There we picked apples. There were rows and rows of trees overflowing with apples. We literally had our pick of the bunch and in five minutes picked close to twenty pounds of apples.

Such ease of harvest is one of the key features necessary for a shack foodstuff.

The other feature is ease of storage combined with multiple types of usage.

Apples meet this standard too.

Apples can be stored whole, dried, jellied, canned, juiced and fermented.

Even the trees as useful as blossoming trees provide lots of pollen for the beehives I plan to stock. Bees pollinating the flowers would lead to more apples.

This is the lazy kind of survivalism to which I look forward.

I finally got a flat-screen lcd monitor. Circuit City had a sale on a 19 inch widescreen monitor for $160 after rebates. Getting drivers for the video card was a bit of a pain, but now I have 1440×900 goodness.

The server is currently running Windows XP Pro, that SLU kindly gave me and Ubuntu.

I’m running XP as it was easier to install Yahoo to Go for PVR software. It is supposed to automatically download TV listings, which is more than any other software has ever done for me. Plus, it’s free.

I keep Ubuntu for its integrated DVD burning functionality and the learning in Linux I get from it.

1) The shack will probably be in British Columbia, Canada.

Blame Amy for this one. Her desire to resettle in Vancouver means I’ll be settling there too. As a survivalist location, BC is not the worst place to settle.

BC has temperate climate, ready access to renewable food supplies (fishing), access to a source of salt (ocean), fuel & building supplies (wood & wood).

Farming will be hard in the rocky soil that predominates most areas. Lack of sunlight and excessive rain will be hard on certain crops and solar power sources. Land prices will be high in the most desirable locations.
Still, it could be worse.

2) Shack construction will have to be done on the cheap

Blame me on this one. I still am appalled by the skyrocketing price of housing. What am I, Rockefeller? I can’t afford a mansion out in the woods. Instead, I need to settle with a cabin, principally handbuilt, with the basics covered.

Ways to reduce costs, like hand building, not excavating a full basement, and utilizing alternative materials will make all the difference on my poor budget.

3) The shack will need to hold more than one family

I’m a softy. If my friends and family make their way to the Shack, I can’t turn them away. The Shack needs to be able to hold multiple occupents and be able to scale up in the surrounding area as time progresses and more people join us. The Shack itself needs room for a variety of people to stay and there needs to be room for more housing and the supplies to build it need to be accessible.

(Of course, I plan to be voted Mayor & Spirtual Leader for Life. That’s a small price for people to pay to sleep on my couch.)

(Okay, it may be a well-known fact.)

One of the things I worry about is Peak Oil. For those who don’t follow handy links, Peak Oil is the idea that there is:

1) a limited amount of oil in the world, and

2) at some point we will hit the peak of oil production and after that oil will start running out

Everything after that will be based on sky rocketing prices for energy and all the wonderful cheap things it provides. Communication, food shipping, fresh water, sanity will all be in short supply as our means of powering cell phones, cars, water pumps, and talk shows just disappear.

Several years ago, when I jumped on the Peak Oil bandwagon, it was considered a crackpot theory to all but paranoids like me, geologists, and oil company executives.

Now, with $60 a barrel prices, China and India becoming demanding gasaholics like the US, and brownouts being a household word, I feel a little more vindicated.

Equal parts paranoia and intellectual exercise, the Survival Shack was born. Talking to interested friends, I started to catalog means of living comfortably in the event of a total breakdown of society.

Like Thoreau, I would have a cabin in the woods. A place I could retreat to and avoid looting hordes, road warrior wannabes, and doomsday scientology cults that would inevitably spring up when the lights stop working.The Survival Shack has several prerequisites attached to it.

1. No survival camp compounds.

First and foremost, the Survival Shack must be able to exist innocuously in society before the world ends. To this end, the Shack would exist as a vacation home until its true purpose was required. This makes me seem less crazy and makes it an easier sell to the girlfriend.

No one wants to date a nutjob that builds a bunker in the woods

So, the Shack should look like a real home, pleasing to the senses.

2. Comfort is an essential goal with an eye to the long term.

What may be comfortable now when I’m in my prime may not be comfortable twenty years after the collapse of society. Decrepit old Joshua is sure not schlepping up and down stairs and harvesting wheat by hand.

Life after the fall will be hard, but it shouldn’t be unbearable.

So, plan for the long term. Make sure all features will stand the test of time.

3. Self-sufficiency is a necessity.

I am planning for the end of society. That means running to the local grocery store for french bread is not going to be an option.

The Shack will have to be built with construction, power, storage, and other necessities already accounted for.

In terms of a weekend / vacation home, this is a great premise. Having water and power when you visit is great. Again, looking to the long term, more will be required. Where will you store vegetables and cured meats during the winter? Is the roof repairable with local materials?

You can see have this can get tedious.It’s also a lot of fun to talk about with friends after lots of drinks.

In the Shack section, I plan to catalog plans and concerns that have come up over the course of years of debate. Admittedly, we’re not experts on survivalist construction, farming, homesteading.

Still, we’ve come up with workable ideas for Location Requirements, Construction Designs, Foodstuffs, Power Sources, and Crucial Supplies. Lots of these overlap, but again the overall effect is to create a vacation house that can transform itself into my Survival Shack when the unthinkable happens.

(PS I can see the inherent absurdity of a survivalist blog, but bear with me. It’ll be fun.)

Right now, the Shuttle SS50C is named Anti. Anti was an Egyptian god of ferrymen, it’s an appropriate name for fileserver. It carries my data across to my endpoints.

Facts:

Case - Shuttle SS50C (bought from Ebay for $40)
Processor - Pentium 4 2.2ghz (bought used from local retailer)
Ram - 1 GB from 2 Kingston 512MB 266MHz DDR Non-ECC CL2.5 DIMM (Newegg)
Harddrive - 250 GB Western Digital IDE (Circuit City with $60 in rebates)
Optical Drive - I/O Magic Internal DVD+/-R/RW Drive with 16x DVD+/-R write speeds & 48x CD-R write speed (Circuit City with $40 in rebates)
OS - Kubuntu 5.10

I partitioned the hard drive with 50 GB to the OS and 200 GB to data. I may have to reinstall and mount the data partition at /home.

Next, I’ll work to install Hamachi for VPN, MythTV backend for PVR functionality, & a driver for Hauppauges PVR USB2.

The last one should be the most difficult as it is a rough driver that is still being developed.

A home server that holds all the music owned by Amy & I.

This server would also work as a PVR to catch the programs we’d like to watch rather than the rest of the crap available.

A soft-modded Xbox would serve as the front end of the PVR in the living room.

But that’s not all I’d like this to do.

I’d also like the home server to stream music and video to a limited number of users on a VPN. This way, I could tell people about a song I like and play it for them right then and there.

Also, this will allow me to keep a limited number of media files on my laptop / ipod (which have limited space) and still access my media.

The home server will be in a Shuttle SS50C that I’m currently attempting to build.

That’s a post for another day.