10:48 – We’ve gotten started on packing stuff up for the move. For the last six months or more, I’ve been saving boxes from incoming shipments from Amazon, Walmart, and our science kit vendors, so we have literally hundreds of good boxes of various sizes. I think we’ll have enough to pack everything up, but then I’m an optimist.
We plan to make the move in stages, carrying vehicle loads up each time we go. We’ll take enough stuff up the day we close to let us spend the night up there, including the dorm refrigerator, spare vacuum cleaner, munchies and drinks, clothing, our air mattress, bedding, and so on. That and large trash bags, cleaning supplies, and other stuff we’ll need to get the place emptied out. And, of course, a large supply of shelf-stable food and bottle water. Furniture, boxes of books, and other heavy/bulky stuff will go via a moving company once we’re ready for it, and we’ll reverse things so that we have what we need to camp out at the old house while we’re getting it ready to go on the market.
We’ve gotten science kit inventory built up sufficiently that it should cover us through the moving process. We also have sufficient subassemblies built up to allow us to build another several dozen kits on the fly. We’ll move half our inventory up to the new place and leave half here so that we can ship from either place.
I re-joined Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program the other day. I never transfer books to our reading Kindles via Wi-Fi because trying to use Wi-Fi on either of those Kindles causes them to crash and require a reset to factory defaults, wiping out all the data including categories. The first time that happened on Barbara’s Kindle she was upset; the second time she was livid. So now I always download Kindle books to my hard drive and then transfer them via USB.
The problem with KU is that it doesn’t offer the USB transfer option when you “buy” a book. You have to specify the Kindle you want it transferred to via Wi-Fi and then go back in and download it to the hard drive. It’s a PITA, but it works.
The problem with doing that is that the author doesn’t get paid. Formerly, Amazon paid the author the full royalty once someone had read at least 10% of the book. They changed that a month or so ago. Now they pay $0.006/page starting with the first page. Fortunately for authors, Amazon is pretty liberal about defining a page. A book that’s 200 pages in print is considerably longer in terms of Kindle page count. So if I read through 300 Kindle pages, the author earns a $1.80 royalty. The problem is that if I’ve transferred that book to my Kindle via USB, Amazon has no way to know that I’ve read even one page because I don’t let my Kindle connect via Wi-Fi to Amazon.
Right now, I’m reading Theresa Shaver’s Stranded series. I wanted to make sure she got paid, so last night I brought up book 2 in the series on my Fire and swiped my way through the whole book. So Amazon now knows I’ve read the book, and Theresa gets paid. Of course, Amazon also keeps track of how fast people read the books, so they now think I read at something like 30,000 words/minute. Call it one page/second. I do read very fast, but not quite that fast.
Shaver, incidentally, writes pretty well for a beginning author. There are some minor issues with to/too, that/which, and so on, but the books are readable. She needs to work on writing dialog as well and she has a tendency to explicate, but she shows some real potential as a writer. The novels are aimed at young adults, so of course her main characters are all teenagers. Shaver is Canadian, which comes through in her attitude. It’s actually refreshing to read PA novels written by a Canadian woman rather than an American man. The tone is very different. Canadians are famous for being polite and helpful, and that comes through in Shaver’s books.
Interestingly, Shaver apparently was not a prepper when she started writing this series and wasn’t even aware that there was a prepping movement in Canada. As she researched and wrote the series, she found herself becoming more and more a prepper. She’s a bit canny about the details, but she did say in an interview that she has “87 cans of spam, 4 gigantic just add water bags of pancake mix and a hundred bottles of duty free booze in my basement…bring it on, I’m sooo ready!”
At any rate, if you enjoy PA fiction, give Shaver a try. The first book in the Stranded series is regularly $0.99 but it’s available on Amazon at the moment for $0.00. I grabbed it the other day because Amazon recommended it. When I checked her author page, I learned she was based in south-central Alberta, about an hour from Heartland, so I just had to give her books a try.
I mentioned this series to Barbara while we were on our way up to Sparta, NC the other day. Barbara retired from our library system after 20 years as a public librarian, and I remember her talking back then about young-adult novels. I thought those were characterized by an absence of explicit sex and strong language, so I was surprised when reading the first book to come across what most people would consider strong language, i.e. “motherfucker”. I doubt that anyone who reads my journal would be offended by that or any other language, but you have been warned. Barbara just shrugged it off and said that the definition of YA novels must have changed since she left the library system 15 years ago.
I wanted to make sure she got paid, so last night I brought up book 2 in the series on my Fire and swiped my way through the whole book. So Amazon now knows I’ve read the book, and Theresa gets paid. Of course, Amazon also keeps track of how fast people read the books, so they now think I read at something like 30,000 words/minute. Call it one page/second. I do read very fast, but not quite that fast.
