Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:
“PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn’t store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.”
Wouldn’t something like this be potentially quite useful if you live in an area that could easily see a natural disaster that results in weeks without a connection to the outside world? Sure you could build a raspberry pi to do it yourself but not everyone is capable of doing that and its also a low power consumption device which is useful to keep your backup power going longer, ideally through a battery as a generator normally doesn’t do very low wattage efficiently. Solar is variable and lower power demands means you can go smaller, or helps keep it more reliable.
I find prepper stuff has a fine line between reasonable preparation for something that may well happen and then you get into the crazies that think the world is ending and they are actually going to achieve anything in such a situation beyond dying alone.
As I live in the UK the most likely disaster is a couple cm of snow which will break most infrastructure, shops will run out of things like milk and bread for days. This happened a few years ago, I had to resort to making tortillas instead for my lunch.