Guest Post: Mental Health in the Apocalypse

by George Groot

George Groot first realized he couldn't deal with depression and anxiety on his own anymore, and during a tour in Iraq he sought professional help which included anti-depressants. Over the last eight years, including two subsequent deployments to Afghanistan, he has used a combination of medication and therapy to cope with the psychological stress. 

"Fatigue makes cowards of us all."-- Gen. George Patton

I’ve tried to write this article a number of times and have scrapped it because there isn’t a good ending to this topic.

The comedian Patton Oswald has a (NSFW) bit about going off his anti-depressants because he was afraid he couldn’t get them after civilization collapsed. While entertaining, his observation about medications not being available is one that I believe is likely to be true.

Modern medicines are miracles of technology, and there is nothing readily available to replace them if they are gone. I wish that there were an easy button, some sort of “collect dandelion flowers, dry them, and make a tea year round to treat depression!” level of answer to this, but there isn’t. Thankfully, multi-year collapse scenarios are rare, and global collapse is also very unlikely, so the odds are good that having a stockpile of necessary medications is going to be enough to get you through the more likely “Hurricane Katrina” style scenarios.

Turning Back the Clock
But if it isn’t short term, then what does that mean? Different people have different ideas about what a global collapse would look like, but using what has happened in the last 50 years as a model for prepping, I don’t believe that a full-on “face colander Mad Max”-style collapse is likely.  Far more likely is the long, slow slide of Rome where things just get worn down, the economy contracts, and systems just aren’t as resilient... like the water system in Flint, Michigan, but played out on a global scale. So I believe that any collapse is going to be more of a "turn back the clock to the 1910-1930s" rather than "turn back the clock to the Stone Age". I think it is important to state this up front, because what I write here is based only on my own ideas, and not some sort of group consensus.

Truly high-tech pieces of civilization rely on clean rooms and high purity raw material inputs. It would be impossible to make an integrated circuit (a computer chip) using the technology available even 100 years ago, and modern medicine requires the same purity of ingredients, very precise reactions, and high-tech testing to ensure that the end product is actual medicine instead of poison. This means that if there is a collapse that disrupts the economy, computer chip and medicine fabricators will be the first to experience disruption in operations. This isn’t in itself going to end the world, but what it means is that as the digital things wear out, they won’t be replaced by better cheaper digital things and that once the current medicinal stocks are on hand are used up, people will begin to look for replacements.

Alternatives
If you think about all the “cure-alls” sold in the early 20th century, where doses of cocaine or morphine were included in products sold over the counter, it probably doesn’t inspire much confidence in meaningful treatment methods from the scientific knowledge of the era.

The even worse news is that there aren’t any 1910-era replacements for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) or mono-amine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) that are routinely used to treat things like depression and anxiety. I recommend a huge dose of skepticism when listening to anyone who says that you can treat depression with common herbs you can grow at home. Unless you are talking about cannabis (which does have some medicinal uses, which is why it's regulated as a drug), the ability to grow medicinally useful compounds at home is very small, and those that you can grow are not going to be useful for mental health.

There is some research that shows good effects from saffron and turmeric in treating depression. Turmeric grows in warm wet parts of Southeast Asia and saffron can grow anywhere from Spain to Afghanistan, but the three stamen per flower make it incredibly hard to grow in quantity. If international trade is disrupted, getting these in quantity might become difficult. If you are a reader who lives where turmeric is grown, that might be something to look into. If not, perhaps international trade will make turmeric available; after all, spices were a huge driver of international trade for the bulk of recorded human history.

Addictions
But even though these spices were available a hundred years ago, looking back to the early 20th century it becomes clear that a lack of effective mental health treatment options was one of the foundations for the rampant alcoholism that eventually gave us Prohibition, which gave us a huge increase in organized crime, which eventually ended Prohibition. Self-medication with alcohol to treat depression or anxiety (think about how gin and whiskey took on the names “liquid courage”) is something that you and your tribe will want to avoid. Alcohol has many uses from sterilization to food preservation and should be part of your preps, but you must be cognizant of the dangers of alcohol addiction in a world without modern medicines.

Then there's marijuana. Despite a near total Federal prohibition on it, a somewhat thriving underground economy supporting an obvious demand for the stuff has managed to stay in business. Several states are legalizing marijuana, and so far it hasn’t been a big deal and no one really cares. Marijuana doesn’t cure cancer, nor has any health benefits to a healthy human being, but it may be useful if someone in your tribe has crippling anxiety and/or depression. However, the long-term side-effects of heavy marijuana usage would make this an option of last resort in a long term collapse scenario.

Unfortunately that’s pretty much it for the list of chemicals or plant products that are available to the 1910 level of technology. If I haven’t made the case by now that there just aren’t any good “low-tech, resilient” chemical solutions to treating depression and anxiety, it isn’t for lack of trying on my part. The dangers of addiction through self-medication are real, and the “sanitariums” of the era were little better than poorly run torture prisons to keep the mentally unwell out of the public eye.

The Talking Cure
The last option is the one that I support. Taking medications as a therapy under the instructions of an actual doctor is recommended when available, but there's almost always someone available to listen. Having people feel comfortable enough to talk about their depression is far harder to achieve than it sounds -- people don’t want to look like unproductive parasites in a survival situation -- but it's important to create some sort of tribal culture, service, or space where it's acceptable to do that. A resilient tribe has always had priests, pastors, therapists, and elders, to whom people could go for advice. Those people may not always have had good advice to give, but simply listening is a service that isn’t going to go out of style any time soon. 

Above All, Plan

Like I wrote at the beginning, there aren’t any easy buttons for this issue, but mental health and its evil twin addiction are not going away just because civilization took a hit to the jaw.

 
Plan for medicines to become scarce, or not available, and that more and more members of society at large will fall into addiction.

Plan for increasing your security posture to a level where you aren’t rolled over by an addict looking for their next fix. 

Plan for creating the support structure you need to deal with depression and anxiety. The support group is a great way to go in terms of a solution that can be implemented by people without requiring outside expertise (think of the Alcoholics Anonymous model if your tribe is large enough).

Finding the Angle

Not actually Erin.

Picture by KJ Photography

& is used with permission.

Special thanks to George Groot for double-checking my math and helping with clarity. 

I realized that my previous post referenced using azimuths to find an angle without explicitly showing how to do that. I will attempt to explain the process, but please understand that math is not my best subject, and I may flail verbally about while trying to make my point. 

