So personally as prep I'm attacking it from the low hanging fruit angle.... Went to my local Harbor Freight and for about 800 bucks got a 3500 Watt Predator Inverter generator and about ten of the 5 gallon gas tanks (50 gallon total) of fuel/gasoline... In a lights, grid and Internet out scenario here in the middle of July in Texas I'll at least be able to run a portable AC to keep one room reasonable cool for about two to three weeks... Once I get my generator running (I have a smaller Honda inverter as backup in case the Predator craps out etc) I can power my other powerbanks without any issue... its really things like AC, microwave, etc that take up the most power.... I also have couple pistol, rifle incase my neighboors try to kill me to steal my stuff etc
In terms of most bang for buck in terms of cross section of screen display versus power consumption I settled on a tablet (Samsung 10 inch) as large enough not to strain the eyes but small enough a device form factor to not consume too much power versus say a laptop or especially a desktop...
I have a Amazon Kindle (voyager generation) that I have kept about 1000+ self help, emergency prep, survival etc books /pdf that I downloaded mostly from the piratebay and converted to epub or kindle compatibile format... for offline reading... way better than carrying a bunch of papper books around in a SHTF scenario and compared to a tablet it saves a lot of battery power , lasts longer, and is LED backlit for night reading....
I also have a Huawei P40 lite but I couldn't get it to accept a microSD card unfortunately... with the Samsung tablet I can insert a microSD card for extra storage up to 512GB supported...
For the Samsung tablet I got me a 512 GB microsd card, put the Kiwix apk app on the tablet and downloaded and transferred all the wiki stuff including the Wikipedia, dictionary, quotes, books, sources, news, etc etc to my microsdcard and can run the whole works, all wikipedia articles, etc from my tablet from the Kiwix app completely offline...
Still have more than enough storage on the sdcard to download the entire world map all 106GB of it from Planet OSM
However I tend to like Google Maps format better because it has things like other metadata such as POI, and named places like restuarants, musuems, schools, businesses including their contact numbers, hours of operations, ratings, and other tidbits that aren't included in something like Here Maps or Planet OSM....
Google Maps does let you download an offline copy, problem is I cannot do that on my Huawei P40 Lite since it doesn't support Google Play, and though I can download it to my Samsung tablet, Google has nasty habit of deleting the cache maps after 30 days so as to prevent them from going stale if someone where to use offline copy of the map for say after months... that is precisely what you don't want in a long term SHTF situation....
To work around this I downloaded VMware Workstation Pro on my laptop and set up a Windows VM (which then I can snapshot and basically freeze in time etc) and inside the Vmware VM I downloaded another Android based emulator called BlueStacks 5, so with this emulator I can download Google Maps app inside my Windows VM (with itself is portable appliance that I can run nested inside Linux or any other base OS /machine.... After I download all the maps that I needed (Google Maps has limitation of about 30 offline maps at a time) which include the 30 largest cities in the world, (and also my entire metroplex and nearby regions) I then zip/compress the C:\ProgramData\BlueStacks_nxt folder which contains the android VM datadisk files etc... So now I can have an offline Google Maps that I can run on any windows, mac or linux machine and keep it forever...
In terms of most bang for buck in terms of cross section of screen display versus power consumption I settled on a tablet (Samsung 10 inch) as large enough not to strain the eyes but small enough a device form factor to not consume too much power versus say a laptop or especially a desktop...
I have a Amazon Kindle (voyager generation) that I have kept about 1000+ self help, emergency prep, survival etc books /pdf that I downloaded mostly from the piratebay and converted to epub or kindle compatibile format... for offline reading... way better than carrying a bunch of papper books around in a SHTF scenario and compared to a tablet it saves a lot of battery power , lasts longer, and is LED backlit for night reading....
I also have a Huawei P40 lite but I couldn't get it to accept a microSD card unfortunately... with the Samsung tablet I can insert a microSD card for extra storage up to 512GB supported...
For the Samsung tablet I got me a 512 GB microsd card, put the Kiwix apk app on the tablet and downloaded and transferred all the wiki stuff including the Wikipedia, dictionary, quotes, books, sources, news, etc etc to my microsdcard and can run the whole works, all wikipedia articles, etc from my tablet from the Kiwix app completely offline...
Still have more than enough storage on the sdcard to download the entire world map all 106GB of it from Planet OSM
However I tend to like Google Maps format better because it has things like other metadata such as POI, and named places like restuarants, musuems, schools, businesses including their contact numbers, hours of operations, ratings, and other tidbits that aren't included in something like Here Maps or Planet OSM....
Google Maps does let you download an offline copy, problem is I cannot do that on my Huawei P40 Lite since it doesn't support Google Play, and though I can download it to my Samsung tablet, Google has nasty habit of deleting the cache maps after 30 days so as to prevent them from going stale if someone where to use offline copy of the map for say after months... that is precisely what you don't want in a long term SHTF situation....
To work around this I downloaded VMware Workstation Pro on my laptop and set up a Windows VM (which then I can snapshot and basically freeze in time etc) and inside the Vmware VM I downloaded another Android based emulator called BlueStacks 5, so with this emulator I can download Google Maps app inside my Windows VM (with itself is portable appliance that I can run nested inside Linux or any other base OS /machine.... After I download all the maps that I needed (Google Maps has limitation of about 30 offline maps at a time) which include the 30 largest cities in the world, (and also my entire metroplex and nearby regions) I then zip/compress the C:\ProgramData\BlueStacks_nxt folder which contains the android VM datadisk files etc... So now I can have an offline Google Maps that I can run on any windows, mac or linux machine and keep it forever...
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