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rhimorechill · 5 years ago

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1-30 can i just have your opinion on all of them please

KDHSKHFKFB whoever u are anon ur actually my only follower ever

1. are you of the “tom nook is a crook” or “tom nook is an honest businessman” opinion ?

HES AN HONEST BUSINESSMAN !!! ur loans have NO interest and he was handing out 100k interest/month for a good while there !!!!! the only reason it dropped to 10k is b/c i accidentally made a mil while tryna get dreamies ok. the whole "nook inc owns the entire island" thing is KINDA WEIRD but like ! i mean. its still a pretty sweet deal

2. do you play as yourself or a made up character ?

i play as me !! and then everyone tells me my character is cute which ROCKS

3. where is your house located ?

well CURRENTLY. its just at the center of the island. but once i get terraforming (which will be as soon as i get lolly, mitzi, and purrl) it will be on its own little island in the middle of the island

4. who were your first villagers ?

hamlet and renee ! and bea and agent s and broccolo. oh and quillson. theyre all gone now but i moved bea into a friends island so i can visit her later !!

5. preferable method of earning bells ?

turnip runs babey !!! srsly i will pay like 500k tips and make a million in PROFIT (per run !!) its fucking awesome. i never use turnip exchange tho that shit website always stops telling me where i am in the queue

6. what villager personalities do you typically get along best with ?

i love all of them. so much. normal and lazy villagers might take the cake, but ankha was on my island for 2 days and nearly stole my heart, so snooty villagers r up there too. smug villagers ? like i mostly have experience w raymond b/c i fucking HATED quillson and keaton n ed i barely paid attention to (ed gets points tho. he shares my bday) but that goddamn nerd has a war with slugs. we love to see it. peppy villagers rock (i have THREE on my island rn... but ugh i gotta kick out merry sometime..... i love her but i just !! have too many). i CANNOT hate jock villagers those guys just wanna work out !!! and talk abt working out !!!! theyve done nothing wrong in their whole lives. uchi villagers are great too and cranky villagers r trying their best !!! every villager is good is what im saying. even quillson (i guess)

7. who is your current best friend in the game ?

MGHGSHGD felicity or raymond !!! they send me mail all the time and also i really like raymond. b/c hes such a fucking NERD of an accountant. and felicity was the first of my dreamies to move in so im 💚 when it comes to her...... SOMEDAY. lolly will also be my bff. lolly come home

8. is there a villager you want to get rid of ?

MERRY WHITNEY VELMA. PLEASE GO AWAY. U R ALL SWEETIES BUT NONE OF U MADE THE CUT. ONLY ONE OF U IS EVEN A CAT. (if you want whitney or velma pls dm me !!! someone asked for merry already but id love for them to be on islands where ppl love em)

9. do you hoard a lot of items ?

YES. i did a purge the other day and laid a fuckton of items out to give away. it did not fit and i had to shove some on the cliffs. i still have a big pile waiting to be taken. meanwhile my storage gets new items added

10. take medicine or save & restart ?

medicine is for chumps.

11. where is your favorite spot in your village ?

HMMMM i rlly like my entrance !!!! its rlly neat and has green AND pink mums + trees..... and fencing and a path. IDK i worked hard on it and think it turned out rlly well !!!! other than that maybe my shopping area ? i dont have terraforming yet so theres a lot i Havent Gotten To wrt my island (like my cliffs are almost entirely undeveloped b/c i havent placed any inclines. so theres no pathing)

12. what achievement do you want to hit the most ? (ex: golden equipment, all fish / bugs, etc)

its not REALLY an achievement but i want all my dreamies real bad. after that i want a 5 star island !! i would like a lily of the valley. or 20.

13. do you know any secret tips ?

HMMM i dont think so ?? i dont really know any secrets. ive been trying out campsite cycling and it has Not been going well tho. if u need tips on tting to move villagers out or smthn i can help w that !! this is such a vague q that im like DO i know smthn ??? that is a secret ?????? i also vaguely know abt *m**b* sp**f*ng but im not allowed to do that soooo. thats a pipe dream. fun fact: its not a secret but gardening is SO fucking complicated theres genetics n shit. its wild. thank god someone straight up gave me blue roses so i dont have to go thru that shit. also do not tt backwards when dealing with turnips. not even 30 mins to save ur 600+ prices frm closing time. They Will Change

14. who are your dreamies ?

THESE CATS (i know major shocker from tumblr user pumakittycat. app is acnh life)

15. favorite furniture item ?

HMMMM THIS IS A TOUGH ONE. maybe mum cushions ? those r cute as fuck. i love every flower item, honestly, frm garden wagons to flower stands to pansy tables to hycanith lamps to. idk the bonsai shelf ? i have one of those. i also love my sea globe. its great. WAIT DO RUGS AND WALLS/FLOORS COUNT THERES NO QUESTIONS ABT THOSE i love so many FUCKING items. also autumn woods wall, if ur out there,

16. favorite clothing item / outfit ?

my green clover dress !!!! its the best thing EVER. my full outfit also consists of a silver tiara, a cherry blossom pouchette, white fishnets, and green rubbertoed sneakers. and, ofc, clover facepaint. ALSO FOR CONTEXT. my island is named clover bay thats why im like Clover Time. Theyre Important To The Aesthetic. im also an aro bitch who loves overall dresses. b/c they slap

17. favorite museum room ?

I LOVE THE LITTLE BUTTERFLY ROOM do not even TALK to me unless ur the butterfly room in the museum THERES SO MANY AT ALL TIMES ITS SO NICE

18. cedar, fruit, or palm tree ?

FRUIT. i literally chopped down every single hardwood tree on my island and replaced them w orange trees

19. favorite fruit ?

.......Oranges

20. favorite fish ?

HM. bitterling has a special place in my heart for being my Only fish model. whale sharks also rock tho. and thats only of the ones ive caught !!! i also love frogs, turtles, and obligatorily catfish. oh and seahorses and bettas

21. favorite bug ?

HM. ladybugs maybe. and both birdwings ! maybe also emperors butterflies. possibly others as well

22. favorite flower breed ?

MUMS !!!!!

23. favorite crossbred rare flower breed + color ?

GREEN MUMS.

24. favorite villager personality ?

havent we been over this ? im a dumb bitch who likes all of them way too much

25. favorite time of day to play ?

i uh. play. all the time. i tt a Lot tho so i like setting my time to 1pm ? idk it Feels like a good time

26. favorite special visitor event or reward ? (ex: selecting an art piece from redd, aiding guliver and getting a special item, etc)

SAHARAH. im obsessed w the fucking rugs and the tickets and the lottery. i also love celeste, and gulliver has a spot on the faves list for providing lucky cats sometimes (also a fave item) and for having been to space

27. favorite kk song ?

call me basic, but bubblegum kk plays at all times in my living room

28. favorite animal crossing game ?

ACNH lmao. i never really sat down and got Dedicated to city folk, which is the only other game ive played

29. if you’ve played animal crossing before, are there any animals you’re nostalgic for ? if this is your first game, has any animal in particular left some effect on you ?

ROVERRRRR come home :( also harriet.... i Miss Her. and resetti (i REFUSE to use rescue services dont @ me). and also the bus driver guy who took u to the city. If You Were An NPC In City Folk I Miss You Now

30. share a story from your gameplay

SO. i love the little alien easter egg. i set up a photoshoot and made like a little storyline abt the aliens and stuff. i even got a flying saucer and put that down and used it. and every fucking time !!!! i do shit with aliens !!!!!!! gulliver shows up on my beach. i know he went to space in cf n stuff (I GOT FLAVOR TEXT ONE TIME-- DURING NH-- ABT HIM NOT WANTING TO GO BACK EVEN) so i think its fucking hilarious that the aliens show up.... so does he

#rhi's asks #anon #acnh #LMAOOOOO thank u for asking so much....... heres a brick wall of text

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selfstorage2020-blog · 5 years ago

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Self Storage

15 Reasons Why You Should Be Storing Stuff You’re Not UsingClear up your life, and stash away your stuff.

Ladies and gents, our society has a “stuff” addiction. Our society glamorizes shopping, encourages us to buy stuff we don’t need, and also tends to suggest we constantly upgrade. Stuff can be good, but there’s always truth to the phrase “too much of a good thing.”

If you’re big into shopping or just buying the latest and greatest, you might end up with a lot of gear that we just don’t really have room for. Sure, certain things can be useful once in a while, but that doesn’t mean that we always have room for it.

People who are highly minimalistic will tell you that having too much stuff in your home can cause a lot of problems. If you’re ready to start clearing up your life, it may be time to look into storage services like Shed.

You would be shocked at how much of a difference using storage can make. The reasons described below are proof that storing little-used items can help you change your life for the better.

Storing little-used items in a separate area makes your home easier to clean.

Did you ever notice how much dust tends to collect when your table is filled with odds and ends? Anyone who has tried to clean a room filled with items that are barely ever used can tell you that every extra item you own will make a room harder and more time-consuming to clean.

The more items you have in your home, the harder it is to keep your home from turning into a mess. If you hate cleaning, then you really should start moving items into a separate storage facility. When you have fewer items to pick up, move around, polish, and dust, your cleaning time drops.

The biggest change you’ll notice is how much more relaxed you are without a home jam-packed with stuff.

Did you ever notice how suffocating being in a home that’s filled to the brim with items can be? If you get a bit more annoyed and agitated in rooms that are crowded with things that are never used, you’re not alone.

Apparently, storing away things that don’t get much use can help ease anxiety and promote mental wellbeing. Studies have shown that rooms that have less objects inside them are seen as more relaxing.

The biggest issue people have when they decide to get rid of stuff in their homes is the potential of losing things that they may eventually need. That’s why it’s often wiser to use a storage service like Shed than it is to just toss out things that you use once in a blue moon.

With Shed, if you need one of the items that you have in storage, you just need to order it back to your home via the easy-to-use app. Within two to five hours, that item will be delivered to your home. When you’re ready to get it out of your home again, just call up Shed to have them bring it back into storage.

It’s easier to find things when you have less to sort through.

Did you ever have to sort through a messy house to try to find your keys? It’s a chaotic ordeal that can make you late for an appointment or just make you feel lost. If you’ve ever had to bolt through rooms, tipping over every little thing to find your keys or wallet, you already know how aggravating it is.

Most of us have had points where the stuff we’ve bought hindered our ability to keep ourselves organized. Putting stuff you don’t regularly use in storage cuts the need to hunt for keys, wallets, and other daily use items in half.

More stuff means more allergies.

Stuff collects dust, especially if it isn’t frequently used. The more cluttered up your place is, the more dust will collect. If you have allergies, all that extra dust can take a serious toll on your health and wellbeing.

Take a look around your home. Do you find yourself in an uphill battle with dust? If so, it may be time to clear out your home of the things you really don’t need.

It also dissuades unwanted pests.