Triangulation is a process used in surveying and navigation which uses triangles (hence the name) to determine the coordinates of a point. You need two known angles and one known side length (or distance) to do this, creating a triangle which allows us to use trigonometry to solve for the other angles and distances. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation_(surveying)

Let us assume that you need to find the distance to the boat in the illustration above. How do you do that without a rangefinder?

1) Starting at point A, shoot an azimuth to the boat and record it. 

2) Using your compass, you turn right 90° and march toward point B. I recommend 10 yards, as it is a short enough distance that your bearing will not vary too much, and it is a nice round number that ought to make math easier. 

How will I know when I've traveled 10 yards? If you're doing land navigation, you should know your pace count per 100 yards, so just divide that by 10 and when you've walked that number of paces, you have arrived. If you don't know your pace count, this article by Lokidude will show you how. 

If the object is quite large, you might need to take more steps; I still suggest you take them in units of 10. 

I am making this slightly more complicated than it strictly needs to be, because you will need to have a straight line (d) coming from the boat that intersects line AB at a right angle. If you don't have a right angle, things will be much more complicated and outside the scope of this article, so I'm having you do a little more work now to save you a lot more grief later. 

This is the same reason I'm not having you walk until you're at 90° to the boat. What is the likelihood that you'll correctly make a 90° angle the first time? To my mind, this extra step prevents that mistake. 

3) At point B, shoot a second azimuth to the boat and record it. 

4) Shoot a third azimuth to point A and record that. 

5) In a triangle, no single angle can be more than 90°, and we're going to create a 90° angle in a moment, so angle ß cannot be larger than 90°. If it is, then subtract it from 180°. If it isn't, then subtract it from 90°. 

6) You now know angle ß. Record it. (For this example we will say it is 60°.)

7) Halve the distance of line AB to create two right-angle triangles which share a side, d. Side d is the distance you need to determine. 

8) You know the distance from B to D (the halfway point between A and B) is 5 yards. You know the measurement of angle ß. This is all you need, so now let's do some math. 

9) How much do you remember from Geometry? 

https://www.mathsisfun.com/sine-cosine-tangent.html

We need to find the length of d, which in this figure is the Opposite side. The tangent of angle ß is the quotient (the number you get as a result of division) of the Opposite over the Adjacent. 

Side note: if you ever forget, just remember SOH CAH TOA:

• Sine is the Opposite over the Hypotenuse (SOH)
• Cosine is the Adjacent over the Hypotenuse (CAH)
• Tangent is the Opposite over the Adjacent (TOA)

But we don't need to find that angle, because we know it. So we do some math jiggery-pokery:

• Tangent of Θ = O/A
• Multiply both sides by A 
• A times tangent Θ = O

Which is exactly the same formula which David's friend gave us here, just with different names for the sides. 

So going back to the original problem with sailboat distance:

We know the distance from B to D is 5 yards. 

We know the measurement of angle ß is 60°. 

Therefore, 5 times the tangent of 60° will give us the length of line d, the distance to our target. 

The tangent of 60° is 1.73205080757. Shortening that to 1.73 ought to suffice. 

Therefore, d = 5 * 1.73. 

Therefore d -- the straight line distance from shore to boat -- is 8.65 yards.

The Right Angle Theorem says that the length of the side opposite the right angle is the square of the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In other words, the famous A² + B² = C², where C is the side opposite the right angle, also known as the Hypotenuse. 

Therefore, 5² + 8.65² = C². 

Therefore, 25 + 74.8225 = C². 

Therefore, C² = 99.8225. 

Take the square root of both sides. 

C = 9.9911 yards. 

So the distance from your current position at point B to the sailboat is almost 10 yards, or 30 feet. 

This makes good intuitive sense, as solving for all angles shows that we originally had a 60/60/60 equilateral triangle, in which case the distance between A and Boat and B and Boat must be the same as the distance between A and B.

Remember, we know that we have a 90° angle and a 60° angle, and all angles within a triangle must add up to 180°, so 90 + 60 = 150 and 180 - 150 = 30, therefore the remaining angle opposite side DB must be 30°. 

Since this triangle is half of our original one, the other half must be symmetrical and therefore identical. Therefore, the angle opposite side AB is 60°. 

George Groot adds:

We can exploit this feature of angles without using a compass for short distances, such as distance across streams or small rivers, simply by using the bill of a cap to align with the distant shore and  then turning to face a point on land without moving your head. The bill of the cap swung in an arc, and the arc describes the same distance (a radius) from the central point, letting you determine a distance that you can’t walk to by walking to a point on the same arc that you can reach. This is much less math than using triangulation to find the distance, and much quicker to determine things like "Do I have enough rope to make a rope bridge?"

If trigonometric functions are confusing, an alternate way is to use "minute of angle math" to determine the distance. Starting at point A, shoot an azimuth to your unknown distance target. Turn 90 degrees to walk parallel to the target for a known distance and shoot a second azimuth to the target. Subtract the smaller angle from the larger angle to get the "inside angle" of the target to your known distance. 

Since one minute of angle is roughly one inch at one hundred yards, if your known distance was 10 feet (120 inches) and your angle was 1 degree (60 minutes) you know that your unknown distance to the target is 200 yards away (60 minutes = 120 inches at 200 yards). This method requires a precise compass, and precise linear measurement, but it does work. 

Guest Post: a Small OTC Pharmacy List

by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

Every disaster prep list usually includes the words “30 days’ (or more) worth of medication.” If you are on medication, this is really great advice, but there are also a bunch of things you can purchase without a prescription that will provide you with treatment options  from a headache to a laceration, and those are good to have on hand for when stores aren’t open. This list isn’t all encompassing, and it’s meant to be generic so that you can decide, “Yeah, I need that, but not that” and customize it to your situation.

