Useful knowledge collection

I was thinking that perhaps one of the most useful things for any long term period of survival would be a large collection of information and knowledge on countless things that one would find useful if there was some big change where the internet and other sources of human knowledge are hard to come by, now obviously if anything bad enough happened to cause something like this the immediate needs of survival would have to be taken care of first but what about in the long term?

Wouldn't it be a good idea to collect and store as much useful knowledge as possible from the internet and elsewhere?

We're lucky to now have access and the ability to store libraries of information digitally and print off stuff you might need in a hurry. Some will think that electricity might be a problem but a laptop or pda can store plenty and are quite low on power which could be charged from solar, wind-up or even something homemade, I would keep it stored when not in use in a waterproof metal container, which should keep it safe from floods and possibly emp?

I would collect lots of free ebooks and webpages with guides and various useful stuff from the net, then store it on one of those small external hard drives and on pc, laptop or pda etc, while having backups on cd/dvd and making them all easily searchable with a tool like google desktop which I think can search within text files like pdf, html, word etc.

I was thinking this could become a useful source of links, things like survival manuals, how to guides, educational stuff, really anything useful and interesting would be good.

I've not done much searching yet which is the reason I wanted to make this post because im sure many of you lot know the best things to get, so far I've only got some general knowledge type stuff, It would be cool to download wikipedia but that would be huge and a waste of space as much of it is useless, good thing I found schools-wikipedia.org... which contains some of the best stuff but obviously limited to a dvd in its current version, still it covers a lot and has a nice layout.

Also a good how to site...
www.instructables.com...

Spend hours and hours scouring the net, every possible place you can find. There is some very cool information out there.

Hi J.T.

Here's a few excellent sites and e-books stuffed full of low-cost practical projects and designs...hope this helps add to your collection

solar cooking archive

Power From The Sun (e-book)

Home-brewed generators, wind turbines, electronics, and much more

DIY wind-turbine community

12v DC Car-battery 'bush' welding

This site gives a detailed explanation of welding-rod types, circuit polarity, and other useful technical data Battery welding technical info

visual step-by-step guide of bush-welding in practice



[edit on 17-9-2007 by citizen smith]

somewhere here some posted a link to the foxfire series or it may have bee firefox....I dont remember. I tried to search but couldn't find the link...could someone please clue me in again

The best collection of info I've found is free and you can get it here. It's about 13 gigs of public domain "how-to" books to help 3rd world countries. Hope this helps many of you.

[edit on 18-9-2007 by SemperParatus]

Originally posted by SemperParatus

Sorry I know its been a while but i had to say thanks as that's a really good collection there!

I also thought it was worth bringing up the thread again, though i've not found anything since as i've not been actively looking, hopefully i and others can add to it in time as it could be very useful to everyone here.

Thanks again all!