There’s a reason why pests are attracted to hoarder homes, you know. Excess items give bugs and other pests new places to hide, multiply, and skitter around unnoticed. It’s also way harder to clean areas that have too many obstacles, which makes it possible for errant crumbs to turn into food for smaller critters.

By reducing the amount of goods you have in your home, you make your place less hospital to creepy crawlies. That’s actually why many pest control experts emphasize keeping a clean, litter-free home.

Reference : https://shedstorage.com/

#self #Storage #Units

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storageunits2020-blog · 5 years ago

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Storage Units

15 Reasons Why You Should Be Storing Stuff You’re Not Using

Clear up your life, and stash away your stuff.

You would be shocked at how much of a difference using storage can make. The reasons described below are proof that storing little-used items can help you change your life for the better.

Storing little-used items in a separate area makes your home easier to clean.

The biggest change you’ll notice is how much more relaxed you are without a home jam-packed with stuff.

It’s easier to find things when you have less to sort through.

More stuff means more allergies.

Take a look around your home. Do you find yourself in an uphill battle with dust? If so, it may be time to clear out your home of the things you really don’t need.

It also dissuades unwanted pests.

Having less stuff around your home is also seen as more visually appealing.

Most people can tell you that hotel rooms often seem to emphasize a mess-free aesthetic that keeps things bare-bones. That’s by design—and not just because it’s easier for the staff members to clean, either.

Visually speaking, minimalist homes tends to be seen as more appealing, more organized, and more enjoyable. Keeping your items to a minimum is a great way to make sure that you have a home that will continue to elicit compliments from guests for years to come.

Most people also enjoy having more space.

Homes are now being made at increasingly large sizes, and that’s partly because of all the extra items we now own. If you have an older, smaller home, then you probably might be feeling a bit cramped due to the amount of goods you need to own.

Every single item that you own, useful or otherwise, will take up space and make you forget how much room you really do have in your home. If you’ve been feeling pretty claustrophobic, there’s a quick fix you can choose.

The fix for this is really simple—storage! Even removing something as simple as a bread maker you only use twice a year can make a huge difference in how open, free, and airy your home feels.

By storing your stuff rather than throw it away, you can also figure out what you actually need.

If you want to downsize your life and free yourself from excess materialism, using a storage facility is a great way to do it. Shed automatically catalogues all the items that you choose to store with them. If you realize that you don’t use an item after about a year of it being in your storage facility, you simply ask for the item back and throw it out.

You would be shocked at how many things quickly become “out of sight, out of mind.” By using a storage facility to suss out what you really should keep stored and what needs to be tossed out, you can help release yourself from too much bulk in your life.

There’s also a slightly lowered chance of getting hurt from stepping on the wrong thing.

Old gear and other items have a natural tendency of getting in our way, and that tends to cause small accidents to happen. Parents who may have stepped on a LEGO or students who have fallen over a laundry hamper can tell you that tripping over small messes left on the ground is not a pleasant experience.

The less items that you have strewn about your floor or hanging off the edge of your desk, the better off you’ll be—at least in terms of the likelihood of trying to avoid accidents.

Think about how much work it takes to throw a party. You have to clean your home, make space for guests, lock up valuables, and also put together a nice menu for everyone involved. Cleaning and just keeping items out of the way, though, tends to be the biggest pain in the rear end.

The biggest hurdle entertainers face is making sure they have enough room for guests. By removing your stuff and placing it in storage, you are making it possible to get your home prepped for guests sooner and also free up space for any other people they may bring to your place.

Better still, having a storage facility allows you to effortlessly find special party supplies that otherwise end up jammed into difficult-to-reach places. Before the invention of professional on-demand storage, you probably had to hunt through tons of boxes in the attic to find your Christmas decor.

On-demand storage means that finding those decorations becomes fast and effortless—as does cleanup. This means you can easily order that special Christmas decor the day before your party, send it back after you clean up, and ignore the fact that it exists until next holiday season.

If you work at home, you might notice that your concentration will improve.

It’s amazing how much of an effect a cramped, junk-filled room can turn into a distraction. It makes eyes wander, minds turn undisciplined, and even exacerbate anxiety that can make it difficult to focus on subjects at hand.

A place that keeps a minimalist appearance is a place where you can focus. By removing all the “extras,” you’re forcing your mind to focus. After all, they can’t distract you if you decide to remove them from sight.

When you have less stuff, it’s easier to change your home’s appearance.

Did you ever notice how much all the extra little stuff you own dictates the look of your room? The more stuff you have, the harder it is to make a dramatic change in your home’s look. When you have a home that is minimalist in nature, your aesthetics become more malleable.

In a minimalist home, doing something as simple as changing the color of your sheets can turn your room into a totally different place. If you love flexibility with your home’s appearance, you need to get a storage unit.

Many people tend to keep items that hold bad memories, simply because they aren’t ready to let them go. They keep them in their homes, which leads to them being stuck in the past, which in turn, keeps them feeling depressed and anxious.

An “out of sight, out of mind” approach to items that have negative memories tied to them can be incredibly healing for people who aren’t fully ready to part ways yet. By taking those items out of your home, you give yourself enough time to distance yourself from the memories and overcome the trauma.

It doesn’t really make sense to have to brush aside your Christmas tree in order to get to other items in your closet, does it? When you use some goods only once a year, it sometimes is better to just store them elsewhere and have them delivered on demand.

With Shed, you no longer have to worry about sifting through your Christmas decor to get your Halloween-related goods. If it’s far more convenient to use a storage facility to store all those little extras in life, by all means, you should. More often than not, you’ll find that it’s worth every penny.

Reference : https://shedstorage.com/

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selfstorage2019-blog · 5 years ago

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Self Storage

15 Reasons Why You Should Be Storing Stuff You’re Not UsingClear up your life, and stash away your stuff.

You would be shocked at how much of a difference using storage can make. The reasons described below are proof that storing little-used items can help you change your life for the better.

Storing little-used items in a separate area makes your home easier to clean.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

The biggest change you’ll notice is how much more relaxed you are without a home jam-packed with stuff.

It’s easier to find things when you have less to sort through.

More stuff means more allergies.

Photo by Shelby Miller on Unsplash

Take a look around your home. Do you find yourself in an uphill battle with dust? If so, it may be time to clear out your home of the things you really don’t need.

It also dissuades unwanted pests.

Having less stuff around your home is also seen as more visually appealing.

Photo by eniko kis on Unsplash

Most people also enjoy having more space.

The fix for this is really simple—storage! Even removing something as simple as a bread maker you only use twice a year can make a huge difference in how open, free, and airy your home feels.

By storing your stuff rather than throw it away, you can also figure out what you actually need.

Photo by Greta Schölderle Møller on Unsplash

There’s also a slightly lowered chance of getting hurt from stepping on the wrong thing.

The less items that you have strewn about your floor or hanging off the edge of your desk, the better off you’ll be—at least in terms of the likelihood of trying to avoid accidents.

If you work at home, you might notice that your concentration will improve.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When you have less stuff, it’s easier to change your home’s appearance.

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wesleybates · 4 years ago

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20 Web Programming Tips to Boost Your Skills

It is impossible to master everything there is when it comes to web programming, but there are programmers who are better than the others in this field. Learning something new to help you program better is important because this is what makes you a skilled programmer. Fortunately, there are so many tips, tricks and hacks on the web today that can benefit programmers, and help them by making their work easier and in the creation of better designs.

Here are some of those tips that you can use in order to boost your programming skills:

1.Always know what is trending in web programming

Clients will always look for a programmer that will give them something exciting, modern and stylish, that is why you need to know what is current in the web industry and what is old. You need to tame your skills in such a manner that you can design antique and stylish designs, as well as traditional and special ones depending on what the client is looking for.

2.Keep an eye on the finer details

In most cases, those particulars that seem irrelevant are the ones that are significant in the way your design will look like in the end, which is why everything should be important to you as you develop your website. Always work towards achieving a great outcome.

3.Use a team tracker

This is important for programmers who work with a team. Sometimes tracking progress through projects can be hard and time wasting. There are so many software out there that one can use for project management, especially those that have feature or bug tracking.

4.Give your websites a perfect navigation

Website navigation is very important to the end users, which is why you need to keep it simple and frank. Keep all your pages just a few clicks away from the main page. Your layout should also be great looking as this is what will encourage your users to click on.

5.Keep your apps up to date

Just like any other software, websites and applications should be kept up to date. There are modern developments every day, which affect the way people access and view the web. That is why you need to familiarize yourself with the latest features, techniques as well as modern safeties so as to develop websites that will be useful to the modern way user.

6. Save time by automating unit tests

It will take up a lot of your time if you deploy or manually run unit tests. In most cases, programmers are working on deadlines, you need to save as much time as you can and this is one sure way to achieve that.

7. Active phone numbers

Nowadays, a lot of people prefer to surf the web while on the move, and most of the mobile devices people are using have the ability to make calls. Take advantage of this and include active phone numbers on your website.

8. Choose colors carefully

Anything that you use on your websites will be significant and this works with colors as well. The colors you choose should always replicate the products, appearance as well as the market that you are targeting.

9. Utilize shortcuts

There are all kinds of shortcuts that can speed up your work and even help you program better. You can for instance turn your backgrounds, buttons and icons into sprites in order to speed up page downloads.

10. Give content your best shot

The most important thing on your website will be the content. This is what your visitors will rely on in order to understand what the website is all about. Ensure that your website content is appealing as well as tempting, for your users to read on to the end.

11. Make good use of SEO methods

Programmers should learn, understand and know how to apply SEO methods and practices in order to ensure that all their web pages will attract traffic and get a good ranking in the search engines. A good ranking will make it easy for its intended audience to see the website with ease when they search for it.

12. Always use perfect pictures

You should never get it wrong with the quality and type of pictures you use on your website. There are tools you can use for instance Pixel Perfect, just so you will ensure that your pictures are in perfect quality and resolution.

13. Don’t be quick to launch your projects

Once the website is created, take time to look for any mess there could be before you launch it so that it will not be an eye sore to anyone that will come cross it. Fine tune your websites until they give you the kind of results you had in mind.

14. Secure your websites

This should also happen before you go live with your website. YThey can offer advice on what you can do in case any of your projects fails any of the tests.

15. Get Git

You need a strong versioning system if you are working on big projects, and GitHub has won the hearts of many developers. This will not work though if your project is private because on GitHub’s servers, it will be publicly available. You can use GitLab though, as it is completely open source and one can set up his own servers.

16. Do one thing at a time

One principle that programmers should stick to is the single responsibility principle, whereby every object in the code must only have one function. Mixing up everything gets complicated in case something breaks and it becomes hard for you to trace back to where the problem started in order to fix it.

17. Always comment on your code

If you are working in a team, it is obvious that other people will see your projects. They need to understand your code; therefore you have to be a little organized. Comment on your code, name your layers and keep your FLAs and PSDs organized.