“For the Inside of You” List

• Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs). These are the “fever reducing” and “general aches and pains” medications. I like generic acetaminophen and naproxen, but my wife finds that ibuprofen works very well for her. The generic bottles of 100 pills or more should be sufficient for a short term disaster, and I recommend one each acetaminophen, naproxen, aspirin, and ibuprofen. 
• Antihistamines. Due to the war on some drugs, the “good stuff” is still available without a prescription, but you’ll actually have to talk to a pharmacy tech and show your ID to make the purchase. The prices for even generics are pretty high, but pseudoephedrine is still the “king of clearing things up” (especially hives) for me when diphenhydramine doesn’t cut it.  I would say that two 24 packs of pseudoephedrine pills is a good start for a household that doesn’t have environmental allergies, and one large bottle of diphenhydramine for mild “seasonal allergies”. People with chronic allergies will need a 30 day supply of their normal medication.
• Laxatives. An interruption to your normal diet can cause a person to become constipated. There are multiple options, and if you don’t want to keep laxative pills on hand, you can make a “saline laxative” out of potable water and Epsom salts.
• The “Anti-Laxative” Loperamide (aka generic Imodium) This helps avoid dehydration when illness causes diarrhea. 
• Vitamins. A generic multi-vitamin is cheap insurance; I use Walmart’s Equate brand. You’ll want one pill per person per day times the number of days you are prepping; for a 4 person family working on a month, that’s 124 pills. Generally a short term disaster doesn’t lead to any sort of vitamin or mineral deficiency, but it is pretty cheap insurance. If someone in your house has a specific supplement they need to take regularly (iron, magnesium, etc.) add that in as well.
• Caffeine can really help with headaches/migraines, which is why caffeine is an ingredient in so many OTC headache pill and powder formulas. A bottle of generic “alertness pills” is cheap insurance in case someone needs caffeine to deal with a migraine, and for some reason don’t have caffeinated beverage handy.
• Rehydration salts. These can be individual packets of sports drink mix, medical grade salt mixes, or a mix of salts in pill form. It doesn’t matter too much which you choose, but you will want some on hand to assist anyone who needs to rehydrate. This can get spendy if you buy individual packets of name brand sports drink, but electrolyte tablets seem to be fairly affordable right now on Amazon.

“For the Outside of You” List

• Sterilizing Fluids. You’ll want 90% rubbing alcohol on hand, and a bottle of povidone iodine or prep pads is also a good idea.
• Antibiotic Ointment. A generic “triple antibiotic ointment” is cheap insurance, so I recommend two tubes. 
• Super Glue. When you really, really need to hold skin together right now, this is good stuff to have on hand. It will harden in the container, so make sure you rotate in new stock every year. Of all the recommendations, super glue probably has the shortest useable shelf life.
• Calamine lotion and hydrocortisone cream. This is for treating rashes, itches, and mild allergic reactions to plants on the skin. 
• Anti-fungal cream. A significant number of Americans have an active foot fungus infection at any given time. Generally this is not a problem, but you don’t want it to spread to others during a disaster.
• Petroleum Jelly. Really useful for dry, cracking skin, and it also turns a cotton ball into a great fire starter.
• Sports Tape. This is different than medical tape, as it is designed to support joints. I use the cheap three dollar generic stuff for taping my fingers for Brazilian Jiujutsu the same way rock climbers tap their fingers for that sport. This also serves as a good blister cover, and can wrap around bandages for added protection. It doesn’t last forever, but is pretty cheap to have on hand.

“Preventive Medicine” List

In the event that “normal services are disrupted” you want to be able to keep your area as clean as possible, preventing rodents and insects from invading your space. 

• Insect repellent for your skin. Being munched on by bugs is pretty miserable, and this helps prevent insect-borne illnesses from spreading. In addition to the sprays and lotions for your skin, you can get candles/torches and electronic devices that help you keep your area temporarily free from the bloodsucking insects.
• Lice shampoo/treatment kit. Do not get an “organic/natural” kit here, get the kind that has dimethicone, which interrupts the lice water metabolism and kills them that way.
• Permethrin. This is an insect killer/repellent for your living area. You can get it highly concentrated for agricultural purposes, or in spray cans to kill bed bugs. Understand that this is a pretty serious chemical, and it needs to be handled accordingly. It can be seriously nasty stuff if you let it touch your skin, but I’ve found nothing better for treating fabrics. 
• Sunscreen. Don’t make a bad situation worse by getting sunburned. 

Storage and Stock Rotation

Like most perishable things, “store in a cool, dry place” is the best advice for your medicinal preparations, but even medicinal items stored properly still have a shelf life.  If it is a dry item, like a pill or powder, that shelf life is much longer than the “use by” date on the packaging. If the product is “wet” in any way, such as a gel, adhesive tape, cream, or spray, you’ll see a much more noticeable degradation of the product the further beyond the “use by” date on the packaging. If the product is a liquid, such as hydrogen peroxide, you’ll want to replace it regularly for the same reason you rotate your stock of laundry bleach (it breaks down and loses its oxidative properties over time).

References

If you have access to the internet you can check for drug interactions here, and if you are preparing to survive offline the “Where There Is No Doctor” series comes highly rated, and the newest editions are updated with additional medicinal information. 

While I don’t plan to start a village medical clinic, having a printed reference on hand is pretty cheap insurance for those things where I don’t have a clear idea on how to proceed.

Guest Post: Laptops and Cellphone Post-Disaster

by George Groot
George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

In the event of a major but temporary disruption to normal life, keeping things as “normal” as possible for my children is something that I try to do. Several years ago during a tornado warning we spent a few hours in the basement and a laptop with some videos was enough to keep the kids happy.

But what do you do when a few hours turns into a few days to a few weeks? Assuming that you have some form of alternative energy such as a generator or solar panels, and a battery bank to store electricity, you might be just fine recharging laptops, tablets, or cell phones from that alternative power source. However, if you don’t have a general purpose alternative electricity source, there are a number of portable solar charging options just for portable devices.

Solar Recharging

Cellphones

As a rule of thumb, more surface area for solar panels is better. Anything that is a battery bank with just a single solar panel will be pretty useless as an energy source; battery banks need at least three or four fold-out solar panels in order to get into the “worthwhile” category. For example, this solar battery bank advertises 10,000 milliamps of energy after 20 hours of charging, which is actually useful for a smartphone that uses about 1,800 milliamps of power for a full charge. With 10 hours of daylight, at 100% efficiency and working as advertised, that’s 5,000 milliamps. Even if you drop the efficiency to 50%, that’s still 2,500 milliamps, which is enough to charge up that smartphone or most tablets. 

