Thanks to Chris over at Mountainize.com, for sharing this hack with us, you can now have fresh ground coffee in your EDC, BoB or on any camping trip. This could also be good for tiny house living as well. Chris uses a peppermill to grind coffee beans into a course blend.

The FBI has now charged 7 people and brought down the Megaupload website on piracy charges. The battle continues. In response, the Department of Justice website was attacked and brought down with a DDoS attack. I admit that I get a chuckle when I read this stuff. It’s like cowboys and Indians. reminds me of the old lady burning her books and house in Fahrenheit 451. Read the rest of this entry »

This is episode one of the Ecolante Podcast. Today I discuss the SOPA legislation and what I call, Internet 3.0, the future of information distribution.

Episode 1 - E1_011912_SOPA

Found this post today over at TEOTWAWKI, and I had to repost, couldn’t resist. Good solid advice. Now off to my goal list for 2012.

http://teotwawkiblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/goal-setting-for-survivalists.html

The larger your family, the more laundry you’ll have building up by the end of the week. Cleaning the laundry can be a time consuming process. The more you have the longer it takes. You can reduce your laundry loads with some of the following tips.

Wear clothes more than once before washing. Beyond clothes that are visibly soiled or undergarments, hang your clothes up at the end of a day of wear them to keep them nice and wear them again.

Reduce your clothing “collection”. Or at least reduce what you wear each week. This may be a multiple vector issue for some. I personally do not care if I am seen wearing the same short twice in a week. Some feel this is a social no-no. To those I say this… I understand and I get it. But consider the clothing you will be wearing in a power out, survival situation. The mindset is different, but should it be? When we are forced to survive, our values change. So I ask you to consider that here.

Hang clothes out to dry. If you are using a dryer, you may want to invest in a drying rack. These racks can hold a decent amount of laundry and your clothes can dry over the course of a day instead of drying in the electric or gas dryer. I generally hang our towels and light clothes on the rack in the summer. Since we run a dehumidifier in the summer, the clothes dry in about 8 hours. You can dry your clothes on a rack 3/4 of the way and tumble dry for the last part, to fluff them up.

Reuse towels. Use your towels at least twice. Hang them up over the shower curtain rod or the towel rod to let them dry over the course of the day. After the second use, then wash them. Also using small towels to dry off will increase the amount of towels that you can fit in your load. If each regular sized towel you had were cut in half, and that smaller towel was used twice instead of once you would get 4x the usage from the same material you are using now.

Roll your own. You could make your own laundry detergent or use vinegar in place of fabric softener. This will certainly save money and reduce the amount of chemicals that you are putting on your body and into the environment. And vinegar only smells bad when it is wet. So if your clothes dry completely, you will not smell it on your clothes.

There you have it, now get moving toward laundry freedom.

I recently had the “pleasure” of working on a Sunday. And besides the fact that I was missing church, I expected this to be a half day. With that in mind I had not brought a lunch, or money to buy one. I know, I know, I know… “prepper did what”? Well in my defense I did have 4 cups of instant noodle lunch available to me. When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave when expected, I busted out the cup-o-salt… I mean cup-o-noodles. The salt is what I am on about. When I bought this mess in a cup I was not on a survivalist mindset at all. This garbage has 1190mg of sodium. As my co-worker Scott said, “that’ll shrivel your tongue!” He was almost spot on. I had water available to me. I probably consumed close to 60 oz that day as well. But it did not help.

The lesson to myself and to knowledge I want to share with others is to be very aware of the contents of your food. Whether the food is dehydrated or canned or prepared and frozen, the nutritional value or lack there of is very important. Even canned foods can have high sodium contents for the sake of preservation. In the case of beans you can easily rinse them with clean water to reduce the salt.

So this also opens the questions of, what are viable alternatives to prepared foods for such a situation. I usually have packets of instant oatmeal available in my desk drawer and my back pack. But the body needs more than oatmeal. How does one prepare food in advance that has a decent shelf life? I think the real lesson, is to keep food in your pack at the ready for the day when you are without. Perhaps foil pack chicken, instant rice and a low-sodium soup mix.

Lifehacker is now offering what it calls Lifehacker University. And while it seems to be nothing more than their collection of already available free online courses (Open University), it’s still an offering that is free nonetheless. You will probably have to sign up at each school that offers something, but that is a small price to pay for free education.

Lifehacker University

Too often I see friends and family with unsecured home wireless networks. Most often they are unaware that the wireless router is locked down by default because the box said it was secure. Or I hear the line, “No one wants my files. I don’t have any thing important.” While that may be true, the fact that your files are thought to be locked and perhaps are not should be cause for concern. If you wouldn’t put such information out on the net for all, then you should secure it off the net as well.

Well it appears that WPA encryption can now be cracked with ease. And since 90% of the routers sold today have or at least advertise WPA encryption, this article may be of importance to you.

Cracking WPA Encryption – http://lifehacker.com/5873407/how-to-crack-a-wi+fi-networks-wpa-password-with-reaver

When was the last time you made coffee? And I mean really cooked coffee. With a percolator. About a week ago I decided to use my camp peculator to make some coffee. I used the stove top and not an open fire (yet). And about 20-30 mins later I had really hot coffee. In a no power situation, the ability to cook food will be very important. You’ll benefit greatly from learning in the kitchen now and transferring those skills to the camp setting later. Read the rest of this entry »