18. Photoshop actions

These are meant to ease your work.

19. Outsource your app’s mailing function

Managing your app’s mailing function might end up being a full time job. You can save yourself the trouble by outsourcing it.

20. Use more white space

Decreasing white space is one of the things that can reduce your page’s load times.

There is a lot you can achieve if you are able to learn something new every day. If you want to more tips please be in touch with the expert Web Developer in Edwards, CO.

#Web Development

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savetopnow · 7 years ago

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2018-04-06 18 TECH now

TECH

Ars Techica

Facebook can’t catch a break: Medical data-sharing plan halted

“Open sesame”: Industrial network gear hackable with the right username

Waze’s crazy routing over a 32% grade road is driving residents nuts

Lawbreakers “failed to find an audience,” dev officially admits FPS defeat

Dealmaster: Get a 15-inch Dell laptop with a Core i7 and 512GB SSD for $600

Buzzfeed Tech

Was Marc Jacobs' Chipotle Proposal An Ad?

The Guy Who Wrote The Book On The Deep State Wishes Trumpworld Would Shut Up About The Deep State

People Couldn’t Log In To Tinder To Cancel Their Dates Because Of Facebook

Facebook Now Says Cambridge Analytica Accessed Up To 87 Million People's Data

Nasim Aghdam Opened Fire On YouTube Because She Was "Upset" With Its Policies And Practices

CNet

Samsung estimates another quarter of record profit - CNET

Space sperm? NASA sending human swimmers to the ISS - CNET

Facebook says it's on the hunt for another Cambridge Analytica - CNET

SpaceX can't broadcast Earth images because of a murky license - CNET

2019 Chevy Spark gets a facelift, keeps Activ - Roadshow

Clean Technica

Tesla Model 3 = #1 In Q1 2018 US Electric Car Sales

Massterly — Wilhelmsen & KONGSBERG’s New Autonomous Shipping Firm

Volkswagen of America Appoints Ex-Tesla Manager as Vice President of NAR-G4 Team

PSA Group Announces New EV Unit — Is The Company Now Serious About Plug-In Vehicles?

Power Sector Carbon Index Highlights Falling Levels Of Carbon Pollution

Hacker News

Dozen black holes found at galactic centre

Fullstack Academy is looking for developers who love teaching

C++17 Compiler Bug Hunt: Very First Results (12 bugs reported, 3 already fixed)

Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata dies at 82

Facebook was in talks with hospitals about a proposal to share data

Mashable

'Stranger Things' star realizes dream of meeting a Kardashian

Eggs, ranked

'Where's Waldo?' is hiding in Google Maps for April Fool's Day

Hundreds gather to bid farewell to Stephen Hawking

Tesla Autopilot was turned on when the fatal crash in California occurred

Motherboard

The FCC Is Refusing to Release Emails About Ajit Pai's 'Harlem Shake' Video

This Salad Was Grown in Antarctica

Okay, Let’s Talk About John McAfee’s Paid Cryptocurrency Promotions

Scientists Have Measured the 'Color' of Antimatter for the First Time

Facebook Needs to Do More to Stop the Online Opioid Market, Says FDA Chief

New York Times Technology

Common Sense: With Tesla in a Danger Zone, Can Model 3 Carry It to Safety?

YouTube Shooting Puts a Focus on Workplace Security

Groups in Myanmar Fire Back at Zuckerberg

Tinder and Bumble Are Seriously at War

Sleeping in Car and Visiting Gun Range: How YouTube Attacker Spent Final Hours

Recode

Steve Jurvetson appears to be starting his own venture capital firm

How to watch Apple CEO Tim Cook’s MSNBC interview with Kara Swisher and Chris Hayes on Friday

Domo, the once secretive $2 billion software company led by Josh James, is moving to go public

Lawyer bots take the hassle out of fighting parking tickets and property taxes — and could cost local governments real revenue

The shooting at YouTube HQ

Reddit Technology

Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

Facebook Decides to Back Off Creepy Hospital Data-Sharing Project for Some Reason

Users would have to pay to opt out of all Facebook ads, Sheryl Sandberg says

Facebook fined $33 million for failing to aid Brazil graft probe | Reuters

More Colorado Towns Vote Down A Comcast State Law Hamstringing Broadband Competition

Reuters Technology

Grab's Uber deal still has some obstacles to navigate

Singapore regulator says Uber app to delay shutdown amid competition review

Activist fund says Toshiba chip unit worth as much as double sale price

Samsung Elec tips record first quarter profit as chip boom winds down

Uber rival Didi makes Mexico launch official, recruits drivers

Slashdot

Canada Has Pulled Off a Brain Heist

EFF: Google Should Not Help the US Military Build Unaccountable AI Systems

The FCC Is Refusing To Release Emails About Ajit Pai's 'Harlem Shake' Video

Motorola's Modular Smartphone Dream Is Too Young To Die

Microsoft Modifies Open-Source Code, Blows Hole In Windows Defender

TechCrunch

Grab delays shuttering Uber app in Southeast Asia as Singapore probes merger deal

PlayingViral helps marketers grabs millennials’ attention with quick, interactive surveys

Samsung, now the world’s largest chipmaker, forecasts record Q1 profit

Crypto exchange Coincheck, still recovering from $400M hack, sold to online brokerage

Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes

The Next Web

Facebook admits it deleted messages Mark Zuckerberg sent, for ‘corporate security’

India slams the brakes on cryptocurrency trading

Falling behind the trends? 12 ways to successfully adapt and catch up

Snapdragon-powered Windows PCs are getting 64-bit app support

Facebook hits the brakes on creepy project to access your patient data from hospitals

The Verge

Facebook deleted Mark Zuckerberg’s Messenger texts without telling anyone

Snapchat is finally releasing its special Lenses for iPhone X users

Studio Ghibli anime legend Isao Takahata dies at 82

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electricoutdoors · 5 years ago

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Prepping 2020 – 41 Tips and Tricks for New and Old Preppers Alike!

Prepping

If you’ve been prepping for any length of time then these may be a refresher or they may be brand new. If you’re just starting in the prepping/preparedness world, then these will most likely be new to you. Either way, there’s something for everyone in this list of prepping tips.

What are the best prepping tips that everyone should know? The best prepping tips are:

Always be ready to learn

Bug out only as a last resort

Even if you live in an apartment, you can still be prepared

Water is the most important thing to store

Don’t get overwhelmed as a new prepper

Understand the threats you’re likely to encounter

Learn to grow your own food

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Prepping

41 Prepping Tips Everyone Can Use

Conclusion

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Prepping Tips Everyone Can Use

As a new prepper, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Sit down and write out a quick list of things you need when you first start prepping.

Water, food, and defense should top your list but you don’t have to rush out and get everything today. Prepping can get expensive. Break your list down by priority and add a little each week to your stores.

If you live somewhere with plenty of water available, maybe you just need to buy a Big Berky water filter the first week to meet all of your water needs. Add a few cans of food for the next couple of weeks until you have some food put away.

Your situation will change depending on where you live and how much you can afford each week. Just take it slow and do it in manageable chunks. Before you know it, you’ll have the secure feeling that comes from being prepared!

Prepping means you should always be ready to learn.

It’s often said that knowledge is power, and that is especially true in the world of readiness. Keep an open mind and try to learn more every day. Just because someone has a view that opposes yours does not mean that there is nothing you can learn from them! In fact, I find that I often learn the most from people with different viewpoints than me.

Even if a disaster does strike, you can (and should) continue to learn from your successes and especially from your failures.

Bugging out should not be your first option in a disaster.

If you are planning to bug out at the first sign of a collapse, then you are probably living in the wrong area.

Make plans to move to an area that is likely to be a good place to bug in. This doesn’t mean drop everything and move into the middle of the woods. It does mean that if prepping is something that is going to be a big part of your life, then you need to get to an area that is safe for you and your family.

Even moving out of the city and into the suburbs is a huge improvement on your prepping situation. In the end, it’s up to each of us to decide when to bug in or bug out.

Just because you live in a city or an apartment doesn’t mean that you can’t be prepared.

Not everyone can simply pack up and move to a rural community. If you’re stuck in a situation like this, then you need to begin to learn the vulnerabilities of that area. Then, start to counter each of those vulnerabilities as best as you can.

Remember, no one is 100% prepared for everything. Your job is to be as prepared as you can be in the situation that you are in. As long as you are improving your situation, you’re on the right track.

If you can’t move away from the city, we suggest that you put together a bug out bag.

Learn to use the space that you have available.

This is especially important if you live in an apartment or a small home. You can buy or build sliding storage racks or totes that will allow you to store food, water, and supplies under your bed.

The normal queen size bed can store around 43 sq/ft of goods. A king-size bed can keep around 60 sq/ft under it. This is assuming 1 ½ feet of clearance under the bed.

The back of the closet often goes unused. Build or buy shelving for that area. You can stack boxes or canned food and cover them with a sheet then use them as end tables or nightstands. Small racks on the inside of closet doors can be a great place to store canned foods.

Get creative and look around for those spaces that aren’t being used. Creativity is one of the keys to prepping in less than ideal situations.

Use modern apps and web-based programs.

Google maps is a great planning tool for anyone who is a prepper. Having a satellite view of your surroundings gives you a solid place to begin your planning.

Printing out these maps and incorporating them into your defensive plans is a good idea so you have them available when you need them.

There are a lot of good mobile apps as well. Apps like Golf GPS for the iPhone can give you the range of objects relative to your location. Other apps like BulletDrop can be used to figure out, you guessed it, the drop of a bullet based on its weight and muzzle velocity.

By browsing the app stores, you can probably come up with more apps that would be useful for prepping.

There are many areas of your home that can provide you with water following a disaster.

Water in the tank of your toilet can hold around 3 gallons of drinkable water. Your water heater is also a great source of water. By draining your water heater you can get up to 40 gallons of water. Another possibility is draining the pipes in your house. By opening a faucet on the top floor then collecting the water from a faucet on the ground floor, you could end up with another couple gallons of water.

A water BOB is another great idea. As long as you can fill them before a disaster strikes, they make a great way to store water for almost anyone.

Learn to use the Emergency Response Guide (ERG).

The ERG is a book that allows first responders to identify hazardous materials, their labels, containers, hazards and appropriate protective equipment.

In a post-collapse environment, factories, pipelines, and chemical plants will still be a part of the landscape. Having access to an ERG will allow you to identify hazards if you are looking for supplies in these areas. It would also make a great addition to your prepping library in order to help treat accidental exposure to these chemicals.

A PDF of the ERG makes a great addition to a prepping library and can be located here for free. There is an Android and iPhone App available there as well.

You can’t only focus on your strengths.

We all have a tendency to like to do the things that we’re good at.

