Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go” - T.S. Eliot

Doom Survival Guide: A Handbook to Survival in a Post-Apocalyptic World

http://www.doomguide.com/

~ Welcome to the Doom Survival Guide ~

This site exists to create and share a compact guide to survival in a world which has been all but destroyed by natural or unnatural disasters. In other words, when TSHTF. This is not to debate what scenario that may be, but you are here so you probably have your own ideas. Various themes floating around include:   Climate Shift   World War III   Asteroid Strike   Polar Shift - magnetic or physical - gradual or sudden   Total Economic Collapse   Galactic Tsunami (whatever that is)   'Kill shot' Solar Flare   Outbreak of some horrible CIA-created disease (ie - zombies)   Broad EMP attack   NWO Takeover   General wrath from a pissed off god   Stevie Live USD Doom-O-Meter Gadgets powered by Google   In any apocalyptic scenario, essential services such as power and clean water will be unavailable. Delivery of food and supplies will cease as people stop going to work and paying their bills. Money will be worthless unless you can sucker someone to trade your useless notes or lumps of metal for something of real value - such as clothing, tools, medical supplies, labor, or food and water. If you wait for authorities and emergency services to look after you, you will be disappointed. Therefore it will be up to YOU to ensure the safety and continued well-being of you and your loved ones The book is based on the famous SAS survival manual which contains invaluable information on how to survive with little to nothing in many harsh environments. It has been condensed to remove useless information such as how to return to your commander for debriefing and court-martialing, how to use your US Army issued equipment pack #47A-50/D effectively, what to do if the country you are attacking has changed its political allegiance, etc. As well as removing redundant topics, more have been added and existing ones expanded. Extra information includes:   General guidelines on how to prepare for and survive after TSHTF - that your government won't tell you.   More shelters, beyond the basic 'get you out of the weather for a day' emergency hovels. Including semi-permanent (seasonal) and long term shelters.   More animal and fish traps.   Section on ropes and knots, From making a meter of thin cord, to meters of strong rope with natural materials. Lashing methods, rope splicing.   Making and using fire pistons.   Construction of rope bridges.   Basic and advanced brain tanning, rawhide.   Sustainable organic gardening.   Raising small and practical animals.   Medicinal properties of common plants and how to grow them.   Field surgery - wound debridement and field amputations.   Field dentistry.   Weather Prediction.   Tactical movement and tracking.   Basket Weaving   Black Powder   and more... Why? I have many sources of information, some in books, some in magazines, some in printouts, and of course the internet still seems to be working. However I wanted a compact source of information that is small enough to include in even the smallest of survival kits. I don't have millions of dollars to buy 300 acres of primo land in the middle of nowhere and construct a bunker surrounded by militia. For me, it will probably be down to gunning it until the fuel runs out, then heading for the nearest forest with whatever I can carry on my back. I won't be able to haul around a library, and even if I had a netbook and a bicycle-powered generator, I doubt I'd find a hotspot. So if I'm going to carry one book - it needs to be small and thorough. So I have endeavored to compile as much useful information as I can into one small tome. Since there are others that may find this document useful I have decided to share it. There are instructions on how to print and bind a professional and robust book using only basic resources. It is a living document and always in a state of change, but the versions available for download are always complete in themselves. Anyone is welcome to make suggestions in the hopes of creating guide that is useful to as many as possible. If you have any questions or feedback then please contact me or join the chat.

Tough Mudder - Premier Adventure Challenge Series

I'd like to give one of these a shot someday, while I'm still sort of young and mostly spry. 


http://toughmudder.com/



Tough Mudder events are hardcore 10-12 mile obstacle courses designed by British Special Forces to test your all around strength, stamina, mental grit, and camaraderie. With the most innovative courses, half a million inspiring participants, and more than $2 million dollars raised for the Wounded Warrior Project, Tough Mudder is the premier adventure challenge series in the world.

Fooling facial recognition surveillance cameras with cunning and crocheting

By Xeni Jardin at 7:08 pm Tuesday, Mar 20

[Video Link]

Canadian yarn-lover and privacy-lover Howie Woo has developed an ingenious system for thwarting surveillance cameras that use face recognition technology. His solution involves crochet and LOLs. Here are more photos (via the Boing Boing Flickr Pool). More about Howie's playful creations here.