Laptops

An even larger option is made by the popular Anker brand, and it comes with an 18 volt outlet, which is enough to charge most laptops (although many are set to receive an input of 19 to 19.5 volts). Not all laptops are great options for solar charging, though; a very high efficiency “ultrabook” style laptop will be a very good option, while a “desktop replacement workstation” will be much harder to keep charged. For example, the 4th generation Core i7 processor has a 47 watt power draw at full power, where a 4th Generation Core i5 is only 15 watts. The Core i5 has half the processing cores as the i7 of the same generation, but less than a third of the power consumption at max load (although the i7 can handle a much larger max load, we are talking playing kids games or movies to keep them out from underfoot). 

This shouldn’t discourage you from getting an i7 based system, though, as many ultrabooks use the i7 processor knowing that it has a variable power requirement based on load, so in practice they can often work on battery power for much longer than “business class” laptops using the same generation i5 processors because the entire package is meant to be more efficient. What you should look for is total battery capacity and advertised usable time under battery power; an ultrabook should be good for over 10 hours on battery power with a new battery. As batteries age, that number will go down.

From Recreation to Communication 

Apps

I believe that smart phones are one of the handiest pieces of communications gear that a prepper can have after a natural disaster. While voice telephone calls eat up a lot of bandwidth, SMS messages are tiny and can allow people to communicate in and out of the affected area with reasonable latency. Also, communications apps such as Zello have been used to coordinate local groups of disparate people, such as South American opposition political parties or volunteer search and rescue groups helping in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

Mesh Networks

Even if there is a complete failure of the cellular network, smartphones can be used for local communications via “mesh network” solutions like Serval, and Sonnet is an interesting project that I hope becomes a reality.

If you can find good versions of the Linksys WRT-54G router at thrift stores for a few bucks, you can build mesh net infrastructure. It won’t be as sexy a solution as Sonnet looks like, but as long as you can keep them powered they will keep people connected. Every time I see a version 2 WRT-54G at a Goodwill, I pick it up. They are generally priced in the 5 to 10 dollar range, and even the later version 5 and up models can be useful when loaded with DD-WRT or Open WRT firmware.

Be aware that using WiFi as a primary communications channel will often suck a smartphone battery dry much quicker than the cellular radio connection. This is because the power management for a cell radio is much more “passive” than the WiFi radio, which was designed for computer networking and which keeps the device registered with the Wireless Access Point (WAP) constantly rather than on an “as needed” basis.


I hope this has been an interesting and informative look into how to plan for a power budget in the event of a disaster, although you don't need to wait for an emergency to put them into practice; the concepts are exactly the same as if you were going to do some remote camping and wanted to bring your power source with you.

Guest Post: Carbohydrates and Fats in the Apocalypse

by George Groot
George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

We’ve already covered essential amino acids and vitamins. I’m going to lump carbs and fats together in this final post because, biologically speaking, they are both very boring: science lists no “essential” carbohydrates, and only two essential fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6). For a quick review, here is the list of essentials:

Amino acids: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine
Fatty acids: linoleic and α-linolenic acids
Vitamins: ascorbic acid, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B-6, pantothenic acid, folic acid, biotin, and vitamin B-12
Minerals: calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, and iron
Trace minerals: zinc, copper, manganese, iodine, selenium, molybdenum, and chromium
Electrolytes: sodium, potassium, and chloride
Ultratrace minerals: (essentially everything else)

Carbohydrates
Carbs are nowhere on the above list, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore them; a lack of carbohydrates in your diet can lead to hypoglycemia (low blood sugar, which results in being tired, cranky, and unhappy) or even ketosis, a serious medical condition that can lead to death. So you definitely need some carbs, but you have no specific need for any one particular carbohydrate, which is why none are labeled as essential.

But not all carbs are created equal, and you can think of them as “fast” or “slow” carbs. You’ll often hear them called “simple” and “complex”, and if you remember that simple is the “fast” kind that tastes good but isn't good for you, then you are on your way to success. Simple carbohydrates are monosaccharides (a single sugar molecule) or disaccharides (a molecule that is broken apart by an enzyme into two single sugar molecules). Not all of these sugars have the same glycemic index (how much they affect blood sugar and insulin production), and complex starches such as found in potatoes or pasta are still carbohydrates according to your body.

You don’t need much to survive; a single bowl of oatmeal or a medium potato is going to give you all the carbs you need to avoid ketosis or hypoglycemia if you are a healthy person. If you have flour, beans, rice, pasta, potatoes, and fruit as part of your preps, you are not going to have any issues getting enough carbohydrates to maintain health. I worry more about preppers being extremely carb heavy in their preps which, over the long term, can lead to health problems such as weight gain, heart disease, and diabetes.

Fats
If you cook with a vegetable oil, or eat fish, you are already getting the two essential fatty acids you need. In fact, the only people who are in danger of needing essential fatty acid are those who go for a long stretch of time on extremely lean meat. But if you have a fat source, then lean meat is no problem.

The normal household cooking oils (corn, canola, olive, and soybean) all have the essential fatty acids you need. There is some argument among foodies about which oil has the best ratio for human consumption and optimal health, but in a survival situation any of them will keep you alive and healthy. Sunflower oil may or may not have the omega 3 fatty acid you need, depending on how it is processed and what type of sunflower seeds were pressed. Cold pressed is best, in my opinion.


The two essential fats that you need aren’t hard to come by, and cooking oil is one of the essentials that you can buy cheap and stack deep as it has a myriad of other survival uses such as filling copper candles, weatherproofing cloth, and if you store it too long and it starts to go rancid, consider turning it into soap. And if you didn’t pack away enough cooking oil to keep yourself healthy and your cast iron pan seasoned, then go fishing and gather nuts to make sure you get the essential fats you need in your diet.

Guest Post: Vitamins in the Apocalypse

by George Groot
George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

If you are prepping food, it is easy to get bulk calories in the form of starches. My previous article on proteins focused on ensuring the complete array of amino acids made it into your diet; this article will focus on vitamins.

I prefer to not rely on a daily multi-vitamin for essential nutrition, but in the case of survival it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stock up on a few bottles just in case. But vitamin supplements will eventually run out, and a longer-term solution will be required. The good news is that you can grow most of the vitamins you need from the dirt, and the ones you can’t grow (the B family) you can farm or hunt.

At the cellular level, vitamins are all cofactors and are needed to catalyze necessary chemical reactions. Minerals can also be a specific type of cofactor called a coenzyme. Some vitamins, such as B12, have a mineral component (in this case a cobalt ion) already included. Sometimes they are used whole as a prosthetic group tacked on to a protein, and sometimes they are just a precursor to the actual coenzyme or cofactor. But no matter the terminology, vitamins are important to maintaining your health.