My guess is that Amazon will not pay her based on your reading rate. Authors could set up co-ops to do that to get paid more. You need a robot hand to flip through books when the Kindle is otherwise unoccupied.
Well, it wasn’t *that* exaggerated. Back in college, when I did a trial of maximum speed with good comprehension on fiction, I did something like 12,000 WPM, or roughly two seconds/page. When I’m reading fiction for relaxation, I do maybe 2K to 3K WPM, or about a page every 10 or 15 seconds. I get through a typical 25o-page novel in about an hour.
“I get through a typical 25o-page novel in about an hour.”
Mrs. OFD is right there, just about. A book a night. I am far slower, but still a lot faster than the average. Say, who the hell reads anymore, anyway? We got our cells, our tablets, the net; who needs books?
I love reading. Unfortunately my reading comprehension and WPM have been in the toilet since last years massive car crash. Comprehension comes more readily at the moment when reading paper books. I prefer reading on my kindle or tablet for the convenience of having books on hand. Pre-crash I’d devour a book a night, every other night. Tech/science reading might take a bit longer.
Studying to upgrade my oracle very has been an exercise in futility and frustration. I KNOW Oracle 9i, but grasping the changes, hanging them on the framework of my existing knowledge, and most importantly retrieving it again, I feel like an idiot. Aargh. Failed my first attempt. Fortunately I learned that I was mistaken about having to pass by the deadline or ‘start over’.
My brother in law has been working on his post-concussion reading comprehension via ‘comic book therapy’. Something about the graphics helping your brain bridge the gap and remapping neurons so you are effectively relearning reading for comprehension
I haven’t read comics or graphic novels for A Very Long Time Indeed but am going to give it a shot. Heh. Don’t think I’m going to find a ‘Visual Guide to Oracle’ on the shelves of Barnes and Nobles, though.
Jenny, you might find http://www.amazon.com/Thrilling-Adventures-Lovelace-Babbage-Computer/dp/0307908275/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447609224&sr=8-1&keywords=lovelace+babbage interesting. Or mangas; mangas have a very wide range of subject matter and treatment, and if you don’t hate them right off there’ll probably be something you like.
My reading speed, comprehension, and retention have gone way down. I don’t know how much is from injuries (three skull fractures and who knows how many concussions) and how much is from chronic lack of sleep. Or from simple aging; I’m older now than I have ever been before.
@SteveF
Thanks for the suggestion. I know my local library has an extensive manga collection. I’ll get one of them to make some recommendations. They don’t have a copy of the Lovelace story, and local holds only for other libraries, so Amazoned it a few minutes ago.
Sleep deprivation is brutal on cognitive function. So is dehydration. And let’s not talk about the impact of aging. Combine those with stress and a concussion? You’re screwed.
I’ve learned to manage my health and sleep much more carefully. That takes more discipline than I’d imagined it would.
You might want to read the “Battle Angel Alita” manga series. A few family members that are into manga recommend it. Plus, my brother signed a deal to be set decorator on a live action film based on it. James Cameron is producing, Robert Rodriguez is directing.
I like cloud services – there are some services I would no longer want to do without. I use several Google services, and I store data (encrypted on my end) on Dropbox. All of those just work, so I am a pretty happy camper. With that out of the way…
I absolutely detest the current trend, where every big software producer tries to force you onto *their* service. Windows-10/Office-365 pester you about MS OneDrive (or whatever it’s called). Acrobat Reader has just updated to “Acrobat Reader DC”, which pesters you about putting your stuff in Adobe’s cloud. If there is a company I trust less than Microsoft (and that’s difficult), it would be Adobe. The *last* thing I would ever do is save documents on Adobe servers.
– – – – –
Paris may, just may serve to bring a few people to their senses. One article I read points out that the West – primarily the US – has created this problem. If you blow up people’s countries, and leave them with nothing, you get a great breeding ground for terrorists.
That doesn’t help solve the problem, but perhaps it will be a lesson for the future.
In the meantime, we have the situation that we have. France is nearly 10% muslim, which is a potential disaster. It may be a knee-jerk reaction, but I wonder if serious restrictions on the practice of the religion would help. Here, for example, muslim children are required to attend swimming courses just like other kids, and not wearing stupid clothing. Some places forbid head-clothes on the girls during school hours. I think all of that and more should happen. This would serve two purposes: first, it would identify the fundamentalists. Second, it would be part of a long-term strategy to weaken the hold the religion will have on the next generation.