Folding Gun Disguised As Flashlight

The Military-Maker Complex: DARPA Infiltrates the Hackerspace Movement

I leave it to my buddy Klint to keep me up on a wide variety of cutting edge information in fields from technology to occult mysticism and back to military intelligence. His site Technoccult is, as Klint succinctly puts it: "a general interest blog for weirdos."

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Klint Finley

In a two part essay Fiacre O’Duinn explains why DARPA’s partnership with MAKE magazine to fund 1,000 makerlabs in U.S high schools is antithetical to the maker movement and wonders whether it’s a line in the sand that will divide the movement:

While the MENTOR program involves cooperation, this is done so as part of challenge competitions, in which teams compete against each other for cash prizes. This seems in stark contrast to how maker culture has developed to date. Why is competition necessary? If the goal is truly for education using the hacker/maker model, can learning and exploration not take place merely for pleasure, in a completely open environment, or must it be reduced to yet another lesson in the need to hoard and compete for resources and information?

Third, why has the field of study in these makerspaces narrowed only to STEM topics? What happened to the transdisiplinary focus of hacker/maker communities that make them so innovative? Where are the arts? Where are wearables, knitivism, DIY molecular gastronomy? Why do the challenges involve working on unmanned air vehicles or robots, projects that are of interest to DARPA for their military applications? Shouldn’t we encourage STEAM rather than STEM? Could it be that regardless of their educational potential, these topics have no possible military application? With such a narrow focus, one could ask which culture will win the day, maker or military?

Finally, why are the full details of the Make proposal and specifics of the agreement with DARPA not being made public? Because in dealing with the military, lack of transparency is simply a matter of course. This works well for the military but why is it necessary for a community project involving children? Why was a “Secret” clearance level needed to work on designing modules for the program, according to this job advertisement? This lack of transparency also leaves other questions unanswered. For example, as the program expands to over 1000 schools, will military personnel be brought in to teach? This last question brings me to issues of recruitment, STEM education and the military.

The biggest issue of all may be the use of the the MENTOR program as a military recruitment vehicle.

Make, DARPA and the line in the sand, #1

Make, DARPA and the line in the sand, #2

I’ve long opposed military recruitment programs in schools, but what might the benefits of such a program be? I’ve been thinking lately that in these times of austerity, and given the general difficulty in getting public funding for education and social programs in the U.S even when we’re not in a recession, tying social programs to hawkish programs like defense and law enforcement may be the only way to go.

In his “State of the World” in 2009, Bruce Sterling suggested taking a national defense position on climate change:

If I wanted to be politically effective, rather than visionary, I’d disguise myself as a right-wing Green, probably some kind of hunting-shooting NASCAR “conservationist,” and I’d infiltrate the Republicans this year. [...]

So we publicly recognize the climate crisis: just as if we suddenly discovered it ourselves. And we don’t downplay the climate crisis: we OVERPLAY the crisis.

“Then we blame the crisis on foreigners. We’re not liberal weak sisters ‘negotiating Kyoto agreements.’ We’re assembling a Coalition of the Willing tp threaten polluters.

“We’re certainly not bowing the knee to the damn Chinese — they own our Treasury, unfortunately, but we completely change the terms of that debate. When the Chinese open a coal mine and threaten the world’s children with asthma, we will take out that threat with a cruise missile!

That’s our new negotiating position on the climate crisis: we’re the military, macho hard line.

Would it work? Would it be worth selling out the rest of your values for?

I don’t know, but also consider the sorry state of jobs in the country. On the one hand, Newt Gingrich’s moon base idea was justified as a defense measure, but it was widely seen as a proposal as a jobs program for NASA’s home state. Maybe a moon base was too wild an idea, but could something like sci-fi work? Remember, the interstate highway system in the U.S. was actually called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and was justified as a defense measure. If we want a jobs program to rebuild or crumbling infrastructure, it seems like we could do a lot worse than call it a homeland security program.