Solubility
Vitamins also come in two main categories, fat soluble and water soluble. Quoting from the linked article:

Water-Soluble Vitamins
All B vitamins and vitamin C are water-soluble. Water-soluble vitamins are easily dissolved in the body. The kidneys remove excess amounts of these vitamins so they can be excreted in the urine. Still, this doesn’t mean that you can take vitamins B and C in unlimited quantities.

There is a misconception that if you consume too much of a water-soluble vitamin, your body will just ‘get rid of it.’ The truth is, there can be problems with excessive amounts of water-soluble vitamins, and upper limits have been set on their consumption.

Fat-Soluble Vitamins
The fat-soluble vitamins are A, D, E, and K. Fat-soluble vitamins are absorbed in the lymph, transported in the blood, and can be stored in the liver and fatty tissues for use as needed.

The fat-soluble vitamins are the ones you really need to be careful about. Because fat-soluble vitamins can be stored in the body, these vitamins can build up to toxic levels when consumed in excessive amounts.

Vitamin A is found in leafy greens like spinach, kale and in carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and butternut squash. As a fat soluble vitamin, feel free to consume it with a little pat of butter or other oil.

The B vitamins are found in the meat of ruminants. If you eat any of the kosher animals (they have cloven hooves and chew the cud), you are not likely to be deficient in any of the B vitamins. If you are a vegetarian, your only real option is vitamin supplements.

Vitamin C is the cofactor for the collagenase enzyme, which puts specific bonds on the collagen proteins to make connective tissue stronger; this is why lack of vitamin C causes the typical leaky gums and easily cut skin seen with scurvy symptoms. It's generally easy to get enough vitamin C from plants and fruits, but even rare meat can contain enough vitamin C to keep you healthy (animal protein is the main source of vitamin C for some Inuit native diets). If you are worried about getting enough vitamin C in winter, grow boxes with kale or spinach; they, and tubers like potato, sweet potato, turnips, and rutabaga, are all rich in vitamin C.

Vitamin D is something your body can create through exposure to sunlight. Ultraviolet B rays cause a tight ring structure to form and you are good to go -- for a while, at least.

Vitamin E, another fat soluble vitamin, is found in large quantities in spinach and in sunflower seeds. Sunflower oil is a decent cooking oil that stores relatively well when not exposed to oxygen.

Vitamin K is another vitamin that I don’t worry about much. If you are eating enough spinach or other greens to get your vitamins E, C, and A, then you are already getting more than ten times the vitamin K you require.

Growing Your Own
Now if you want to grow fresh greens year-round to take care of your A, C, and E needs (getting B from meat and D from sunlight if necessary), a cold frame system will work very well in the temperate regions. Since these plants have little in the way of calorie content, they are less likely to be a target for thieves than crops of squash, root vegetables, or fruits (in their seasons).

I know eating greens can have all the flavor of "blah" mixed with "yuck" to some people, but they are a great source of vitamins that can be grown year round.

Next: Carbs and Fats!

Guest Post: Titanium at the Mammoth Sniper Challenge

by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before. 

In January of 2023 I participated in the Mammoth Sniper Challenge, a three day endurance event where you have to pack everything except water and live out of your pack. This year I used an ALPS OutdoorZ Commander freighter frame and pack bag, stowing an AR-15 in the rifle retention system on the pack and carrying 150 rounds of 5.56x45 and 100 rounds of 9x19 on the opposite side pouch to balance the load. Magazines went in the outer utility pockets. My food, clothes, cooking kit, and pistol went in the upper compartment, my sleeping system went in the bottom compartment, and my sleeping pad was rolled up and strapped to the bottom. 

https://amzn.to/49HtERS

All told, my pack weighed in at 59 lbs at the beginning. I had 2.2 lbs of food per day, with around 3,000-3,500 calories per day. At the end, with most ammunition expended and two days of food gone, my pack was around 45 lbs.

Cooking

I’ve served in the US Army for 25 years, and I have plenty of experience long distance rucking, but I always had the opportunity to make a small cooking fire or to re-supply with MREs at logistics points. Since fires aren't allowed during Mammoth by Fort Eisenhower Range Control, I had to purchase a packable cooking solution. I went to Walmart and picked up this Coleman Peak One butane-propane stove for my cooking needs.

https://amzn.to/3T8kFDH

The good: It works, it’s small, and it is easy to use. It was available at my local Walmart for about $14 when I bought it in 2022.

The bad: It’s 6.7 ounces, or nearly 200 grams. 6.7 ounces feels light in the hand, but I learned the hard way, again, that ounces make pounds, and pounds make pain.

For Mammoth 2024, I used a titanium stove that weighs only 26 grams:

https://amzn.to/3uMZMEW

The good: It works, it’s small and it's light. At $24, its price is competitive with the Peak One whose 2024 price has risen to $22 at Amazon. 

The bad: It’s slightly less efficient at turning fuel into heat than the Coleman, adding about 20 seconds of time to boil one liter of water. My partner for Mammoth picked up the same stove, and neither of us had any issues actually using it throughout the event.

Fuel

Another thing I learned is that I should pack the absolute smallest isobutane canister possible. Since Mammoth only lasts three days, I only really need to cook about seven meals, and even the smallest fuel container can cover boiling water to re-hydrate nine freeze dried camping meals. 

In 2023 I bought the “econo-size”450g canister at Walmart, and I’m still using it multiple campouts later. While it was good value for my money, it was also weight that I didn’t need to carry for three days. This time I bought the absolute smallest canister I could, and it lasted the entire event just fine, and because the location hardly ever drops below 25° F, I chose a pure isobutane fuel instead of an isobutane/propane mix. If you live in an area where it does get colder than the boiling temperature of isobutane, you’ll want an alternate cooking method.

Mess Kit

The second upgrade to my kit was going from two stainless steel cups to a titanium cup and a titanium pot. The 450 ml cup was 20 dollars and comes with a lid...

https://amzn.to/3uNrTnn

... and the 750 ml pot with lid was 18 dollars.  

https://amzn.to/3USdnoT

As you’ll see later, the real upgrade is going to vessels with lids, which makes it easier to cook over a fire without cinders or ash falling back into your food. 