For immigration, the Australian approach is the only correct approach: If you want asylum, apply at an embassy in your home country. Show up in Australia unannounced, and you will be sent away. That is the right solution, indeed, the only possible solution.
“For immigration, the Australian approach is the only correct approach: If you want asylum, apply at an embassy in your home country. Show up in Australia unannounced, and you will be sent away. That is the right solution, indeed, the only possible solution.”
Unfortunately, we have a fifth column of bleeding hearts/SJWs who are constantly nagging the government to take more, without “discrimination”. The government offered to take some Syrian Christian refugees, but the entrenched SJWs said that would be discriminatory and against our various treaties and covenants.
I’d rather take 10 atheists than one moooooslemm.
I think we’re taking 50,000 of these people, and we have a population of around 22 million. That’s a lot of unproductive people sucking up taxpayers dough and probably staging Paris-like atrocities.
@brad
Paris may, just may serve to bring a few people to their senses. One article I read points out that the West – primarily the US – has created this problem. If you blow up people’s countries, and leave them with nothing, you get a great breeding ground for terrorists.
Please. Leave them with nothing? They wouldn’t have shit without our technology. Western oil tech has given them almost everything of worth. The problem lies in a medieval religion and a tribal system that separates people. Thanks to modern transportation they can go out and kill others besides each other. It’s their own leaders that both deprive them and rile them.
Fuck ’em.
“I’d rather take 10 atheists than one moooooslemm.”
+1,000, but make it 10 million atheists. Atheists can be reasoned with, quite often.
“Fuck ’em.”
+10 million.
I see Obola is over talking with Prince Vlad about these issues; hopefully the latter can inform the former on the necessary measures.
As for cloud stuff, I’d rank Google right up there with M$, Adobe, and FaceCrack as being untrustworthy, to say the least. I’m working slowly to get us off all things Google, and Mrs. OFD off FaceCrack, and ditto Adobe products. Enough is enough.
No, thanks. Don’t wanna get camel herpes. Fleas, neither.
“Don’t wanna get camel herpes. Fleas, neither.”
Or accidentally roll over and trip a suicide-pack fuse.
_Event Horizon_ (The Perseid Collapse Series) (Volume 2) by Steven Konkoly
http://www.amazon.com/Horizon-Perseid-Collapse-Series-Volume/dp/1495380432/
Book number three of a five book series. This is actually a four book series plus a prequel book, _The Jakarta Pandemic_. The book is a POD printing in trade paperback (my favorite!).
Six years after the Jakarta Pandemic that killed 30 million people in the USA and one billion people worldwide, the USA economy has mostly recovered from the pandemic. Then, an asteroid entered the atmosphere traveling low over Boston and explodes over the Atlantic. The asteroid was actually a cleverly disguised re-entry vehicle with a nuclear bomb. The resulting air burst in the Atlantic outside Boston, 60 foot tsunami, and EMP practically destroy the entire eastern seaboard of the USA.
The second book in the series was the first 48 hours after the air burst. This book is the next 48 hours as our hero rescues his kids from Boston University and tries to return home to Maine, escaping ravaged Boston along with millions of other refugees. One unique aspect of the story is the amount of trouble that the homegrown militias are causing.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (229 reviews)
We don’t typically bomb their countries until AFTER they are already sh!tholes.
And frankly they were sh!tholes to start, westerners built whatever they have that isn’t a sh!thole (albeit using eastern slave labor, or just about slave labor) and if the westerners stopped paying, and stopped helping, it would quickly return to being a sh!thole.
Venesuelan oil industry shows what happens when westerners stop helping the ‘little brown people.’ They break it, wear it out, fail to maintain it, steal it, and generally destroy what it took western first world workers, money, and knowledge to build. Sorry if that sounds racist, but that is the fact. You can take them out of the jungle, or desert, literally, but they aren’t gonna become process engineers in less than several generations of constantly increasing prosperity, with the nutrition, education, and healthcare that comes with it.
The protestant work ethic, and western concepts of free will and personal responsibility are the underpinning of western first world success. The mooslims will never progress as a people in a technological world as long as there is ‘inshallah.’ ie. ‘if god’s willing.’
Oil companies there are full of posters trying to change the culture, but you can’t. Posters that say “Accidents are PREVENTABLE.” They just don’t believe it, and so they don’t bother. You don’t put a man on the moon by shrugging and saying ‘it’s in god’s hands.’ You put a man on the moon by checking your calcs a dozen times and then rechecking them. You do it by sweating every detail. You take YOUR job seriously, and you expect everyone else to do the same. You hold them up to standards. You enforce standards. When there is a failure, you figure out why, and who F’d up. You don’t arm wave and say it must have been god’s will. At least you don’t in any serious endeavor.
