BrannonKing

Dear HN crowd:

If there were a reasonable probability of you and your continent being without electricity for a year, how would you prepare? I'm interested in your thoughts on the things I listed below -- where to get these things and what I'm missing.

Water: I don't know if the water pressure to my house would stay or not. Assuming not, I need some mechanism for collecting rain water off the roof or off a tarp. I need some water filters that work well for pulling water from a nearby stream. I've seen water purification pills, but are there any without detergents in them? I used to have a house with a well; if I get one again, I'll get a hand-pump for the well. Hopefully the toilets will stay flushable by dumping water in them.

Food: I will keep several buckets of wheat berries and oats. I grind my own wheat regularly anyway. I need a hand-powered grinder to go with them, though. Some extra canned food would be handy. I expect the deer in the nearby forest would disappear quickly, but I might try to shoot one early.

Heat: I need a propane tank and a heater for the house. The propane needs to be used for cooking too. Without electricity, maybe a large battery with a solar charger would be helpful to run a blower? Or maybe a wood-burning stove would be sufficient? There is forest nearby.

Communications: it would be awesome if our phones could work peer-to-peer. I haven't seen that tech yet, though. (Work on it!) Maybe I and my extended family could have satellite phones that only cost when used. It would be nice if they could bring in weather and news. I need solar chargers for all these small devices.

Are there any major needs on that list I'm missing? Some things I might want: extra gasoline, a generator powered by my bicycle, a waterwheel generator, dry beans, and a large house battery (though I haven't been impressed by these yet).

I've been doing Zoom meetings where we use live Overleaf to talk through math equations. This is cumbersome at best. I need a tool that I can use to talk with one or two remote mathematicians while we're visualizing and editing equations live.

Hand-drawing the equations, like you would do on Zoom's whiteboard, is not great. We all have mouse & keyboard interfaces, and mouse-drawn square-root symbols and subscripts leave a lot to be desired. Also, we copy and paste equations and modify them. The whiteboard interface has a struggle with this as well. The mouse-drawn stuff tends to be too large; we can't fit enough on screen.

What tool would you recommend for this scenario? A bonus would be to have something like a mini Desmos calculator on the side, where I can drop (in)equations and get them rendered.