Weight Savings

Between the burner and the two vessels, I’m shaving six ounces off my load.  

Old Stainless Kit: 14.9 ounces (no lids). This “heavy” loadout cost me about $23 because I got the burner on sale and one of the stainless cups from the Goodwill thrift shop for 99 cents. 

Stainless Steel

Pure Titanium Kit: 8.9 ounces, including lids. This new loadout cost about twice as much, for just over half the weight. My partner at Mammoth 2024 used a stainless steel Stanley cup with a plastic nesting cup, and he’s already decided to replicate my Titanium loadout if he competes in Mammoth 2025. 

I also  have two teenagers, one of whom needs his own backpacking setup, so he can get the “heavy” option until something better comes his way.  

 

Pure Titanium

If you're curious, my old stainless kit with a new titanium lightweight burner weighs in at 9.2 ounces, but don't get any lids for the cups, and I have no idea where you can get my bigger cup that I got from Goodwill. 

For me, the weight savings are worth the cost. For those of you who might need a “get home bag” that isn’t carrying a long gun with 150 rounds of ammunition and a  pistol with 75 rounds of ammunition, your weight budget might easily handle a stainless steel cup or pot, or even a 1.7 lb Kelly Kettle. If you plan on “bugging in”, then having a stainless Kelly Kettle at your location is very good at rapidly boiling water.

https://amzn.to/3SUotY8

Recommendations for Blue Collar Preppers

If your “get home bag” doesn’t need to include food prep items, this entire article doesn’t apply.

I am a big fan of stainless steel, as it is affordable and durable, but it's also heavier than aluminum or titanium. I am against cooking in aluminum, as over the long term it can negatively impact health, but if you just need to get from Point A to Point B over a few days rather than a long term thing, I’d have no issue with boiling water in aluminum vessels (the human body routinely cleans out aluminum ions, but too much can overwhelm the system). 

• If you are really pinching pennies and just need it for insurance in your go bag, or are really trying to cut weight for a short term survival kit such as on an aircraft, aluminum is the best value and weight option. 
• If you need something to cook with long term, and are pinching pennies, stainless steel is your best choice. 
• The cost premium is titanium, which is a good long term cooking option that is lighter than stainless steel (but not lighter than aluminum), but the weight savings only really matter if you're going to be walking a lot.

My recommendation is that you get a titanium burner since the cost difference is minimal at best, and stainless steel cups with at least one lid since they cost half that of the titanium equivalent.

https://amzn.to/3UNzWv9

Whichever setup you choose, I highly recommend keeping some black teabags in your kit in a ziplock bag. They weigh just a few grams, and heating up the 750 ml cup in the morning with two Tetley brand tea bags gave me and my partner a hot, caffeinated drink that tasted pretty good. In Mammoth 2023 I used Starbucks Cafe Vita instant coffee packets, but those are expensive, and I honestly think the hot tea was easier on our bodies this year, especially on Saturday when it rained from 0100 until 0900. There's nothing like ruck marching in the rain, soaked to the bone, and when your life really sucks a hot beverage is great, and tea just brews easier than instant coffee (and cleans up easier too).

Additionally, if you search Amazon for “long handled titanium camping spoon” you’ll see quite a few options. I didn’t use one the last two years, but it is now on my purchase plan because when you're rehydrating freeze dried meals, the long handle allows you to stir the food without sticking your hand deep into the bag. 

One final thought: a three day endurance event isn’t a disaster “get home” rehearsal, but it is pretty close to the same level of physical exertion and “outdoor surviving” required to go from point A to point B. I never had to worry about getting clean water (it was provided to us, and I never needed to carry more water than I planned to drink on the ruck march), but you probably will, so bring at least a Sawyer Mini filter or iodine tablets. 

Guest Post: Sausage & Bean Soup

 by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before. 

This recipe is a staple from my childhood. I generally make this soup for my family on Sunday afternoons, as it’s quick to put together and makes a filling meal. It also makes a pretty decent “refrigerator magnet” for any other leftover proteins you may have; just chop them up and add to the soup (although I’ve never tried leftover fish, the beef, pork, and chicken have all been successes).

Ingredients

• One 14 oz or larger smoked sausage (Kielbasa works fine)
• One can stewed tomatoes
• One can each: pinto beans, black beans, kidney beans, great northern beans, black-eyed peas (technically a bean, despite the name), and whatever else you have on hand
• One quart of savory fluid (stock, broth, etc)
• Seasonings (to taste)

Directions

1. Slice up the sausage into bite-size rounds and add to pot. 
2. Dump stewed tomatoes into pot.
3. Rinse the beans before putting into the pot. This will remove a large amount of the specific carbohydrate that ferments in your gut to give you gas.
4. Cover the bean/sausage/tomato mix with the savory fluid, and heat until it boils.

The notes are after the recipe, because we have manners

This recipe is much like “The Pirate Code” in that it’s “more like guidelines, really.”

My wife and I have made this recipe with beans we pressure canned ourselves. Even with Aldi generic canned beans coming in at under a dollar per can, it’s hard to beat the economy of canning your own legumes. 

What do you do if you can’t get sausage? This is where tinned meats, or pressure canned meats, come into play. The majority of the flavor from the sausage is a “smoky” note, but that’s not important from a nutrition standpoint. You can add back in a lot of “umami” flavor with soy sauce (which is shelf stable almost indefinitely) or even pressure can sausage ahead of time. 

If you keep Kosher or Halal, then obviously your meat options are more limited, but tinned chicken seems to work fine. If you are vegetarian, then there are all sorts of shelf stable “textured vegetable protein” soy options to mix in. 

The best part about this recipe is that it is cheap, quick, and filling, but whether or not it ends up “delicious” really depends on how you season it. I like a few slices of hot pepper (or a few dabs of pepper sauce) to liven it up, along with a few bay leaves, basil, and black pepper for more depth. Sometimes I’ll use “Italian stewed tomatoes” with the basil and oregano already mixed in. One time I used miso soup as the savory liquid, and it worked well enough that my younger son asked for that variation specifically.

There is one trick I’ve learned for rinsing the beans, and that is to use a cheap set of kitchen strainers. I bought mine from Ikea, but any set will do. If you don’t want to waste the water rinsing beans, just dump the contents of each can into the pot; your gut flora will eventually adapt to the non-digestible carbohydrates and the flatulence will diminish quite a bit. 