So let them learn to eat sand and drink oil.
In one generation, they’ll be back to the stone age. The ones that made it out into the world are a problem as they will continue to prop up the rest.
Seriously, does anyone think they will stop being what they are? When will the ‘radical element’ be satisfied? When will they say, ‘well that’s enough, we can relax now.’ Ask the next bleeding heart those two questions. I bet they haven’t thought about it. The answer is ‘never’ by the way, to both questions. Even if the whole world was a caliphate, they’d keep on, schizming and each sect would try to take over the next.
nick
Well
One thing that always wonder me is the complete clueless generalization of some people living north of Rio Bravo.
Fred is better, he says that the educated mexican people doesnt want to go north.
I read here since 199x? always some stuff interesting, but Nick, you are intelligent people, this rant insults your intelligence. Venezuela and PDVSA since 10 years is a complete mess.
One thing people are forgetting about is we no longer have the nearly limitless reserve of bombs, smart or dumb. We have essentially fought all wars since Vietnam with heavy iron that was surplus from WWII. Most of the “smart” bombs used in Gulf War and Iraq were heavy iron with “smarts” strapped onto the nose. We can no longer fly >1,000 sorties a day (a necessity to be effective) because we just don’t have bombs. We also have practically no inventory of cruise missiles.
My comments are based on recent discussions with some old salts and fly boys who still have reliable contacts in high places. My submarine friends paint a very bleak picture. There are too many boats (submarines) and ships sitting in port. It is not for lack of things that should be done.
She’s a bit canny about the details, but she did say in an interview that she has “87 cans of spam, 4 gigantic just add water bags of pancake mix and a hundred bottles of duty free booze in my basement…bring it on, I’m sooo ready!”
I wonder if one can use booze for pancake mix?
I mentioned this series to Barbara while we were on our way up to Sparta, NC the other day. Barbara retired from our library system after 20 years as a public librarian, and I remember her talking back then about young-adult novels. I thought those were characterized by an absence of explicit sex and strong language, so I was surprised when reading the first book to come across what most people would consider strong language,
I’ve noticed this also. Several of my favorite authors have written what I loosely classify as a “Heinlein Juvenile” but do have explicit sex and strong language in them. That makes it hard for me to recommend them as I started reading Heinlein juveniles in 3rd? 4th? 5th? grade and have major concerns about exposing pre-teenagers to those concepts. Or, maybe I just grew up in a sheltered time, the 1960s, in the South. Ok, not quite the South but Oklahoma. Definitely sheltered.
Just about the only author to have pulled off a true Heinlein Juvenile, IMHO, is Jerry Pournelle with “Starswarm”. John Varley has made several attempts but usually feels the need to sex it up a bit.
@ayj,
I’m not sure what you disagree with, in my comment.
Since ‘re-nationalization’–ie stealing from the foreign companies that were taking the risk and doing the work: “By 2010, Venezuelan production had in fact declined to ~2.25 Mbbl/d (358,000 m3/d). PDVSA have not demonstrated any capability to bring new oil fields onstream since nationalizing heavy oil projects in the Orinoco Petroleum Belt formerly operated by international oil companies ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Total.”
You recognize that “Venezuela and PDVSA since 10 years is a complete mess.”
The existing facilities are falling apart. No new investment is being made. Production is declining. I re-iterate- you cannot take people from the jungle and make them the equivalent of the westerners that were doing the jobs. Anyone in upper management, or technical management in those companies, was trained in western institutions, primarily in the US, or by working for international companies. They came from families that already enjoyed access to nutrition and education and health that put them so far from the laborers and native population that they are almost different species. If the most advanced tool you grew up with was a shovel or a machette, you are NOT going to understand how a fractionation tower works or why you have to hold tolerances in the 10000th of an inch range.
The same is true in the middle east. EVERY technical job is done by westerners or someone who spent years learning from westerners. Every labor job is done by imported labor, generally completely uneducated tribesmen from india, pakistan, the Philippines, indonesia or other 3rd world labor pools. I’ve worked there, and seen it with my own eyes. They are from primarily islamic cultures and the sense of fatalism and predestination is overwhelming. Some have been bitten by the western idea that you can improve your lot in life thru hard work and learning. Most leave it up to allah.
If the westerners left, the whole place would fall to pieces. They are NOT natively capable of sustaining a technological society.
I re-iterate, in a few generations of increasing prosperity, with the better nutrition, education, and healthcare that comes with it, they MIGHT as a society, be able to do so. I don’t think so because of the ‘inshallah’ attitude.
Anyone who HAS clawed their way up out of that all the way to a technological job, with true understanding of what they do, has nothing but my sincere amazement. To start so far down the curve and end up there takes incredibly rare abilities.