You should take an honest look at yourself and see where you need to get better. Once you’ve identified those things, don’t shy away from them. Attack them and learn everything you can about the areas where you’re the weakest.

If you’re really good with a rifle but have no idea how to grow a garden, guess what? You’re a gardener until you know what you’re doing. Gaining survival skills is just as important (if not more important) as gathering food, water, and other prepping gear. Plus, they’re easier to carry around.

Mountain bikes make a great post-collapse vehicle.

A bike could be a lifesaver after a collapse or even in a short-term breakdown.

When fuel cannot be delivered, a bike of some kind will provide the ability to travel distances at speed. Add in a trailer and your ability to carry gear will increase by about 100 lbs.

A mountain bike will give you more travel options if you should decide to bug out. Riding along train tracks or cuts made for power lines could keep you off the roads when everyone else is stuck in traffic. Check out our article on mountain bikes as post-collapse vehicles.

Have a plan to get your family together in one place if an event occurs when you’re separated.

This plan should be something that you and your family can implement without the need to communicate in case cell phones don’t work.

As an example, your plan may be that if something occurs while you’re at work, then your wife or husband will go get the kids from school and you will work your way back to the house. You could also have each parent get one child and then you both head home.

Your plan will vary depending on your specific situation, but it should be something that everyone knows. As with any plan, it helps to practice it.

The internet contains a wealth of knowledge.

You can find entire libraries worth of prepping books to download for free by just using Google. Take advantage of that while you can! Following a disaster, you may not have access to the internet for a long time (if ever).

Print the resources you need most and keep them in three-ring binders for when you need them. Add these binders to your prepping library.

You can also store all those books on a thumb drive or external hard drive. Keep it in a safe place and you could potentially have access to them even after a disaster. As long as you have some way to charge a laptop, you should be able to access a computer following most disasters.

Purchase a firearm to protect you and your family.

Guns aren’t the most important thing to have, but you need to be able to protect yourself and your family from potential criminals and thieves.

What you buy will depend on your budget. For those with a lower budget, I would suggest a pistol if you can conceal carry in the area that you live.

If you can only have a firearm in your home, then I’d say to get a 12-gauge shotgun. If you happen to have a higher budget then I’d suggest an AR-15 for home defense and a pistol. This is always a topic that spurs a debate.

Ultimately, whatever you can afford is better than nothing. If you live in a country that doesn’t allow you to have firearms then you’ll have to be creative when looking for weapons for self-defense.

Hand to hand weapons have been used forever. Baseball bats, knives, machetes, axes, and tomahawks are all viable options for self-defense if you are prepping and cannot buy a firearm.

Get in shape now!

Prepping itself isn’t normally hard work, but the strain of a post-collapse life is.

If all of the modern conveniences we take for granted are gone, then something as simple as getting drinking water could become a backbreaking ordeal.

A lack of strength and flexibility also means that you are more likely to get injured. Being overweight increases the chances of heart disease, diabetes (which could be a death sentence in a grid down situation), and many other negative health effects.

If you needed to walk 20 miles a day could you do it? Could you wake up the next day after a couple hours of sleep and do it again? These are questions that you honestly need to ask yourself.

Starting a basic exercise program will make all aspects of your life better.

Expensive solar panels aren’t the only way to get power from the sun.

There are a bunch of portable solar charging options available now for right around $75. These solar chargers are typically aimed at charging cell phones but they can also charge batteries or battery packs. I’ve used Goal Zero products a lot and I’ve never had a problem with them. There are other brands on the market but I don’t have much experience with them.

More extensive solar power options are available. Prepping to power your entire home after a collapse is possible if you’re willing to put the time, money and effort into it.

Storing water should be your first priority.

We can only live a for a couple of days without water. You should plan around a gallon of water, per day, per family member. For a family of three or four that can add up quickly.

Water also take up a lot of space and is very heavy making it one of the more difficult items to store. There is a wide variety of prepping water storage containers available for sale. They can get expensive but they also have the added benefit of being stackable.

A less expensive way to store water when you’re first starting out prepping is by rinsing out old soda bottles and filling them from the tap or just buying cases of bottled water. These containers are not as strong as purpose build water storage containers, so be careful when stacking them.

You can help improve the taste of water that has been stored for a long time by pouring it back and forth between two containers.

Get to know your neighbors before a disaster strikes!

Following a collapse, we will all have to work together. You can start by simply learning your neighbors’ names or waving as you drive past them. You don’t have to become best friends with them, but at least being familiar with them can go a long way when you may need their help.

Even if you live in the middle of nowhere, getting to know your closest neighbors is a good idea. The lone prepper or prepper family is not the best idea and the crazy homicidal prepper certainly isn’t going to work.

You will need help to do everything that is needed in the event of a long-term collapse.

Dealing with bodies in an SHTF world is something that we will need to become accustomed to.

If you come across a corpse, it may smell bad, but the likelihood of it transmitting diseases to you is low. This is especially true if they died of starvation, dehydration or trauma (such as a gunshot wound or falling debris).

A corpse will contaminate water, so they should be moved away from bodies of water or groundwater. They will also bring vermin to the area, that will transmit diseases.

Burying or burning bodies is the best way to keep vermin away. Just make sure you bury them deep enough that scavengers won’t dig them back up and far enough from water sources that they will not contaminate your water supply as they decompose.

Keep a get home bag in your vehicle if you work or spend a lot of time away from home.

When you’re prepping this bag, remember that you’re only trying to get home from where you would most likely get stranded.

I would plan on moving no more than 15-20 miles a day on foot, so pack with those distances in mind. If you work 17 miles from your house then pack food and water for one or two days.

Pack some light food items (such as protein bars), several bottles of water, some kind of light shelter (space blanket or small tarp), a first aid kit, a pistol or light rifle with a couple magazines, sneakers or hiking boots and a change of socks and t-shirt would round out any get home bag I would build.

Keep it light and get home as fast as you can.

Know how to disinfect water, and know several methods to do so.

Prior to starting to disinfect your water, you should do your best to filter out solid particulates or let them settle and scoop out the clean water into another container.

Water purification tablets are an easy and inexpensive way to disinfect water. Boiling is another method, heat the water to a rolling boil for one minute (three minutes if above 5000 ft), then let it cool.

You can also use household bleach to disinfect water. Use unscented bleach that is less than a year old, add 2 drops to one liter of water or six drops to a gallon of water. Let it stand for 30 minutes and make sure it has a slight chlorine scent. For cloudy, cold or discolored water, double the amount of bleach.

Make sure you’re prepping items so you can also filter water. Buying a quality survival water filtration system should be one of your priorities when you first start prepping.

It’s good to know how to build a few basic defensive fortifications.

A couple of useful fortifications are the abatis and defensive fighting position (DFP).

An abatis is useful for diverting or stopping traffic on roadways. You can build one by felling or dragging trees onto the road and interlacing them together to form a continuous barrier that a vehicle would not be able to pass.

The DFP is nothing more than a hole in its most basic form. It should be two rifles long, one rifle wide and roughly deep enough to allow the tallest person to be covered up to their armpits. To improve the DFP add frontal and overhead protection and conceal it as best as you can.

Prepping basic fortifications ahead of time will greatly increase your survivability during a no-notice collapse.

Be aware of the threats that you are likely to encounter and try to avoid them.

When prepping, the best way to defend against any given threat is to avoid the places that those threats are likely to occur.

The threats we face today are most likely related to Islamic extremism. With this in mind, prepping for a vehicle-borne attack, bombing, shooting or stabbing are all likely. Avoiding crowds, especially those around protests and political/religious events is the best way to stay away from these threats.

If you do need to be around large crowds, be aware of your surroundings, keep an eye out for suspicious people and move away from any possible confrontations. In a post-collapse environment, areas like FEMA camps, food & water distribution areas and markets could all be potential areas for violence.

Do not let your pride overcome common sense. Walking away from a confrontation is almost always the better idea.

Not disposing of trash in the correct way is guaranteed to attract vermin, scavengers and spread disease.

Prepping to handle the garbage that you’re going to be creating is something many people overlook.

Today, we are used to just dropping our trash off at the curb, going to work and coming home to an empty trashcan. Most people are in for a rude awakening if those services ever come to an end.

At our current rate, each person makes about 6 pounds of trash per day. Limiting the amount of trash that you produce is going to be your best bet. What you do produce can be burned or buried away from your home.

If you live in an apartment, you will have to make sure that people do not pile trash up against the building. This could be used as fuel for a fire to burn the building down, on top of the threat of disease and animals.

Basics like smoke alarms and fire extinguishers can save lives.

This is an everyday prep. Fires kill around 2,500 people annually in the U.S. and injure another 12,000.

Have a working smoke alarm outside of each bedroom. Check them monthly!

Make sure your every family member knows where to meet in the case of a fire in your home. Practicing the evacuation is a good idea, especially if you have small children. More ideas and further information about fire extinguishers can be found in our article about prepping for a home fire.

After a collapse, fire is going to be a common weapon used by looters and marauders! Having extra fire extinguishers is a good idea.

Carry a firearm with you whenever you can.

This topic is another one that always causes several debates, pistol or revolver, what caliber, do you need night sights, etc. I say carry whatever you are comfortable with.

In the end, the most important thing is that you’re armed. This is another everyday prepping item. If your state allows for concealed carry, then I would suggest applying now if you haven’t already. You are the only one that can protect yourself or your family. The police are not going to be there until it’s too late.

Weapons like retention knives, kubotans, and tactical pens make great back-ups when you’re carrying a firearm.

They’re also better than nothing if you’re prepping in areas where you cannot carry a firearm.

Knives like the Ka-Bar TDI can be hidden along the beltline on the weak side. If you are struggling with an attacker, this allows you to draw the blade while maintaining control of your firearm with your strong hand.

Kubotans (like the Cold Steel Mini Koga) are blunt weapons that can be used to apply pressure to pressure points or used in a closed fist to strike at soft areas like the temples, throat, and eyes. So-called tactical pens normally fall somewhere between a pen and kubotan. You can use them in a similar manner to a kubotan.

If you’re carrying any of these as a primary means of defense then you should carry them on your strong side.

Just because you live in the city doesn’t mean that you cannot grow some of your own food.

As long as you have windows that get a few hours of sunlight a day or can get access to the roof, you’re in business. Container gardens are a great way to supplement your food storage.

Lettuce, cabbage, greens, tomatoes, beans, peppers, carrots, radishes and potatoes are all good options for a container garden. In shady areas, plant lettuce, cabbage, and greens. For sunny areas, tomatoes, beans, peppers, carrots, radishes, and potatoes work well. Cucumbers, squash, and pumpkins can also be grown in pots as long as they have something to grow on. Planting them near a fence or railing would give them the staking they need.

Come up with a plan to dispose of human waste.

