Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.
You guys remember this post about charging the smartphone off the solar panel using the USB battery as a regulator of sorts? So that was about two weeks ago and I’ve been charging the phone that way exclusively since then. No problems, no hiccups, and no lack of charge. So, based on my two weeks of charging the phone this way, I say that this is indeed a viable method of keeping the phone going in a situation where there might not be another method of charging available. Of course, this is summer when sunlight is plentiful. We’ll have to run this little experiment again around January when it’s cold and overcast all the time. But..so far..seems to work just fine.
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I was chitchatting with someone the other day and the conversation turned to preparedness, which isnt that surprising, but then we went deeper into what flavor of apocalypse was this person preparing against i found that his concerns mirror mine pretty closely. Me, I’m not the kinda guy who buys the notion that we’re all gonna be shooting at UN troops marching down main street while dying of Bird Flu as comets and asteroids slam into the planet exacerbating a pole shift and creating Peak Oil as the rapture occurs. I’m more of a ‘gradual decline into Third World / Soviet-era lifestyle’..you know – lines for toilet paper, rolling brownouts, chronic unemployment, understocked stores, etc, etc….sort of a nationwide Detroit. (Hmm..I may have to start using ‘Detroit’ as a verb and an adjective. “Hey, did you see that earthquake Detroited Haiti?” or “It’s been seven years since Katrina and parts of New Orleans are still Detroity”.) Anyway, the discussion reinforced that I officially know no one locally who is not, in some way or another, gearing up against the uncertain future…this includes friends, customers, police, vendors, and pretty much anyone I say more than ten words to on a normal basis.
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Went out shooting the other day and I’ve been playing with the Uzi since I mounted the vertical foregrip and I gotta say it makes a huge difference. It’s a heavy gun, and 9mm isn’t exactly a recoil powerhouse, so bringing the thing up to the shoulder and doing fast double taps at multiple targets is easy. Which reminds me, I need to get one of those BattleComp muzzle devices on the AR and see how easy the same courses of fire are in terms of fast target-to-target hits. As I said, my interpretation of the apocalypse doesn’t really anticipate running gun battles and multiple-target scenarios but…if I’m wrong..well…better to be prepared on all fronts, no?