Unless it was the “little brown people” phrase, I don’t know where you can find room to disagree.
nick
BTW, I chose that phrase deliberately as it is often heard quietly spoken by those who would ‘help’ them, mostly be continuing to treat them as if they needed the help from above… and yet use structures that almost guarantee that they will continue to need ‘help’ forever.
The resulting air burst in the Atlantic outside Boston, 60 foot tsunami, and EMP practically destroy the entire eastern seaboard of the USA.
I think I mentioned this before. An airburst nuke isn’t going to cause a 60 foot tsunami that wipes out the eastern seaboard. There just isn’t enough energy there. Earthquakes have a huge amount of energy in them. The biggest atomic bomb (50 megatons) has less about the same energy as the surface energy of the Japan earthquake of 2011. An airburst or even a surface burst is going to waste a lot of energy on heat, flash, air movement, etc.
Speaking of moving, Derek Lowe’s Chemistry Blog has moved.
A big thumbs-up for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer mentioned above. Equally as much fun is the graphic novel version of H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds and the sequels by Edginton/D’Israeli. (The original prose version of TWotW ain’t half bad either.)
The resulting air burst in the Atlantic outside Boston, 60 foot tsunami, and EMP practically destroy the entire eastern seaboard of the USA.
I think I mentioned this before. An airburst nuke isn’t going to cause a 60 foot tsunami that wipes out the eastern seaboard. There just isn’t enough energy there. Earthquakes have a huge amount of energy in them. The biggest atomic bomb (50 megatons) has less about the same energy as the surface energy of the Japan earthquake of 2011. An airburst or even a surface burst is going to waste a lot of energy on heat, flash, air movement, etc.
How about a couple of MIRVs hooked together in the “asteroid”? The author has not been very specific at all yet on the cause of the nuclear blast. I have no idea if it was a single bomb and what the size of the bomb was. Just the resulting damage which, the author has embellished in a previous book. Of course, you have to suspend disbelief that China would EMP it’s largest customer at all.
Also, the story still stands without the tsunami. Just not as much initial damage. Most of the actual damage is caused by the “asteroid”‘s low pass over Boston and the EMP. Only half of the cars died with the EMP but all of the electrical grid died. I’ve seen estimates that a long term electrical grid down across the USA might kill 50% to as much as 80% of the population due to starvation, exposure, etc.
For the last six months or more, I’ve been saving boxes from incoming shipments from Amazon, Walmart, and our science kit vendors, so we have literally hundreds of good boxes of various sizes. I think we’ll have enough to pack everything up, but then I’m an optimist.
BTW, Uline does have moving boxes at a reasonable rate when buying in bulk:
http://www.uline.com/Grp_141/Moving-Boxes
My favorite moving box is a 13 x 12 x 17 inch box with interlocking quick setup bottom and top with holes in the sides for easy carrying:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1WNB16/
I like bankers boxes, especially for books.
Tape the lids on.
They stack well, aren’t too big to move, have holes for handles.
They’re relatively cheap, and very reusable.
nick
The Wizard of Oz graphic novels by Shanower and Young are excellent. Kind of pricey, if your library can’t get them, especially considering that if you get one you’ll want to get them all.
@dkreck: By “leave them with nothing” I’m referring to going in and destroying their (halfway) functioning countries. Sure, they were crappy places to begin with, but Western remodelling via Hellfire missiles hasn’t improved the decor.
Iraq was a dictatorship, and undoubtedly an unpleasant place. However, destroying the government did not exactly improve the place, and the US-selected puppet government has never been able to control the country. In Libya, the US didn’t even try for a puppet government – they just took out the old government and left chaos. In Syria, the US has been trying to get rid of the government as well, by funding and equipping terrorists, including Al Queda. The result: more chaos.
If you were living somewhere, and some foreign country came in, destroyed your government, bombed what little infrastructure you had, and handed weapons to local rebels to finish the job – might you be just a little bit pissed off? Why not join the terrorists? At least they will feed you, and give you a chance at revenge. The Islamic issues just add frosting to the cake, giving a religious justification to the acts of violence and revenge.
The actions of the US (and allies) since 9/11 have been stupid beyond belief, creating a huge new generation of terrorists. Europe is now reaping the whirlwind that the US sowed. Gee, thanks for that.