In the very short term, or if you’re just traveling through an area, you can dig a hole, go to the bathroom, then cover it back up. This can’t be your plan for the long term. Holes full of human waste all over your yard will breed disease and shouldn’t be part of your prepping 2019 plan. In fact, many of the most dangerous diseases you will encounter in a post-collapse environment are transmitted through contact with human feces.

Proper hygiene is necessary for long term survival.

There are many sustainable methods of waste disposal available to you. The cheapest medium-term solution is something like the Luggable Loo or SereneLife Outdoor Toilet. These still leave you with the problem of dealing with the waste, but they are certainly more comfortable than digging a hole.

A composting toilet is great if you’re looking for a more permanent solution. The cheapest, long-term fix is the use of an outhouse. They’ve worked for centuries and there’s no reason why they won’t work again.

Learn how to stop severe bleeding.

Prepping to control bleeding is one of the most important parts of first aid.

For minor bleeding, apply pressure and elevate the wound above the heart. If you’re trying to treat heavy bleeding, don’t be afraid to use a tourniquet if the wound is on an appendage. For large, gaping wounds, you should pack the wound with gauze or a bandage impregnated with a hemostatic agent.

Our article on how to stop bleeding goes much deer into the subject.

Find several places that you can get water around the area that you live.

Lakes, streams, and ponds are all great places to start. Don’t overlook man-made bodies of water like pools and water hazards on golf courses.

Take a look at the horizon, chances are you’ll notice a few water towers in the area. Gathering water from them will not always be very straightforward. Getting a basic understanding of how they work before a disaster occurs is a good idea.

Examining the maps available at Water Resources of the United States is another place you can look to try to find water in your area. Make note of these water sources and mark them on a map in case you need them in the future.

Regardless of where your water comes from, learning where to get it and how to make sure it’s drinkable is one of the core prepping skills.

Build a bug out bag.

Building a bug out bag is often seen as a right of passage when you start prepping. Build it with YOUR needs in mind and it won’t let you down when you need it most.

What really needs to get discussed is realistic weights. I’ve seen some ridiculous weights quoted in different areas. Most people shouldn’t pack more than 45 lbs (probably closer to 35 lbs) in a bug out bag. If you’re just going to throw it in your Jeep and drive off, then put as much crap in there as you want. If you’re going to actually walk away from your house with it, keep it light.

Focusing on gear that has multiple uses will help you keep the weight in check a little better. Adding items that will let you filter water and capture food will last longer than carrying food and water in your bag.

Make sure you read about why a bug out bag is necessary.

Know how to use your food storage items.

Things like red wheat berries can seem completely foreign to you when you first start prepping if you don’t familiarize yourself with them.

Wheat berries can be ground down into regular flour with a hand grinder. White wheat is engineered from red wheat. Red wheat can have a bitter taste so it is normally mixed with more sugar than white wheat. Grinding red wheat into flour is good for making hard bread and white wheat flour is better for softer bread. You can also boil wheat berries and eat them whole.

Powdered milk can be used to make everything from yogurt to hot chocolate to cottage cheese.

Beans and rice a kind of self-explanatory but there are tons of creative ways to use them.

You don’t need to plan out complete meals, but I suggest printing out some basic recipes as well as some more in-depth ones to keep your food interesting. Food can be a great way to relax and provide a much-needed distraction and some comfort in really horrible situations.

Get hard copies of local maps.

They can be difficult to find these days with GPS and cell phones everywhere, but you should have hard copy maps available and know how to use them.

I like to have detailed maps of my local area and any areas I may stop along the way to a possible bug out location. Then slightly less detailed maps of the areas surrounding that. Finally, I keep a current American road atlas available as a good overall map of the country.

Consider keeping the materials for a homemade greenhouse on hand.

PVC pipes, PVC fittings, and heavy gauge plastic are all you need to make a basic greenhouse. This type of construction can be flimsy and won’t stand up to strong winds. Stronger materials will be needed if you live in an area that experiences high winds.

The ideal temperature for a greenhouse is 80-85 degrees. Make sure you can regulate and monitor the temperatures in your DIY greenhouse.

In the springtime, you can start your plants from seeds. Keep them in the greenhouse until there is no more threat of frost. In the winter, plant cold-resistant vegetables like lettuce. For long-term use, I’d suggest something along the lines of the DIY greenhouse kits that Bootstrap Farmer offers.

Collect rainwater can make water collection easier.

Something as simple as draping a tarp or large trash bag between two lawn chairs can be used to collect rainwater. A more advanced, permanent option, comes in the form of rain barrels. You can buy everything from aesthetically pleasing barrels that would fit naturally into your backyard, all the way to 100-gallon or 250-gallon barrels.

I like the portable rain barrels since they can be collapsed and stored until you decide that you need it. Ultimately, all you need is a container that can hold water and some way to catch or divert the rain into that container. Make sure the container doesn’t allow sunlight in if you plan on storing water in it for an extended period of time. This will help keep the growth of algae to a minimum.

There are tons of DIY projects out there for when you first get started prepping. Just search on Google for rain barrels.

Get it through your head that you cannot defend your home from the front door.

If you’re in a position where your home is, or could be in danger, from gangs, looter, marauders, etc. then you need to have security set up away from your house. This is one of the key things that a community provides.

Block access to your neighborhood with vehicles, concrete barriers, abatis or other barriers that can stop traffic from entering. Have only one way in and out and set up a checkpoint. Interview everyone that you don’t recognize. You’re asking to get burned out of your house if you think you can hide and wait for them to come to you. Defending your family is one of the main reasons that we get involved with prepping.

Keep your home and the surrounding area clear of dead trees and flammable debris.

In a post-collapse environment, I believe fires will be a source of many injuries and deaths.

Trees, leaves, and debris need to kept at a manageable level. Wood piles should be at least 30 feet from your living area. Make sure trees and branches aren’t touching your chimney. This may not be that much of a problem as you will likely be burning wood for heat/cooking. Use common sense when you are looking at your surroundings. Move flammable materials away from your living area if they could catch it on fire.

It’s really that simple but it’s also something that can be easily overlooked when there’s a lot going on.

Consider storing some modern adhesives and sealants.

Everyone loves duct tape and talks about how you can use it for everything. It’s an excellent product and you should definitely have some on hand but there are other things out there that you preppers should consider.

One thing I don’t hear a lot about is storing items like Flex Seal, expanding two-part foam and epoxy. There is any number of prepping situations that I can think of when these would come in handy. Be sure to check shelf lives as most of these products only have a shelf life of 1 or 2 years. The short shelf life definitely doesn’t lend itself to extended storage. I’d be interested to hear from someone who has used these products after that shelf life and see if they still hold up. I have personally used a two-part epoxy that was around 5 years past its advertised shelf life and had no problems.

Be aware of the threats posed by a flood.

How many times have you watched the news and wondered how can those people be so stupid? Why would they drive through that water? I see it all the time, so I wanted to touch on some guidelines for prepping to deal with floods and crossing flooded areas.

If there is a flood warning near your home, move valuables and furniture to the highest floors of the house. Disconnect appliances and do not touch wet electronics. While the electricity in your house normally only causes a painful shock, electronics can have capacitors which allow them to store enough electricity to cause a deadly shock.

Floodwater is often contaminated with human waste which is the leading cause of deadly waterborne diseases. You should only move across flooded areas if it’s absolutely necessary. Six inches of moving water can knock you down, one foot of moving water is enough to sweep away a vehicle.

Eyecare is very important during times with limited or no professional medical treatment.

Make sure you have several pairs of glasses available with your current prescription and never wear contacts in a post-collapse environment.

Try to keep your hands away from your eyes. Touching your eyes when your hands are dirty can lead to many different diseases. Some of them are easily treated with modern medicines, but with limited access to these medications, they could eventually lead to vision impairment or complete blindness.

If you don’t wear glasses, consider buying a pair of safety glasses. Adding safety glasses to your prepping supplies should be one of the first things you do when you get started prepping.

Conclusion

Prepping isn’t always easy. This is especially true when you first start prepping! Some of our readers have prepped for decades and have a lot of great ideas when it comes to prepping. If you have questions, put them in the comments.

Do you have any prepping tips you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments.

The article Prepping 2020 – 41 Tips and Tricks for New and Old Preppers Alike! is courtesy of: ready lifestyle

Prepping 2020 – 41 Tips and Tricks for New and Old Preppers Alike! published first on https://readylifesytle.tumblr.com

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 6 years ago

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Keyword research tips for the finance industry

A common mistake even experienced marketers make is to overestimate Google’s powers. There’s no denying that Google is an amazingly successful business. Its parent company, Alphabet, is the fifth most valuable company in the world according to the accounting firm, PwC. It completely dominates search, handling more than 90 per cent of queries in Australia and New Zealand.

It’s also true that Google’s algorithm for ranking website content has become increasingly sophisticated in the 20 years since the company was founded. Google leverages machine learning to handle 5 billion daily queries, up to 15 per cent of which have never been searched before. There are 200+ signals, daily tweaks and regular, more significant overhauls of how it all works.

But don’t get carried away and start assigning human qualities to an algorithm. Google is not “reading” your blogs and sending organic traffic your way because it “enjoyed” them. A lot of what Google’s search algorithm does is pretty simple. And the fundamentals of search engine optimisation (SEO) hold true today even if tricking Google into ranking your weak content is now much more difficult.

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One of those SEO fundamentals is keyword research. In this post, we’ll provide our actionable tips for doing effective keyword research, specifically for the finance industry. We’ve worked with clients from across the finance space, so we can draw on our first-hand experience. Before we get to our tips, let’s start by looking at some of the SEO challenges finance sites often face.

Keyword research for the finance industry: common hurdles

Building and implementing a successful SEO strategy these days is challenging in any industry. But there are some specific challenges that our finance clients have faced in the past. If you’re working in this space, chances are you’ve run into these challenges too.

1. Getting new content through compliance

Finance firms have to be especially careful about what they publish on their websites. In other industries you might be able to give tips and advice or comment on what’s in the news without any risk of blow-back. That’s not the case if you’re a bank, insurance company or accounting firm.

Your landing pages and blog posts will need to go through your compliance team before they get published, otherwise you could face the wrath of disgruntled members of the public or a fine from the regulator. This can present a big challenge to the marketing team because getting new and updated content on to the site is essential if they want to win more organic search traffic.

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Compliance will be particularly nervous about content targeting the most valuable keywords. These are the terms with strong purchase intent. People Googling these terms are ready to buy, but to answer their queries you’ll need to get into the specifics of how your products work. This is the sort of content compliance teams get nervous about.

Ideas for getting around this problem:

Interviews: trust is such a big factor when it comes to running successful content marketing campaigns for finance clients. So, a human face and the personal credibility and in-depth knowledge of key employees are great assets. These people are busy and their time is valuable, so interviews that we can turn into blogs or landing page copy are an excellent way to get compliance-friendly, accurate content with the necessary technical detail.