So given the sorry state of STEM education, and the expense of setting up hackerspaces and the absolutely dismal state of public libraries (which many suggest turning into hacker spaces), is it time to consider letting DARPA build hackerspaces for the kids, even if it means letting in military recruiters and having the kids focused on making weapons?

I can see the pragmatic benefit, but I still just can’t justify it. As Fiarce points out, the program is just too antithetical to the maker spirit. And although as many have pointed out DARPA has funded all sorts of research over the years, including the creation of the Internet, the MENTOR program will specifically include a competition for designingweaponized vehicles for military use. DARPA may do some good work too, but having kids design weapons for the military crosses a line for me.

So will it split the community? Someone with more knowledge of the history of the computer hacking movement and how the NSA and other defense agencies tried to hijack it might have more insight than me. But it seems that if the maker movement has any momentum of its own, then this shouldn’t be fatal to it. Those who want to collaborate openly and make things other than war planes, and those attracted to the militaristic elements of the DARPA program will go there. Hopefully the maker movement will be able to sustain both strands, much like the computer hacker movement managed to sustain an open source movement.

See also: 3 BIG questions (and lots of smaller ones) about DARPA & Make

What Is A Maker?

Simple, concise piece harvested from Raising Geeks & Gearheads.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

What is a Maker?

As I'm heading to Maker Faire in California this week, I've been asked a few times - "What is a Maker?"

This article from the NY Times explains it well - The Kitchen Table Industrialists

Excerpt from the article:

If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called “American Maker,” sponsored by Chevrolet. “Of all things Americans are, we are makers,” its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. “With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.”

Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning “put-it-togetherers.” But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.

What makes this notion something less than complete fantasy is the availability of new manufacturing machines that are cheap, simple and compact enough for small companies, local associations and even amateur hobbyists to own and operate. What once only big firms with hulking factories could fabricate can now be made in a basement or by e-mailing a design to an online factory-for-hire. These machines can produce all sorts of things, including plastic pencil holders, eyeglass frames and MP3 players.

Makers, as they call themselves, can’t compete with the long, orderly rows of workers from the poorer provinces of China or India who cut, stitch and solder bras, shoes and cellphones for pennies — or even with the hundreds of billions of dollars a year worth of stuff that continues to pour out of large, old-fashioned American factories. Their method involves creating “hacker space” cooperatives, where a few dozen members share a 3-D printer, a laser cutter and an oscilloscope and engage in collaborative manufacturing projects. Makers have created companies like Shapeways and CloudFab, which for a fee will manufacture small runs of products that you design. They are becoming kit makers like Bdeir, manufacturing building blocks that allow others to create things.

Neil Gershenfeld, an M.I.T. physicist who is an intellectual godfather to the maker movement, suggested to me that the new tools would over time change global industry as we know it. He predicts a wave of new competitors for the megacorporation that designs, makes and sells products all under one brand. Instead, Gershenfeld imagines a consumer of the near future downloading a design for a mobile phone through an iTunes-like portal; buying an add-on from another firm that tweaks the design; and having it printed at a neighborhood shop in a plastic shell of your choice.

The new personal factories may seem like crude toys for only the most die-hard D.I.Y.-ers. But in technology circles, they are talked about as a looming revolution that could change the way people work and create new opportunities for millions. Personal factories can perhaps be compared to the earliest personal computers — versions of their giant counterparts that are drastically cheaper but also slower and more clumsy. This futuristic vision is the one that the White House endorsed in a recent report on personal manufacturing: “Within a generation, you will have a hard time explaining to your grandchildren how you were able to live without your own fabber,” it said, using a popular word for the new manufacturing tools. “Personal-fabrication technologies present an opportunity for our nation to continue to lead the rest of the world in manufacturing, but in a new way.”

Of course, I can't say all that to people when they ask, so I typically answer - "Garage Inventor" - people who explore the possibilities of what they can dream up and build using their minds and tools, and the minds and tools of their friends...

If they are still paying attention at that point, I _attempt_ to explain that a Hackerspace is not a den of evil...