The best answer, then and now, would be to wall off the Middle East and let them sort out their own problems. From Europe’s point of view, it would actually be comparatively easy: put a fence along the Turkish border, and patrol the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, we first have to sort out all the SJWs in positions of power.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/175434/1-4-swedish-women-will-be-raped-sexual-assaults-daniel-greenfield
“Sweden, like the rest of the West, will have to come to terms with the fact that it can either have female equality or Muslim immigration. It cannot have both.”
well Nick, the iteration sounds better, but
a) Its true, if trained people doesnt maintain facilities, everything fails
b) Trained on oil industry, give me a break, in another live I was here, the only thing you need is RTFM, and it applies to little brown people and red necks.
c) Again, as Fred explains, nobody with education and job leaves a country unless a war, against someone or against themselves, and, Venezuela is the later.
d) Design the hardware/software is another issue, but, remember, Russia bought or stole a lot on 30s -90s, but, they also built, and they dont qualify as westerners, China is on the same way.
Doubt, why nobody here is thinking on tube technology for electronics
Doubt, why nobody here is thinking on tube technology for electronics
Why?
@lynn
Are tubes more immune to EMP than transistors?
One thing we do know about tubes is that if you ain’t careful they’ll give you a real nasty shock, yea, unto the point of death.
old tube radios are very big with a certain prepper who is a prolific poster elsewhere.
Tubes and vintage electronics in general should be more resistant to ill effects from emps. But what will you connect too?
nick
Indeed. Rather than muck around with tube tech, I’d rather focus on low-power kits that be ginned up with a bit of soldering. Got three of them waiting for me this winter, 20-, 40- and 80-meter.
@OFd, don’t those kits have a really small freq range? Or am I reading the ads wrong…
A quick look at my Ramsey 20-meter (14 MHZ) receiver kit tells me it will tune SSB, CW, RTTY and AM, and is nice when hooked up with their QRP20 CW transmitter (I’m also learning Morse as I go). Small and will run off a standard 9-volt battery. I’ve also got their 40-meter receiver and transmitter kits to play with. I hope to test these and my Yaesu FT60, the Bow-Fungs, and a couple of portable SW radios with a variety of cheap and portable antennas out in the woods and hills this winter on snowshoes and x-c skis.
well, Mig 25 was tube tech, due technical limitations and EMP.
I see reading here that a lot of you prefer off the shelf radios, multiples, hoping (implicitly) that one of those could survive.
But, our host is thinking to go back to 1600/1900, and, is easier to build a De Forest tube than a transistor, a lot easier.
So, if one of the events happen, CME, EMP, tube technology is better, their survivability is better for these events, and, since a lot of spectrum usage is gong to disappear, nobody needs high-end technology (meaning high-end as SSB as example).
If I were thinking on this class of SHTF, one or two tube transceivers must be on the shelf, and, they have mu metal to shield.
Communicate with whom? dont know, but, if it is the case, why discone, etc etc. at least dig and store a couple of PRC 77 for VHF, a modded one (or better, any JRC transceiver for HF )
and OFD, a bit of soldering, but, the issue here is spare parts and simplicity, surface mount is not simple (yes, I burnt my fingers a lot of times), and yes, I fixed everything, time ago, from URC32 and olders one to 718T (god bless Collins Radio), the oldest thing I fixed was a WW2 gonio, still running, and surely in SHTF you wish to have a gonio
@ayj,
my radios and scanners, etc are for monitoring and communicating NOW, was well as later. Pretty much every prep, for me, must not negatively effect my NOW, (other than diverting resources-and it must be minimal resources), and indeed should enhance my NOW, and they must not be irrevocable. That’s one of the reasons I’m late to bulk and long term storage food, and I haven’t sold everything and moved to the refuge.
Most likely scenarios for the Gulf Region (where I live) are tropical storm, tornado, hurricane, ebola or other pandemic (due to large number of oil workers with contact in africa, and large number of illegals from jungles south of here), dirty bomb, and way down the list is emp. This ignores shootings, and economic problems (dealt with separately.)
Monitoring scanners and ham proved very useful during the last big storm, and historically is very useful in regional disasters. We have them pretty regularly. EMP effects are the subject of a lot of speculation online. I prefer to look at the ARRL emp guidelines (ham radio) and the DOD emp and grounding guidelines. Both assume a great deal of normal equipment will survive with appropriate engineering applied to the gear, and to the installations. If it’s offline, not connected to long wires, and shielded at all, it will likely survive. Multiple devices in different designs will increase the odds of something surviving.
I’m not saying having an old transistor radio and a tube set is a bad idea, it’s just way down on my priority list. If I find one while I’m out doing my normal foraging, I’ll try to buy it. OPERATING a tube set is an whole ‘nuther story.
If we really have an event that destroys everything but tube tech, just eating and killing will probably take up most of your energy. The recovery will have to be pretty far along before we have enough economic slack (excess capacity) to start making tubes, and recreating that level of tech.
