With a new year upon us, let’s take a few minutes and talk about essential prepping gear.

Hang on a minute, in the grand scheme of things, what would be considered “essential”?  This is an subjective term.  The definition depends on who is reading this article.

To someone is a rural area, a 22 rifle is essential; you never know when an unwanted pest will go into the chicken house.  To someone in an urban area, they may want a bug out bag or fuel stored for their vehicle.

Let’s talk about items that will serve preppers well, regardless of their setup or location.

Water Filter

Water, water everywhere but nary a drop to drink.  The timeless words from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge ring true to all.  Does not matter how much water you have, if the water is not safe to drink, you might as well have a single drop.

There are the classic iodine water tablets, Lifestraw, Sawyer, MSR, Katadyn, and water bottles with built in filters.  There is a ridiculous amount of water filters on the market. Do your research and buy wisely.

Portable filter:  Every prepper should have some kind of water filter in their prepping gear.  What about a purifier?  A purifier is for viruses.  If you live in an area where sewage runs into streams, lakes and rivers, get a purifier.

When the water I filter is in doubt, I use a two step process. First, the water is cycled through a Katadyn hiker water filter. Second, a SteriPen is used to kill anything that made it though the filter. The SteriPen uses ultra-violet light to kill bacteria and viruses.

Home filter:  My home filter is a Royal Berkey.  The Royal Berkey is made up of two stainless steel tubes, which are stacked on top of each other.

Pour the water in the top tube, and gravity pulls the water through the filters.  The Royal Berkey can have up to 4 filters with each one filtering an estimated 3,000 gallons.  The filters remove 99.9% of viruses and bacteria.

Something like the Royal Berkey is family sized and portable.  Going to a remote camp for a weekend?  Bring the Berkey along for the trip

Solar Powered Radio

Everyone needs a radio in their prepping gear. It does not matter if they live in a rural area or big city, The public needs a way to get information when the power goes out.

When the power goes off, I find myself doing three things:

• Flipping the light switch on, which is a habit.
• Turn on an AM/FM radio and tune it into a local station.
• Get a book.

Even when there is a complete grid down situation, chances are radio stations will be in operation, at least for a little while.  After hurricanes Ike and Rita made landfall in Southeast Texas, the local radio station was operating on a generator backup and was able to provide locals with important information.

The built in solar cell keeps the radio going when the batteries run out.

Radios like this are not “just” for emergencies.  Use them when there is a family get-together, cook out, or anywhere you may want music playing.

Freeze Dried Food

This is something we covered in another article – stockpiling freeze dried food.  This stuff has a shelf life of up to 30 years.  Freeze dried food is available in pouches and #10 cans.  Pouches serve one or two people, while #10 cans are for family sized meals.

The #10 cans are perfect to store at a bug out location, deer camp, or in a closet.  Since they are made of metal, rodents are unlikely to chew through them.

Pouches are perfect for camping or hiking.  Just add boiling water and wait until it cools to eat.

With regular canned foods, you have to keep up with rotation and expiration dates.

Freeze dried foods, just remember to eat it sometime in the next 30 years.

Well Rounded Prepping Stockpile

There is so much to prepping it would be impossible to cover it all in a single article.  I decided to pick three topics that I thought would fit just about all prepping needs.  These are water, food and communications.

Even in a complete grid down situation, with these three items hopefully you will have safe drinking water, something to eat (if you can boil water), and be able to listen to a local radio station for news.

 

The post Must Have Prepping Essentials in 2017 appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

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Must Have Prepping Essentials in 2017

Preppers and survivalists are obsessed with bags. Most start with the quintessential Bug Out Bag known colloquially in the survivalist movement as the BOB. Depending on your interpretation of what a BOB needs to be and loaded with what, it is typically a quick grab bag that contains enough supplies to sustain yourself and family for say the first 72 hours of a SHTF event. There are many options and nuances to building out your own personal BOB bag.

What I am here to advocate is not to replace the BOB, but rather to add another option by creating what I will call a Ready Bag. This may in fact in some cases actually duplicate some of the items you might have in the more long term sustainment BOB bag, but it is a bag you would keep in your daily travel vehicle, office, or other location nearby on an everyday basis.

The Ready Bag can contain a lot of useful items, but keep the choices focused on the immediate needs to protect ones’ self in the short term, such as getting from work to home or from home to the grocery and back, or to pick up children at school or daycare in the event of a sudden SHTF occurrence. The Ready Bag is not intended for 2-3-4 days of keeping yourself alive.

So, what would you put in a Ready Bag? Right now my lightweight Ready grab bag has a pistol, four loaded magazines, two canisters of water, two packs of snack crackers (cheese and peanut butter), light gloves, flashlight, compact first aid kit, metropolitan map, flip-open knife, vial of headache meds, and $50 in cash. Other seasonal stuff could be added like a space blanket, wool hat, sunglasses, common OTC meds, and more water. What would you suggest adding?