Low volume, high value: if compliance has to approve everything you create it can help to reduce the number of deliverables. This could mean building the strategy around the big, substantial editorial pieces rather than 40 new blogs, all of which need sign-off before going live. You can also repurpose content that’s already been through compliance into different formats. That might mean splitting up an ebook in to a series of blogs or taking a long-form blog post and turning it into an infographic.

2. Nurturing leads through a long sales cycle

The finance clients we’ve worked with tend not to sell the sorts of products people buy on a whim. It takes more than an eye catching social media ad or a clever blog post to prompt someone to take out a mortgage, move their super fund or sign up for new accounting software.

Finance is one of those industries where people take time over their decisions. This is both a challenge and an opportunity. Keyword research isn’t just about the high purchase intent terms we mentioned in the previous section. Keyword research should support each stage of the sales funnel.

For finance clients that means targeting keywords that people are searching on during their initial research, through the middle of the funnel when they’re digging into specifics and down to the bottom of the funnel when they’re deciding who to trust with their money.

via GIPHY

Ideas for getting around this problem:

Aiming higher: when finance clients first engage us the big gap in their SEO and content marketing strategy tends to be at the top of the funnel. The finance industry has some of the most competitive keywords on the internet. Winning bids on Google Ads for “life insurance”, for example, can top AUD $160 per click. You might need to compete there, but you should also compete earlier in the sales cycle where the keywords are less valuable but also less competitive;

Remarketing: this long nurture process for selling finance products needs a good remarketing strategy. It’s one thing filling the top of your funnel by producing quality blogs that hook people in from search engines, but you don’t get from there to money in the bank without being proactive. You would need email first of all. The oldest digital marketing tactic but still one of the most cost effective. And remarketing tags on your site so you can build audiences of people who have read your blog or hit certain landing pages. You can then retarget these people with follow-up ads on social media or around the web.

Keyword research for the finance industry: actionable tips

Okay, so those are some of the challenges, now here are our top tips for doing keyword research for finance clients. We’ve organised them into three steps, which you should do in order: Step 1: SEO audit; Step 2: Keyword tools; and Step 3: Blog and landing page strategy.

Step 1: SEO audit

Our first keyword research tip is a bit like loosening your belt before a big meal. An SEO audit should identify improvements you can make to your site that will help your pages rank better in search. You should do this before you start researching keywords and editing or creating content.

Usually, an SEO audit will highlight technical changes or bug fixes that prepare the ground for the more substantive project of identifying keywords you want to win and developing a strategy to go out and win them.

You should expect an SEO audit to look at your Search Console set-up, internal links, external links, broken links, title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, mobile friendliness, page speed, URL structure and indexing issues, among other things. Do this first and your good work won’t be hamstrung by crawlability issues.

Step 2: Keyword tools

Now it’s time to get started and you’re going to need some help. There are plenty of third party tools, some of which we use, that can help with keyword research. For our tips though we’re going to stick to the free stuff.

First up is Google’s Keyword Planner, for which you will need a Google Ads account. While this tool is intended to help you create and run pay per click (PPC) campaigns, it is also really useful for SEO. You can use it to get monthly search volume for the keywords you’re thinking of targeting. The average cost per click (CPC) and Google’s difficulty score give you an indication of how hard it will be to rank for those keywords.

You can also get historical data, such as search volume trends. This can be particularly useful in finance where demand for certain products or the number of questions about particular topics vary through the year (financial quarters, end of tax year etc).

Once you’ve identified keywords with enough search volume to make them worth your while you need to look at the competition. If you’re not sure how many monthly searches is enough, this is a good rule of thumb: the top three places in SERPS can expect clickthrough of around 30 per cent. Down the bottom of page one it’s more like 2 or 3 per cent. So, if a query has 1,000 searches per month and you rank #1, you might get 300 clicks.

Like picking keywords, analysing the competition is something there are plenty of paid apps to help with. But again, here’s how to do it for free. Start by Googling the keyword you want to target and look at the results. Is your website and the content you can create able to break into the top three places?

A useful free tool to help here is the MozBar. You can use this Chrome extension to quickly see the Domain Authority (DA) of each link ranking on page one for your target keyword.

We could do a whole post on DA and it’s not perfect, but it does give you an indication of the search power of sites you want to compete with. If your SERP is packed with links from sites with DAs of 60+ and you’re working with a DA of 20 you’ve got an uphill battle breaking in and you might need to find somewhere else to compete.

Step 3: Blog and landing page strategy

When you’ve got your keyword list you need some content. It sounds obvious but if you want to rank for a particular search query then you need a landing page or blog post that directly answers that query.

Google’s algorithm does a much better job these days of connecting content to queries without an exact match. But that doesn’t mean you can write what you want and expect Google to figure it out. What it means is you don’t need to write blog headlines in the same way as you would write (or speak) a search query.

But Google is also digging deeper to find content that provides the best answer. There is a lot more choice now, so each page on your site will likely rank for fewer keywords as Google crawls and indexes pages that better serve some of them.

What you need is something like this:

A landing page or long-form blog post targeting your priority keyword

Lots of blogs targeting longer-tail variations of that keyword

Links from the landing page or long-form blog to all the related blogs

Links from the related blogs back to the landing page or long-form blog post

This is what HubSpot calls a Pillar and Cluster strategy. This is what it looks like:

A good tip for finding those long-tail variations on your priority keyword (again, for free) is to look at the suggested searches when you Google it.

Or you can use the suggestions feature in Google’s Keyword Planner.

from http://bit.ly/2QUbyaJ

#content marketing

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luxus4me · 6 years ago

Link

Bitcoin Magazine http://j.mp/2E6mECo

Where 2017’s dizzying price highs embedded “hodl” into the public consciousness, 2018 was the year that “buidl" became a trend in the crypto-industry — and Bitcoin was no exception.

Anticipated in Bitcoin Magazine’s first cover story of 2018, Bitcoin’s technological progress only accelerated in 2018. Improving Bitcoin from around the world, developers and entrepreneurs furthered Segregated Witness adoption, rolled out the Lightning Network, released privacy solutions, realized sidechains and made progress on a Schnorr signature solution — all of which were still around the corner only a year ago.

Following up on January’s cover story, 2018’s closing two-parter cover story explores how these five technologies progressed.

In part one: Segregated Witness and the Lightning Network.

Segregated Witness

The Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork that activated in August 2017 was arguably Bitcoin’s biggest protocol upgrade to date. Fixing the long-standing malleability bug, it better enabled second-layer protocols while replacing Bitcoin’s block size limit with a block weight limit. Transactions that utilize SegWit are partly stored in a new part of Bitcoin blocks, allowing the network to process more than one megabyte of transaction data per 10 minutes.

Back in 2017, SegWit adoption was off to a somewhat slow start. By the end of the year, most wallets had not integrated the upgrade yet — and not many exchanges or other Bitcoin service providers had either. At the start of this year, less than 15 percent of transactions utilized the additional block space, and blocks barely exceeded 1.1 megabytes.

Throughout 2018, however, adoption increased quite a bit, as more wallets and services implemented SegWit. This perhaps most notably included the Bitcoin Core wallet, which enabled SegWit transactions with its 0.16.0 release in March. Other popular wallets, such as Coinomi (March), Bither (September) and BRD (November) followed suit, while Mycelium is expected to roll out the feature before the end of the year. Some of the biggest Bitcoin service providers also implemented Segregated Witness in 2018, including Coinbase (February), Bitfinex (February) and Xapo (May).

As an overall result, SegWit usage statistics increased to well over 40 percent over the year. Still, while about a threefold increase, this is lower than some would have expected it to be by now.

“I'd say the main reason SegWit usage isn’t well over 50 percent by now is inertia,” Coinmetrics data analyst Antoine Le Calvez speculated when asked by Bitcoin Magazine. “If you didn't adopt it when fees exploded last year — either due to lack of time or other priorities — I don't think you'd support it until fees explode again, when SegWit transactions will have a clear cost advantage over non-SegWit transactions.”

On top of SegWit itself, the new bech32 address format also saw its first non-trivial adoption in 2018. These addresses, that start with “bc1” instead of a 1 or a 3, are a natural fit for SegWit. Transactions from such addresses require less data to be included in a block and are, therefore, even cheaper. Several wallets — like Coinomi, Electrum and Wasabi — moved straight to this new format.

The popular BRD wallet for iOS and Android did this too and, in September, even launched a campaign to further bech32 adoption: “When SegWit?”

“We've always taken the stance that bech32 stood the best chance of being the gold standard for SegWit implementation,” said BRD CSO Aaron Lasher, in explaining the idea behind the initiative to Bitcoin Magazine. “The backwards compatibility of using P2SH-enabled SegWit gave the industry a much-needed jump start, but to really drive adoption, raw SegWit is the way to go.”

He continued:

“As one of the larger wallets, we enjoy an element of influence over the state of the network, as a non-trivial percentage of bitcoin transactions are conducted through BRD wallets. Getting wallets and other service providers to upgrade their software to interact with bech32 addresses is the goal in general, and with this initiative we're targeting them in a respectful and persuasive manner.”

Perhaps thanks to the campaign, in part, and on top of SegWit adoption itself, bech32 use increased throughout 2018 as well.

"5.6 percent of the outputs created these days are bech32 outputs," Le Calvez said, “though bech32 outputs store only ~0.8 percent of all bitcoin, so it means that bech32 users are quite active. That could be because Coinbase and LocalBitcoins support it, and exchanges attract arbitrageurs that move money around faster. Another reason could be that, since bech32 is the cheapest way to transact, it attracts high-activity users.”

All in all, Bitcoin blocks have grown along with SegWit adoption over the past year. While average numbers aren’t quite as telling (because not all blocks fill up in the first place), the typical full block today is around 1.3 megabytes. The biggest Bitcoin block to date was also mined this year, in October by ViaBTC, and was a little over 2.3 megabytes.

The Lightning Network

Highly anticipated for years, 2018 was the year that the Lightning Network made its “official” debut. Although the risky nature of early stage tech was conveyed through the #reckless hashtag, regular users were invited to try out Bitcoin’s overlay network for fast and cheap transactions for the first time.

In March, Lightning Labs was the first to announce the beta release of Ind, the software implementation it’s spearheading, and collected a $2.5 million seed investment round to boot. This was followed by the beta release of ACINQ’s eclair later that same month and Blockstream’s c-lightning in June. Since September, Casa even lets you host a physical Lightning node in your home: the Casa Node. In conjunction, several Lightning wallets were made available, and even more of them are coming, including some from established Bitcoin wallet providers like Trezor and Electrum.

Probably at least as important, Lightning payments are increasingly accepted for real goods and services.