So if you are ever in a survival situation where water is at a premium you can, as Benjamin Franklin once opined, “Fart proudly.”

Guest Post: Pros and Cons of the .350 Legend Cartridge

by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.




The AR-15 platform has a number of cartridge options other than the 5.56x45mm/.223 Remington option: .300 BLK, 6.5mm Grendel, 6.8mm SPC, 7.62x39mm, and as far as I know the now-defunct Olympic Arms crammed the entire family of Winchester Super Short Magnums into the rifle. Every single one of these options is superior to the 5.56 in some way, but generally inferior when it comes to price and parts compatibility.

Of all the other options, only the .300 BLK and 7.62x39 enjoyed some sort of widespread adoption, the others remaining niche builds for niche people. The 7.62x39 builds lack bolt face standardization, but other than that it benefits from reasonably-priced import ammunition for plinking.

The reason that the .300 Blackout is so widely adopted is that it does a few things well:

• The only difference from an AR in 5.56 is the barrel; all other parts are the same, which makes it a cheap buy or build. 
• The brass can be made from cheap surplus 5.56, and manufacturers can make .300 Blackout from the same manufacturing line as normal 5.56mm. 
• Hunting laws in some states require a .24 cal/6mm or larger cartridge for hunting anything but varmints. 

So the lesson to be learned from this is that price is probably the number one factor in widespread adoption of a non-5.56 option for an AR-15 pattern rifle.

Pluses and Minuses
This brings us to the .350 Legend cartridge. It has all of the same advantages as .300 BLK  (with one caveat about magazines), but does so with a larger bullet which is better suited to hunting large game and is hunting-legal in states that require “straight wall” center fire cartridges. The .350 Legend equals the energy and ballistics of the venerable .30-30 quite nicely, but from a 4” shorter barrel. The relatively slow 1:16 twist rate is well suited to even cast bullets at full velocity from the cartridge.

The downside is the aforementioned caveat about magazines: standard milspec 5.56x45 magazines will not work with the .350 Legend, and must be modified. There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do this, but needing to split your stock of magazines between 5.56 and .350 Legend could be a deal breaker for some. However, for hunting a 5-round commercial magazine is all you’ll need for anything antlered, and for hunting feral hogs modifying a few 30-round magazines would likely be the least expensive part of any given hunting trip.

Interesting Points
I prefer the .350 Legend to the .300 BLK because it eliminates the possibility of using the wrong cartridge with the wrong barrel. Some folks have messed up and fired a .300 BLK in a 5.56 chamber, with predictably catastrophic results; others are careful to mark magazines and ensure proper ammunition segregation so that mismatches don’t happen. However, due to cartridge length, you cannot load a .350 Legend into a 5.56/.223 chamber.

It remains to be seen whether or not the .350 Legend goes on to more widespread commercial adoption, or falls into a “niche” like the .35 Whelen, .358 Winchester, and .35 Remington before it. The .35/9mm bore has not been a hit with American sportsman over the .30 caliber options of .30-06, .308 Win, and .30-30 Win (the  direct competitor of .35 Rem in the lever gun market).

However, people who own, shoot, and hunt with the .35 caliber family have been quietly keeping it alive and in the American market for decades now, so there is always the possibility of a broader adoption of the .350 Legend. Even if there is not widespread adoption, ammunition is easily crafted from readily available components. For a hunter, less than 200 rounds a year would be sufficient for nearly anything that requires a tag, and easily assembled over a weekend.

If you already have a .30-30 lever rifle, there is no need to go out and purchase the parts to assemble a .350 Legend unless you just want to, because ‘Murica. But, if you happen to find yourself in the market for a lightweight, ergonomic carbine for hunting, the .350 Legend is a great option to fill that niche from a ballistics standpoint if you handload or don’t mind paying for commercial ammo.

Guest Post: Faberware Stainless Steel Percolator

by George Groot
George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

Coffee isn't a necessity for preppers (although I think it is an excellent trade item), but it is often the difference between low morale and high in a disaster scenario.When you are without municipal services like water and electricity, there are still plenty of ways to get your coffee.


Instant coffee is easy, but I've never found good instant coffee in America the way it is readily available in Europe. Instant coffee works, but you still need a way to get hot water, which means you'll want something to boil water in for sterilization. Odds are good that you have pots & pans that can do this chore already, but most household versions are too large for most camp stoves to heat effectively, let alone bring to boil. Camp stoves are made to work with camp cookware, which generally holds smaller quantities, has thinner construction, and is lighter weight.

Percolators are great for a "shelter in place" solution because they are low tech, and because they boil the coffee they provide their own sterilization solution. If you have a two-burner Coleman camp stove (the green one that folds up), or even a single burner stove sturdy enough to hold several pounds, a coffee percolator will work well with your alternative energy source. If you make your own "hobo stove" you can size it to fit a stove-top percolator quite easily, which brings us quite handily to the subject of today's blog post.

Faberware 8-cup stainless coffee percolator

http://amzn.to/2DE4sAm

This product nicely fills the niche between "lightweight camping" and "serious base camp" products.

The base is broader than the body, and has a nice design feature of indented rings along the outside of the base which are great for open flame stoves. The grooves "trap the heat" from flames a little better than a flat bottom solution, which would be better for a glass top range.

The Good
At $23 dollars and Prime delivery, with all-stainless construction including basket and stem (save for the glass percolator top and plastic handle), it's a great buy. Replacement parts are also available on Amazon, and because it is essentially a stainless steel pot it can do double duty boiling water or cooking soups on a camp stove or hobo stove where a larger pot would tip over or just be too big.

The Bad
If you want something truly lightweight for a bug-out solution, this is probably not the product for you as it comes in at 2.4 lbs (just over one kilogram for our metric friends). The pour spout looks like a traditional wedge, but is actually a drilled hole inside the wedge, which meant the first time I used mine it didn't pour the way I thought it would. I over-tipped the pot, which can get annoying if a lot of people are passing the pot around to fill cups. Finally , the handle is plastic, which means you have to be careful not to expose it to open flames.