As to a type of bag, I like a heavy duty bag of nylon, canvas, or Denier material. Thus far I have tested and used bags from L.L. Bean, Filson, Maxpedition, and Tenzing. I like exterior handles to grab, but am not too crazy about the strap ones that have a fold over Velcro ® wrap. Don’t go overboard with the number of smaller outside pockets to confuse things. If your bag goes/rides in a SUV type vehicle where things inside are visible, go with a black bag for low visibility.

We would love to hear your thoughts on a Ready Bag of your own. Give us your thoughts so we can all learn. Nothing is perfect in this business.

The post Pack Your Ready Bag appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

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Pack Your Ready Bag

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Kodak brings back the legendary Ektachrome film

By now, we’ve talked our heads off about the ILM recreations of 1977 Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in Rogue One. We’ve talked ethics, quality, and even the process. The last piece is to simply watch how it was done, and now you can.

ABC’s Nightline was given the scoop. They did a piece from Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco, talked to John Knoll, and revealed never before seen footage of the process of creating not just Tarkin, but Leia too. Check it out.

It’s definitely an interesting video, especially now since Carrie Fisher has passed away. Kind of gives the whole process another layer of contemplation.

You can read (and discuss) more about the process with the below links.

[ABC News]

via Gizmodo
Watch How ILM Brought Back Tarkin and Leia for Rogue One

Your hard drive failing is one of the worst things that can happen to your computer, since you lose tons of data. Fortunately, most drives include a tool set called SMART that can monitor your drive and let you know when you’re about to have a problem.

As the video above from Techquickie explains, SMART monitors all kinds of details about your hard drive including its temperature, vibration levels, bad sectors, write cycles (for SSDs), and tons more. With this data, it can give you an early warning when your hard drive might fail.

However, you have to seek out SMART to use it. The feature is kind of like the diagnostic computer in your car. Your PC doesn’t just come with an app to show you all of that data. There are a couple of ways to access it, though. First, you can use a command prompt. Run the following two commands to see if there are any errors:

wmic

diskdrive get status

If this returns “OK” then your hard drive at least isn’t suffering from critical errors. If it returns something else, you might have a problem. You can also use tools like Passmark DiskCheckup to go into more detail and find out exactly how healthy your hard drive is.

SMART for HDDs/SSDs as Fast As Possible | Techquickie

via Lifehacker
This Video Explains How to Use SMART to Monitor Your Hard Drives For Failures

We already know which one is supposed to be more “fun”, but what do the innards of manual and automatic transmissions look like? How do all the parts to together?

This delightful video, nearly eight minutes long, is an excellent visual explainer on how both transmissions work and how they are different from one another. If you’re a visual learner like I am, this is a real treat. It’s also a good primer on why internal combustion engines need transmissions at all.

The automatic transmission gets a bad rap among enthusiasts, but it’s a technical marvel even today, and modern ones keep getting better and better. That’s not to say a manual gearbox isn’t equally amazing, as you’ll see here.

Did we learn anything today, kids?

(via Road & Track)

via Lifehacker
Here’s Exactly How Manual Transmissions Are Different From Automatics

Link

While its title is a bit hyperbolic, Looper’s look at one of the most recognized and downright evil dudes in the history of movies is still a good watch, and provides at least a couple of tidbits about the character and the actors that portrayed him that we didn’t already know.

via The Awesomer
The Untold Story of Darth Vader

If you work as a waiter, hair stylist, sales clerk, stocker or other job that requires you to be on your feet all day, you know how tired your feet and leg muscles get from just one shift. Try this yoga routine to stretch and help those muscles recover at the end of the day.

15 minutes is all it takes to do this routine, and once you’re finished you’ll feel refreshed for your next shift, or better yet, for your actual life off the job. Here are the areas this routine focuses on.

• Joints: Standing and sitting stretches for your wrists, ankles, and hips. Essentially bending your wrists or ankles back gently to stretch in the opposite direction they’re normally in.
• Back: Elongate the spine with forward folds and shoulder stretches to open up your upper back. These two poses use your body weight to slowly stretch your upper back and shoulders. For the forward folds, bend your knees and put your feet hips width apart, fold forward and grab your elbows. Gently move your head back and forth, then slowly move your arms and torso back and forth to stretch your upper back and shoulders.
• Legs: Stretch your hamstrings and leg muscles by putting your feet a little more than shoulder distance apart, straighten your legs if you can. Put your hands on your waist and slowly bend forward. Go slowly so you don’t lose your balance. Once you reach a 90 degree bend, place your fingertips on the ground, your palms if you can, and bend and straighten your elbows to stretch more and less. Walk your hands back in between your legs for more of a stretch. Return your hands to your waist and slowly rise up to a standing position.
• Neck: Neck rolls and forward bends to move your neck muscles in a different direction.

The routine is designed to be helpful and short, but if you’re particularly tired, have sore legs, or maybe your joints really bother you, just add a few reps of the exercises above to work that part out a little more. For the full routine, check out the video above.

Yoga for the Service Industry | Yoga with Adriene

via Lifehacker
A Yoga Routine for People Who Work on Their Feet

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Jerusalem gets its own ‘City Of’ mesmerizing movie