One of the very earliest adopters of the Lightning Network was a prepaid top-up service Bitrefill, in March of this year. CEO Sergej Kotliar has been keeping a close eye on Lightning Network usage since, telling Bitcoin Magazine:

“We’ve processed 2,170 regular Lightning orders at this point, receiving a total of 6.3 bitcoin. The share of Lightning payments is steadily growing and is currently at about 2.5 percent of our bitcoin orders. We’re generally waiting on two things for this to take off bigly: more wallets and exchange integration.”

Distribution of payments to Bitrefill per payment method. (Number of payments, not amounts.) Source: Bitrefill

While it was not very necessary this year, as Bitcoin fees have been negligible for most of 2018, Kotliar also tracked how many on-chain transactions were avoided by using the Lightning Network.

“I basically added up all channels, opened and closed, and how many payments and forwards have been made, as a sort of measure of scaling efficiency,” he explained. “This adds up to 2.75 payments per on-chain transaction, and 3.46 payments per on-chain transaction, if we include forwarded Lightning transactions. This number grew steadily over the past couple of months as channel reliability improves and the network grows.”

Besides Bitrefill, other pioneering adopters included the Blockstream store (since January) and bill payment service Living Room of Satoshi (since April). Payment processor BTCPay integrated Lightning payments in July, offering it to all its users (like TorGuard VPN and Coincards). So did payment provider CoinGate in September, on-boarding the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM network, bullion store Bitgild, and hundreds more merchants. And the first exchange started to accept Lightning payments for deposits in 2018 as well: gold-to-bitcoin exchange Vaultoro (since May). [Edit: Payment processor GloBee also started accepting Lightning payments, in June.]

At least as impressive was the level of community involvement in such a new technology. Berlin-based Lightning startup Fulmo, for example, organized a series of popular “Hackdays”: three in the German capital and one in New York. Developers and anyone else with interest could come and learn about the technology and build on it on the spot. Also in New York, Bitcoin development company Chaincode Labs focused its third “Bitcoin Residency” program on the Lightning Network, too.

As an entirely new phenomenon, and partly the result of these events, a number of Lightning apps (“Lapps”) were introduced over the course of the year.

"Lightning has enabled people to build lots of cool things with bitcoin and it's unlocking a whole new potential. Things that we haven't even thought of today," Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark told Bitcoin Magazine. "Every day we wake up and someone has built something new."

Stark's Lightning Labs has tried to keep track of available Lapps in its Lightning App Directory. Examples include a jukebox, a tipping solution and a file-hosting solution, all powered by Blockstream’s micropayment processing system Lightning Charge, showcased during the company’s “Week of Lapps” in March. Another particularly useful Lapp that launched this year is Submarine Swaps, which allows users to pay Lightning invoices even without having a Lightning wallet Further, the hackdays produced photobooths, point of sale payment processors and games. And the Lightning Network even saw the emergence of what can arguably be considered its first “killer app”: The million-dollar, homepage-inspired, web graffiti platform satoshis.place went viral through Bitcoin social media last summer.

All this activity translated into data, too. Although publicly available Lightning Network statistics are not completely reliable — some aspects of the network are hard or impossible to measure — various Lightning Network explorers show that there are several thousand Lightning nodes online on any day. Between them, they have more than 10 thousand payment channels open, holding hundreds of bitcoins worth almost two million dollars, and all this is growing fast.

In the meantime, code supporting the Lightning Network is only improving, and more parts of the protocol are being fleshed out. In November, a group of Lightning developers from different implementations met for a second Lightning Summit in Adelaide, Australia — after the first one in Milan in 2016. Here, the “BOLT” Lightning Network specification made a leap forward, paving the way for more innovation for 2019 and beyond.

“The second Lightning Summit reaffirmed that this is an open community interested in moving a common vision of an open network forward,” said Blockstream and c-lightning developer Christian Decker. “It puts all the things that we postponed in the first meeting back on the table and opens up a second exploratory phase for all the nice-to-have features. Splicing and multipath routing for example allow us to hide all the details about channel allocations of funds: the user just sees a single balance that is available both off- and on-chain.”

In part two of this article, to be published in two weeks: privacy, sidechains and Schnorr signatures.

This article was updated.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

http://j.mp/2QH0Y6w via Bitcoin Magazine URL : http://j.mp/2DOhiZN

#News

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ellahmacdermott · 6 years ago

Text

Bitcoin’s Tech Trends of 2018: What This Year Brought Us (Part 1)

Where 2017’s dizzying price highs embedded “hodl” into the public consciousness, 2018 was the year in which “buidl" became a trend in the crypto-industry — and Bitcoin was no exception.

Anticipated in Bitcoin Magazine’s first cover story of 2018, Bitcoin’s technological progress only accelerated this year. Improving Bitcoin from around the world, developers and entrepreneurs furthered Segregated Witness adoption, rolled out the Lightning Network, released privacy solutions, realized sidechains and made progress on a Schnorr signature solution — all of which were still around the corner only a year ago.

Following up on January’s cover story, 2018’s closing two-parter cover story explores how these five technologies progressed throughout the year.

In part one: Segregated Witness and the Lightning Network.

Segregated Witness

Some of the biggest Bitcoin service providers also implemented Segregated Witness in 2018, including Coinbase (February), Bitfinex (February) and Xapo (May).

As an overall result, SegWit usage statistics increased to well over 40 percent over the year. Still, while about a threefold increase, this is lower than some would have expected it to be by now.

The popular BRD wallet for iOS and Android did this too and, in September, even launched a campaign to further bech32 adoption: “When SegWit?”

He continued:

Perhaps thanks to the campaign, in part, and on top of SegWit adoption itself, bech32 use increased throughout 2018 as well.

All in all, Bitcoin blocks have grown along with SegWit adoption over the past year. While average numbers aren’t quite as telling (because not all blocks fill up in the first place), the typical full block today is around 1.3 megabytes. The biggest Bitcoin block to date was also mined this year, in September by BTC.com, and was almost 2.3 megabytes.

The Lightning Network

In conjunction, several Lightning wallets were made available, and even more of them are coming, including some from established Bitcoin wallet providers like Trezor and Electrum.

Probably at least as important, Lightning payments are increasingly accepted for real goods and services.

“We’ve processed 2,170 regular Lightning orders at this point, receiving a total of 6.3 bitcoin. The share of Lightning payments is steadily growing and [is] currently at about 2.5 percent of our bitcoin orders. We’re generally waiting on two things for this to take off bigly: more wallets and exchange integration.”

Distribution of payments to Bitrefill per payment method. (Number of payments, not amounts.) Source: Bitrefill

While it was not very necessary this year, as Bitcoin fees have been negligible for most of 2018, Kotliar also tracked how many on-chain transactions were avoided by using the Lightning Network.

Besides Bitrefill, other pioneering adopters included the Blockstream store (since January) and Living Room of Satoshi (since April). Payment processor BTCPay integrated Lightning payments in July, offering it to all its users (like TorGuard VPN and Coincards). So did payment provider CoinGate in September, on-boarding the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM network, bullion store Bitgild, and hundreds more merchants. And the first exchange started to accept Lightning payments for deposits in 2018 as well: gold-to-bitcoin exchange Vaultoro (since May).

What may be even more impressive is the level of community involvement in such a new technology. Berlin-based Lightning startup Fulmo, for example, organized a series of popular “Hackdays”: three in the German capital and one in New York. Developers and anyone else with interest could come and learn about the technology and build on it on the spot. Also in New York, Bitcoin development company Chaincode Labs focused its third “Bitcoin Residency” program on the Lightning Network, too.

As an entirely new phenomenon, and partly the result of these events, a number of Lightning apps (“Lapps”) were introduced over the course of the year.

Lightning Labs has tried to keep track of available Lapps in its Lightning App Directory. Examples include a jukebox, a tipping solution and a file-hosting solution, all powered by Blockstream’s micropayment processing system Lightning Charge, showcased during the company’s “Week of Lapps” in March. Another particularly useful Lapp that launched this year is Submarine Swaps, which allows users to pay Lightning invoices even without having a Lightning wallet.

Further, the hackdays produced photobooths, point of sale payment processors and games. And the Lightning Network even saw the emergence of what can arguably be considered its first “killer app”: The million-dollar, homepage-inspired, web graffiti platform satoshis.place went viral through Bitcoin social media last summer.

In part two of this article, to be published in two weeks: privacy, sidechains and Schnorr signatures.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

from InvestmentOpportunityInCryptocurrencies via Ella Macdermott on Inoreader https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoins-tech-trends-2018-what-year-brought-us-part-1/

0 notes

heckyeahlucilleballilovelucy · 7 years ago

Text

The Safe Nomad (5). Aline (Germany) and Sebastien (Canada): The Great Internet Conspiracy.

Before leaving Canada 20 months ago, Sebastien Pelletier joined a bunch of Facebook groups, including one for digital nomads curated by a certain Aline Dahmen from Germany. When he pressed the “request to join button”, he had no clue about what he was really getting into.

A few months later, out of sheer online serendipity, he met that very Aline on a beach in Southern Thailand. They talked shortly, mesmerized by how the internet brought them to exactly the same place at the same time, thousands of miles from home.

Then, a few months later they met again, this time, in Canggu, Bali, again by a very fortunate coincidence. A few hours before his flight to Singapore, Sebastien saw Aline on Facebook asking for accommodation tips in Bali. He could not believe his eyes and messaged her instantly:

“Are you in Bali?” “Yes.” “Me too! Let’s meet up!”

It was like the internet conspired to have Aline and Sebastien bump into each other on every island in South-East Asia until they developed the world’s first dating app for digital nomads.

They decided to take a stroll down the beach and, if you happened to be there on that evening, you could have taken them for just another couple of honeymooners enjoying the breathtaking sunset and making plans for the future.

And while the first half of your assumption would have been completely wrong – look, no holding hands, no kissing – the other half would have been spot on. Indeed, the two were making passionate plans together: based on Aline’s Facebook group, Nomad Soulmates, they were discussing the development of an app.

When questioned about the obvious discrepancy between the subject of the conversation and the proximity of a beautiful young girl during a glorious sunset on a fantastic Balinese beach, Sebastien’s defensive statement was short and to the point:

“I’m a geek. Tech is my favorite subject.”

From compulsive shopper to digital nomad. Sebastien’s becoming.

Up until 2014, Sebastien quenched his passion for technology by the means of compulsive shopping. Every funky electronic gadget that hit the market on a Monday was promptly delivered to his office in Montreal on Tuesday. His average crop was three parcels per week. He was making good money working as a software developer, but his finances could not keep up with his shopping addiction. He owed the banks 20,000 dollars and, because of his accumulating debt, he did not go on a holiday for 10 years.

This went on until one evening, his then girlfriend made him watch a documentary called Zeitgeist 3: Moving Forward.

Sebastien: “It was a turning point in my life. Later that night I took the decision to stop spending and pay off my debts. And for the next 6 months that’s exactly what I did. My office mates were shocked that no delivery boy was looking for me any longer.”