In other words, it’s not something I’m willing to prep for except in the least costly way possible, and it’s way down my list of priorities and concerns.
YMMD, and that’s fine, we all have different outlooks and likely hazards.
nick
That’s why I eventually got rid of my old Vietnam-era AN/PRC-10 backpack radio. Batteries were almost impossible to come by, and the thing used, IIRC, 16 tubes. Imagine trying to find replacements for them.
Nick is correct that this EMP-killing-everything meme is bogus. Most vehicles, including recent ones, would continue to work. A vehicle body is a pretty decent Faraday cage, particularly since the electronics are often enclosed in a metal case of their own. But the electric power grid might well suffer extremely severe damage that would take months to years to repair/replace, and that all by itself would kill most of our population. I don’t intend to take extreme steps, but I do plan to install an off-grid solar system adequate to power our well pump and other essentials.
As to comms, I plan to do a lot of listening but not much talking. I want receive capability across the spectrum, but I’ll be happy with short-range transmit capability.
Would motorbikes survive an EMP event? They’re not really enclosed.
Any bike from the 70s and 80s that was running before the event should run after the event. No computers, mechanical links, simple engines.
(Variable timing, dual overhead cam, 4 valve engines excepted.) 😉
Any dirt or Enduro style bike should be fine, they’re pretty simple.
In fact, if terrorists demonstrate the ability to attack a city, I will rethink my bug out strategy, and buy some enduro style bikes.
nick
I am concerned that it might go farther than that. While the electronics are generally encased in metal boxes, I an concerned that the vehicle wiring harness could serve as an antenna. Also I’m concerned that modern vehicles contain less metal than you think. I’m not sure if the Corvette is still the only production vehicle with a fiberglass hood. I hope and pray we never find out, because whatever happens to the vehicles, it would be a disaster.
@dave,
an automobile is an incredibly harsh environment for electronics already. Moisture, extremes of temperature, vibration, and a REALLY noisy electrical environment combine to make it challenging to engineers. Well designed cars have electronics that are already hardened to survive in this environment.
The boards are coated, the ‘black boxes’ are fully potted (which means they are completely encased in protective material) and the electronics themselves are designed to be robust. Shielding has been increased, and provided to protect all the networking common in today’s vehicles.
Back in the day it was very common to hear ignition noise, and whine in any electronics added to a vehicle. Nowadays, that is almost completely absent due to the extensive engineering and protective effort it took to get local area networking to work reliably in a vehicle environment.
In short, the stuff is shielded, and well designed for the environment. Anything is possible of course, and as electronic features become smaller they are more susceptible to damage.
It’s more likely we’ll find the unintended consequence of allowing programmers to make decisions which can’t be overwritten to hurt us. IE. during the Colorado fires, there were reports of modern vehicles refusing to run because of all the smoke in the air. To protect you from yourself of course. Or during an episode of Ice Road Truckers, one of the trucks shut down for mandatory service on the diesel (regen), despite being in the middle of a frozen lake, where stopping completely could KILL the driver. Those examples alone are good reasons to avoid new vehicles for a bug out, as you don’t know what gotchas programmers have put in, that would be exposed by operating under extreme or unusual conditions. And don’t forget about the black boxes, remote surveillance, and remote kill options present in many vehicles.
nick
I’m no expert on EMP, but the sources Nick mentioned are experts, so I’ll go with what they say. Basically, localized effect (other than grid-down issues) are likely to be a whole lot less severe than the PA novels make it sound. My concern is the systemic effects nationwide, which would take down not just the power grid, but manufacturing, food production, water supply and sewage, transportation, etc.
My Faraday cages will all be steel garbage cans with friction-fit lids. I’ll use heavy-duty plastic contractor bags to insulate the contents from the steel. Anything in there will be fine.
Absolutely, the incredibly interconnected systems that make life possible at our current population densities will go down. There have been improvements, but they are still pretty brittle as systems. We may come thru a crisis with a move back to local generation of power. Some are already headed that way with regional or campus or even building level power systems. You can buy fuel cell based primary and backup power systems right now. Big data centers are HUGE users of electricity, and the economic costs of an outage make the large expense of the backup systems prudent. Eventually we might end up with our own version of a shipstone in a shed behind the house, due to the work done for big data…
By their very nature it will take a long time (if it’s possible) to bring the systems back up, esp. if the technical people are decimated too. Power plants don’t run on air, they run on logistics. If the trains aren’t running, and the mines aren’t running, and the people are dead, the generation side is F’d. The transmission side has it’s own frailty, but we’re pretty good at restoring service. Lot’s of practice. As long as the crews have trucks, fuel, food, water, parts, dispatching, security, etc. The problem is scale. If the destruction is widespread, there aren’t enough people or supplies to fix it. And just identifying and prioritizing the work will be a massive task.
