times because you’ll never know when the information will come in handy.

As of today (2nd May 2018) there are 70 categories such as Water, Cooking, Barter, Foraging, Animal Identification, Homesteading, Gear, Fuel, Weapons, Medical and 60 more.

Each category has a percentage that it’s complete which I update as I fill in more information in that section. When every section is 100% the encyclopedia will be complete. I will however be disseminating the guide prior to completion as I will need assistance finishing it.

Up until now I’ve spent about 1573.25 hours compiling it which is calculated from the number of cells I have that contain information and using the assumption that each cell takes 1 minute to complete. Noting that that may be an overestimation I often come back to cells and edit the information and many of the cells take well over 1 minute to complete, so it averages out.

Unfortunately the document has been corrupted twice already in the past few months which is horrifying when it happens as I’ve spent so much time on this, but both times I’ve managed to recover it (or most of it). Therefore I now wish to blog my progress and upload parts of the guide so I always have an online backup to fall back on.

The first corruption I believe was due to it being saved incorrectly on my USB, which was fairly easily recovered by the built-in excel recoverer. After that terrifying moment I backed up the document 7 times as it was the only copy I had at the time. The second corruption I have no idea how it happened but when I tried to open it on my Windows 10 pc (As I usually edit it on a vista pc), it said it was unreadable and then proceeded to ERASE the file and ALL the 6 other backups I had on the USB. So now I’ve learnt my lesson to have off-USB backups as well. I had to use “Recuva” a brilliant program for recovering deleted and deep files from drives that are invisible to the eye.

After those panic attacks, I’m happy to say I now back them up online as well as on multiple PCs and USB’s, so I’d like to see it corrupt now. At most I can only lose one day’s worth of work.

Currently I’m working on the “Plant Identification” section which by far is the biggest with over 5,400 rows. I have recently added the name of every edible plant known on the planet and it’s scientific name. The next step is to find the information for each plant such as Physical Characteristics, Habitats, Known Hazards, Edible Parts, Medicinal Uses, Pictures and more. At this rate if I add 50 plants a day it would take 108 days to complete them all and it takes about 3 minutes to do a row. (That’s 270 hours to complete them all)

So that’s the simple introduction to TPE, if you wish to help add information to the article please let me know, although I’m not yet giving out the guide until it’s a little further along. I’m also unsure about the title of the guide, perhaps something without “The” at the start to use it more fluently in sentences.

A Change In Lifestyle

By | | Preparedness
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It’s been three or so years since my last post and quite a lot has changed since then, I was into technology, pc games and buying the latest tech gear and reviewing it. However recently I’ve seen how much of a time waster games are and have been investing my time more into learning about the world, economy and particularly preparedness.

It started back in 2015 when I took a trip to America and saw the completely different lifestyle my friends they had over there, in particular prepping for disasters. After some inquisition I soon realized that this world is incredibly fragile and could come crashing down at any point and usually when people least expect it. An example is the “Just In Time” restocking methodology for shops which only have three days worth of food stocked for their immediate region.

Now what if everyone in the local areas realized a cyclone was heading towards their location? Such as Hurricane Katrina. The shelves will go bare, there will be fights of food and gangs in the streets looking for anything worth looting as the police are pre-occupied with all the other violence in the region. There will be nobody to turn to and you will have to sustain and protect yourself.

This is what could happen anywhere on the planet, and it’s not even anywhere near one of the worse disasters that could occur…

This was my short introduction to the coming posts and the content they will appear on my website. I already have multiple projects that I’ve done which I need to post – which even include pictures and instructions on how to follow along if you wish to do so. It’s the first of May 2018 today and I thought what better day to start the first post than today, and I will strive to post every business day.

I also aim to redo the entire website and remove any irrelevant content not focusing on my current interests. Although I will continue to try to post new music and especially photographs as those are my other much enjoyed hobbies. I would now call myself a “Prepographer” – A photographer and prepper, or photographer of anything preparedness related.