A month before settling his debt, Sebastien stumbled upon “The 4-hour work week”, Tim Ferris’s iconic best-seller which popularized the idea of making a decent living outside the 9-to-5 routine. It made Sebastien realize that the rich people are not prisoners to debt and that richness lies in experience and not in material possessions He decided to take one huge leap forward and live a location-independent life.

In July 2015, inspired by German blogger and digital nomad Johannes Voelkner, Sebastien booked a one-way ticket to Southern Spain. As soon as he arrived, he found himself surrounded by people who were living the life he dreamed of: working and traveling around the world.

He spent 3 months in Spain, then after a brief stay in Belgium he flew to Asia. 2 months in Koh Lanta, Thailand, 2 months in Bali, and then back to Thailand, where he intended to just pass through Chiang Mai. It took him 11 months. Then off to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and back to Bali, where he took that famous beach walk with Aline.

Getting the bug. Aline’s becoming.

Speaking of which, Aline’s story was completely different. Being 15 years younger than her partner in crime, she did not have much to leave behind. Right after high-school, she took a gap year and flew to New Zealand. She barely spoke any English back then, but quickly found a job as a nanny. (The family she lived with taught her the spotless elegant English she spoke throughout this interview.) She worked, she traveled, and met people from around the world. It was a fantastic year.

Back home in Germany she realized, for the first time in her life, what her real passion was: traveling. She could not re-adapt herself to a sedentary life. She broke her piggy bank open, bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok and went straight to the DNX conference.

It was networking at the conference that gave Aline her first jobs as a digital nomad, and it was precisely that conference that got her thinking of a dating platform for digital nomads.

Aline: “I noticed that most attendants were travelling alone and this made me think. They told me that it was hard for them to find someone as nomadic as they were. I saw a lot of potential in this insight and this led me into building my first “start-up”, the Nomad Soulmates Facebook group. It was a decisive point between going back to Germany and studying or trying to make things work remotely while traveling.”

The nomads she had met along the way encouraged her to learn online and develop new skills by the means of practical experience. Her eagerness to learn and her natural ability to connect with people turned her into a sought-after social media consultant. She now helps others manage their online communities.

World’s first dating app for digital nomads.

The online dating market is saturated with apps, but Aline and Sebastien believe that they have some real value to offer. Their website and application will employ cutting-edge technology and a fresh approach to networking. They work hard, they learn a lot and love every second of the process. Their primary and noble goal is to help nomads find nomads.

In the beginning, they went straight into app development for both iOS and Android. Then they realized that it would be more suitable to launch a website first, because the web was Sebastian’s primary area of expertise. They launched a website that is currently only available for users in Indonesia and Singapore. The website allowed them to immediately put out new developments and features and receive a real time engagement and feedback from their users.

Sebastien is in charge of the technical backbone of the project. Aline is the “people manager”, the heart of the 9000-strong Nomad Soulmate Facebook group. Due to her skills and passion, the group sees an abnormally high level of engagement; any post gets hundreds of likes and comments in no time.

Getting the best out of technology.

Sebastien: “Being a digital nomad is a different scenario from being on a permanent vacation after winning the lottery. Can someone be a sustainable nomad without technology? Probably not. Even people whose work is not directly dependent to technology – say, life coaches or yoga teachers here in Bali – use technology to find clients and increase exposure of their projects. If you want to maintain a nomadic lifestyle you cannot do it without at least a bit of technology.

Aline and I belong to different generations, but we both grew up surrounded by technology. And we have become dependent on it now. Take away our smartphones or shut down our social media channels and we’ll feel completely lost, at least for a while.

I have been quite critical of the fact that most big apps nowadays demand so much time and attention from their users. And while I understand that one cannot make money out of an app without driving traffic to it, some apps tend to become time sinks. I am thinking of a way to gamify this so that users will spend less time and concentrate more on what’s best and most useful from the technology at hand. “

Aline: “What I like about technology is that it empowers people to meet and connect. You meet someone online, have a chat, exchange a few ideas and maybe a year later you get to meet in person and maybe do something together, the way it happened with me and Sebastien. Even this interview would not have been possible without us getting in touch online first. I also like technology because it not only allows me to meet other people, but it lets me bring these people together as well. “

Productivity tricks.

Sebastien claims that the new lifestyle has changed him a lot, in the sense that he has more drive, more discipline and, consequently, a higher level of productivity and enjoyment with his work. I asked him to share his ‘secret’ to productivity. He agreed.

“Get up early and leave the house as soon as you can. Leave all distractions you might have at home and go someplace where there is nothing else for you to do but work. If you’re not sure what to work on, you’ll need to find that passion first. Once you’ve got that spark, you can re-ignite it at any time.”

What makes them do their thing, and feel protected?

Sebastien: “For me security is quite important because I’ve never had such a thing. I’ve been financially in the red for most of my adult life and I learned how to deal with it to the point that I’m almost comfortable with it. However, when I left Canada I had this big personal project in mind – which I still have – and this project is the centerpiece of my sense of security. It’s not the dating app, it’s something bigger. It’s my future and my safety net.

Security is a combination of not being stressed about money and the confidence that I am good at what I do and that there’s a strong demand for my skills.”

Aline: “There are two sides to security: financial and mental. Back in high school I lived in a bubble. I just did what the people around me were doing. When I escaped that bubble and went to meet travelers and digital nomads, it felt exciting leaving my comfort zone. I discovered that I could do dream much bigger than I thought. Once you’re out there, you start thinking outside the box and you stop limiting yourself.

What brings me a sense of security is the belief that my projects will achieve great success. I might sound crazy, but I do believe in a billion dollar app. Maybe this one, maybe the next. It’s this strong belief and a strong will that keep me going. My security resides in my optimism and in my ability to take things as they come in a positive and open manner.”

In case you missed our trip through Indonesia’s digital hubs, here is a quick recap of what has been going on until now:

youtube

from HOTforSecurity http://ift.tt/2vSfeQ9

#HOTforSecurity

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electricoutdoors · 6 years ago

Text

Prepping 2019 – 40 Great Prepping Tips That Everyone Should Know

Prepping for SHTF - 40 Great Tips That Everyone Should Know

Prepping means you should always be ready to learn.

It’s often said that knowledge is power, and that is especially true in the world of prepping. Keep an open mind and try to learn more every day. Just because someone has a view that opposes yours does not mean that there is nothing you can learn from them! In fact, I find that I often learn the most from people with different viewpoints than me. prepping Even if a disaster does strike, you can (and should) continue to learn from your successes and especially from your failures.

Bugging out should not be your first option in a disaster.

If you are planning to bug out at the first sign of a collapse, then you are probably living in the wrong area. Make plans to move to an area that is likely to be a good place to bug in. This doesn’t mean drop everything and move into the middle of the woods. It does mean that if prepping is something that is going to be a big part of your life, then you need to get to an area that is safe for you and your family.

Even moving out of the city and into the suburbs is a huge improvement on your prepping situation. In the end, it’s up to each of us to decide when to bug in or bug out.

Just because you live in a city or an apartment doesn’t mean that you can’t be prepared.

If you can’t move away from the city, we suggest that you put together a bug out bag.

Learn to use the space that you have available.

This is especially important if you live in an apartment or a small home. You can buy or build sliding storage racks or totes that will allow you to store food, water, and supplies under your bed.

The normal queen size bed can store around 43 sq/ft of goods. A king size bed can keep around 60 sq/ft under it. This is assuming 1 ½ feet of clearance under the bed.

Get creative and look around for those spaces that aren’t being used. Creativity is one of the keys to prepping in less than ideal situations.

Use modern apps and web-based programs.

Google maps is a great planning tool for anyone who is a prepper. Having a satellite view of your surroundings gives you a solid place to begin your planning.

Printing out these maps and incorporating them into your defensive plans is a good idea so you have them available when you need them.

By browsing the app stores, you can probably come up with more apps that would be useful for prepping.

There are many areas of your home that can provide you with water following a disaster.

A water bob is another great idea. As long as you can fill them before a disaster strikes, they make a great way to store water for almost anyone.

Learn to use the Emergency Response Guide (ERG).

The ERG is a book that allows first responders to identify hazardous materials, their labels, containers, hazards and appropriate protective equipment.

A PDF of the ERG makes a great addition to a prepping library and can be located here for free. There is an Android and iPhone App available there as well.

You can’t only focus on your strengths.

We all have a tendency to like to do the things that we’re good at.

Mountain bikes make a great post collapse vehicle.

A bike could be a lifesaver after a collapse or even in a short-term breakdown.

When fuel cannot be delivered, a bike of some kind will provide the ability to travel distances at speed. Add in a trailer and your ability to carry gear will increase by about 100 lbs.

Have a plan to get your family together in one place if an event occurs when you’re separated.

This plan should be something that you and your family can implement without the need to communicate in case cell phones don’t work.

Your plan will vary depending on your specific situation, but it should be something that everyone knows. As with any plan, it helps to practice it.

As a new prepper, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Sit down and write out a quick list of things you need when you first start prepping.

The internet contains a wealth of knowledge.

Print the resources you need most and keep them in three-ring binders for when you need them. Add these binders to your prepping library.

Purchase a firearm to protect you and your family.

Guns aren’t the most important thing to have, but you need to be able to protect yourself and your family from potential criminals and thieves.

What you buy will depend on your budget. For those with a lower budget, I would suggest a pistol if you can conceal carry in the area that you live.

Hand to hand weapons have been used forever. Baseball bats, knives, machetes, axes, and tomahawks are all viable options for self-defense if you are prepping and cannot buy a firearm.

Get in shape now!

Prepping itself isn’t normally hard work, but the strain of a post-collapse life is.

If all of the modern conveniences we take for granted are gone, then something as simple as getting drinking water could become a backbreaking ordeal.

If you needed to walk 20 miles a day could you do it? Could you wake up the next day after a couple hours of sleep and do it again? These are questions that you honestly need to ask yourself.

Starting a basic exercise program will make all aspects of your life better.

Expensive solar panels aren’t the only way to get power from the sun.

More extensive solar power options are available. Prepping to power your entire home after a collapse is possible if you’re willing to put the time, money and effort into it.

Storing water should be your first priority.

We can only live a for a couple of days without water. You should plan around a gallon of water, per day, per family member. For a family of three or four that can add up quickly.

You can help improve the taste of water that has been stored for a long time by pouring it back and forth between two containers.

Get to know your neighbors before a disaster strikes!

You will need help to do everything that is needed in the event of a long-term collapse.

Dealing with bodies in a SHTF world is something that we will need to become accustomed to.

A corpse will contaminate water, so they should be moved away from bodies of water or groundwater. They will also bring vermin to the area, that will transmit diseases.

Burying or burning the bodies is the best way to keep vermin away. Just make sure you bury them deep enough that scavengers won’t dig them back up and far enough from water sources that they will not contaminate your water supply as they decompose.