So, emp is likely to spare a bunch of your stuff, and other people’s stuff, but the large brittle systems can’t really function if 1 in 10 of every part is destroyed.
As I drove around south Texas yesterday, primarily on secondary roads, I was once again amazed by the shear mass of infrastructure present, even in the middle of no where. Train tracks every where. Primary electrical distribution lines, substations, rural distribution lines, lines out to towers. Towers everywhere. Cell, microwave, satellite, local internet, local radio, regional broadcast, you can’t look around without seeing at least one tower. Pipelines crisscrossing everywhere with monitoring stations (with their own power and antennas) pumping stations, routing and control stations. Fiber optic duct everywhere. ATT amplifiers on polls along every highway, and most secondary highways. Roads and drainage everywhere. Bridges, culverts, ditches, embankments. If you open your eyes, and look, the variety and ubiquity will astound you.
And it all needs maintenance. It all needs upgrading. If attacked, it will all need repairing and replacing.
nick
One point about programmers making really bad decisions that’ll bite you, me, and everyone: very seldom is it the programmers themselves who make the bad decisions. Those come from the managers or business analysts or whoever else decides how the system will work. Managers of programmer teams are often former programmers but not necessarily really good programmers promoted because of their technical excellence. Much more often they were lumpenprogrammers or even complete screw-ups. Often they have no technical background at all, but get the gig because “a good manager can run any project”. (That may be true, but if so, I’ve never met a good manager.)
The same goes for many other engineering decisions which are questionable or downright bad. Engineers and programmers do make mistakes, but most of their mistakes are caught well before the consumer sees them. What’s left are the managerial mistakes, which aren’t viewed as defects until enough customers complain/there was an accident/legal action is started.
Just in the 18 months of my current day “job” contract, I’ve perpetrated some really crappy work … which was implemented exactly as specified by a manager or BA. Never mind that I pointed out two showstopper oversights just in one page of a requirements doc; nope, this is what the BA and PM promised the “business” unit (without checking with me, the tech lead for my subteam). -shrug- No problem. I’m paid by the hour and the project I’m working on does not make things better in any way for the residents or taxpayers of New York, so I guess I don’t really care. Unless someone tries to make out that the crappy work is my fault, at which point I become very vicious and unpleasant.
What Mr. SteveF just said + 1,000, at least insofar as my own experiences over the years in IT at sys admin levels has showed me. Yet to meet a decent IT mangler. And I wish I had a crisp fiat-currency dollar bill for every fembat IT mangler I’ve seen who was completely useless in that role yet knew how to make our daily, if not hourly, lives utterly miserable. While knowing zero about IT.
I also pointed out showstopper security stuff at different places I worked and was completely blown off each time, and later those showstoppers happened and manglers were either fired or promoted out of the departments. By which time I was gone and good riddance in their opinion.
Heh, in 1980 I started work on a popultion projections system that was being developed on a CDC 3500 mainframe (may peace and blessings be upon it.) It was designed in Cobol, despite the fact that that language was entirely unsuitable for the project and the mainframe had only a tiny amount of memory.
The system was designed to run overnight in batch mode, with other non-related systems, but when completed it needed the whole computer dedicated over the weekend to run a subset of the user requirements. This despite the fact we’d just bought a Fujitsu M200 – alegedly the largest mainframe in the southern hemisphere with a whopping 8 MB of memory, which could have handled the system easily, especially if written in Fortran or PL/1 and Adabas.
The manager admitted in about 1982 that he should have pulled the plug much earlier…
” very seldom is it the programmers themselves who make the bad decisions. ”
ACK, but—
whenever someone makes a decision for the end user, esp one that can’t be overridden, they better be damn sure there is no downside for the user.
It started with MS, who treats every computer as if it belonged to them. “Do not shut down your computer while updates are being applied.” Well, you didn’t ask, and I need to shut it off…
Merely annoying when on a desktop pc, life threatening when on a vehicle.
I guess there is no review and certification process or body like there is with aircraft, but as vehicles become more software dependent, there better be. Or we’re all doomed.
Doomed I tells ya!
nick
I’m not sure if the Corvette is still the only production vehicle with a fiberglass hood.
My 2005 Ford Expedition has a fiberglass hood and a fiberglass rear hatch.
In fact, if terrorists demonstrate the ability to attack a city, I will rethink my bug out strategy, and buy some enduro style bikes.
I want this Honda thumper:
http://powersports.honda.com/2016/xr650l/street.aspx
I’ve sworn to the wife that I don’t get dizzy spells anymore but she doesn’t believe me.