How to use it:

1. Fill the percolator basket half full with a standard coarse ground coffee.
2. Fill the pot with 8 cups of clear, cold, palatable water.
3. Put the stem and basket assembly into the pot and push down on the lid until it snaps into place. 
4. Place over a heat source and wait. 
• The percolator concept works because the stem assembly, being close to the heat, gets hot and the pressure of the colder water above makes "going up the stem" to the top of the pot a lower resistance pathway than going up the sides. So as your pot starts to boil, you'll see the characteristic "burps and splatters" in the percolator top, and they will get more and more brown as the process continues. 
5. When a lot of steam comes out of the pour spout, and the sound of a constant boil is heard, your pot is ready after one minute of this rolling boil. 
• Why one minute? That comes from the EPA recommendations on sterilizing water in an emergency. They also recommend 3 minutes of boiling above 5,000 feet (Denver residents take note).
• The EPA also says "To improve the flat taste of boiled water, add one pinch of salt to each quart or liter of water, or pour the water from one clean container to another several times." 
• The pinch of salt is actually an old trick to make coffee taste better. A soldier I knew always added a pinch to my cup whenever he was trying to sober me up (but that's another story involving one of the many uses of ethanol in a non-survival scenario). 

Filters
If you want to filter your coffee, you can either purchase disk coffee filters or simply punch a hole in the middle of regular basket filters. There are plenty of YouTubevideos to show how to use paper filters with percolators in case you want use filters. Filters have many uses, some culinary and some not, and so have a place in a prepper pantry.

Other Thoughts
There are other ways to make coffee, and other ways to sterilize water. This one is great for "glamping", "bug out by vehicle", or "shelter in place" scenarios where the size and weight of the unit aren't huge drawbacks to routine use. It's also cheap enough to stash at a bug out location or cache site without feeling too bad about wasting money on preps you might never use.

Protip: if you add fresh grounds to your once-used grounds you'll be able to make a can of ground coffee go longer. If you're like me and need a few stiff cups of black life water to keep you going through the day, this will help you wean yourself of a caffeine dependency over time.

Overall
While this percolator won't make a perfect cup of top-end dark roast, it will make a strong black brew that will taste a tad different from standard drip coffee makers. I recommend a French Press setup for "gourmet" in grubby times if you want a luxurious cup of coffee to start your day, but the percolator will make more coffee (often faster) and will be able to service more people than other solutions, which is important if you have neighbors or a work crew helping out. Never underestimate the goodwill that offering someone a warm drink on a cold morning will buy you! And even if it is hotter and muggier than the third ring of hell in your disaster, you can bet there is at least someone jonesing for their caffeine fix.

Guest Post: End of Life for Windows 10

 by George Groot

George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before. 

For those who aren’t in the know, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 on October 15, 2025. This is not something to be afraid of; operating systems and other software generally have a limited shelf life, and Windows 10 will join Windows 8, 7, XP, 2000, Millennium Edition, 98, various NTs, 95, and 3.1 and earlier as unsupported.  

But first, let me ask the rhetorical question Why do we need a modern operating system that's as secure as possible? Answer: Because the internet is a horrible place. For all the good that a great global network of constantly-on communications devices and computers has done for economic uplift, it has also created new risks to people’s livelihoods, life savings, and mental health.

The good news in all this is that Microsoft isn’t requiring too much in the way of expensive hardware to get a machine certified to run Windows 11. Basically, any Intel Core series with an 8000 or higher number, or an AMD Ryzen with a 2000 or higher number will do. However, if you're using a computer older than 2nd Gen Ryzen or 8th Gen Intel, you should know that while there are plenty of people out there who have managed to load Windows 11 on hardware well into the “Core 2Duo” era, they have really only done so to see if they could. If you're absolutely married to your current hardware and you have the tech chops to be your own IT department, this is an option, albeit one that I don’t recommend. 

 

A better option is purchasing newer hardware on the Microsoft approved list. If you aren't a tech person, there are companies that purchase “off warranty” corporate IT gear and refurbish it for the market. My normal place to purchase a refurbished computer is Newegg.com, and so what follows is current as of the time of this article's publication:

Desktops

An Intel Core i5-8500T refurbished business desktop already loaded with Win 11 Pro can be had for under $200 US at Newegg. If that’s your budget and you're fine with a basic web browsing and productivity software suite box, that’s probably the best option for people who are not very tech oriented. 

Laptops

Unfortunately for mobile users, Windows 11 laptops that are affordable (under the $200 mark) are on the underpowered side, using Celeron and Pentium processors with a small amount of RAM. These budget laptops will work for basic email, web browsing, and streaming media, but they lack significant onboard storage. 

TPM 2.0

Another option is if you're running hardware on the approved list, but somehow your system fails the Microsoft Windows 11 upgrade health check. Generally this is due to a lack of a TPM 2.0, or Trusted Platform Module, on the motherboard. Depending on your motherboard you may be able to purchase a TPM 2.0 module and plug it in, but buyer beware! Some manufacturers use a 12 pin, some 14, and some 20 pin modules, so be sure of what you need before you purchase. Once the TPM is installed, Windows 11 can make use of that hardware to perform whole drive encryption to help secure your system and data.

Linux

The desktop-oriented Linux distributions of today are much easier to use than they were when I first started playing around with Slackware Linux in the late 1990s. If you know nothing about Linux, an easy choice is Linux Mint, which is a derivative of Ubuntu which is downstream from Debian. Debian is a free operating system that is community-supported, whereas Ubuntu is a “corporate Linux distribution” supported by Canonical. This means Mint benefits from both crowdsourced bug fixes and improvements from Debian, as well as corporate security updates and “polish” from Canonical.

While Linux is much more user-friendly than it used to be, it’s still rather picky about who it's friends with. If you have a basic computer with integrated graphics from AMD or Intel, there should be no issues with graphics drivers, but if you have an Nvidia graphics card then Linux can be dicey right now. If all you need is a machine to surf the web, send/receive email, maybe play a few retro-games on an emulator, Linux is great. 

Notice I didn’t mention “streaming” there, as most streaming platforms aren't Linux friendly due to proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. If nothing else, you can load Linux on a legacy PC and set it up as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) file server to make your own network-attached storage appliance.

My Plan

I plan to go Windows 11 for my wife and two sons' desktops if I can get TPM modules that work for their motherboards, and also purchase my wife a Windows 11 laptop. My wife’s old desktop and laptop will have their files backed up to our NAS and migrated to the new machine. My “beater laptops” (refurbished government computers with built-in CAC smart card readers) will likely end up running Ubuntu since that is the desktop distribution most common where I work.

Erin had to ask me to clarify a lot of this, so if you need things explained please leave a comment and I'll help as best I can.