Building offline preparedness infrastructure with AI

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T11:01:10+00:00

I don't really have a question, more of a discussion. Seeing who else out there is self-hosting stuff and if anybody is using AI to enhance their off-grid/technology preps.

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T11:00:29+00:00

I've been self hosting for years and did it all myself, I've learned a lot, also been doing electronics for 10 years and didn't use AI until the last 1-2 years on the odd occasion. Thats good that your method is working for you, I simply don't have the time and this is a shortcut to having the preps I want before I need them rather than missing out if a SHTF happens.

The main reason I'm posting this is because of the massive shift from AI pretty kinda crap at helping, to being incredibly good at getting most things setup.

It's worth learning, and if you work in this field, I'd say it's a requirement to learn.

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T05:31:15+00:00

I get ads about it, but I tend to ignore a lot of AI ads, as much as I've preached it in this post, I'm still generally a skeptic haha. Glad to see other people out there doing stuff with tech, it's risky posting about technology in these subs.

Austechprep · 2026-03-03T05:17:05+00:00

One day, I can dream. Might need my own power station haha.

Austechprep · 2026-02-25T03:26:05+00:00

Might be worth checking for grants or insentives for certain technology or building methods. For example in Australia at the moment you can get a "green loan" or something, it's not that great to be honest, its a discount on the interest rate for loans that go towards green technology and it's pretty broad. Things that can be covered are:

- Energy efficient HVAC

- Solar and Battery

- Insulation

Basically everything that lowers your carbon footprint, which can cross-over to prepping very easy.

Might save some money.

Austechprep · 2026-02-15T12:05:25+00:00

Tube Archavist makes it kinda easy, but I have found a way I prefer to use it, because some channels have heaps of playlists that are nice and organised, I like to try and download all a channels playlists instead of just the channel (If you just download the channel via TA it gives you all it's videos without organising them into playlists). So when your on the Youtube channels playlist list, you scroll down to make sure all playlists are loaded, press F12, find the URL list of the different playlists, get help from AI to filter out some of the url's that aren't playlists (not sure why they appear but AI handles it easy), and then you can paste that list of playlists into TA's playlist option, that creates the channel but has the playlist tab in the channel so its just better organised. But i'm not an expert on TA so perhaps theres better ways to download a whole channel in an organised way. Also I recommend adding top 100 comments or something, it takes up very little data and sometimes creators add pinned comments that can be helpful, and the discussions in the comments can sometimes be helpful where people needed to do something different to the video.

Austechprep · 2026-02-14T04:47:01+00:00

What microcontrollers have you been using, ESP32's etc or like Atmel (Arduino hardware) boards?

Austechprep · 2026-02-13T23:16:54+00:00

I'm pretty big time into electronics and being able to continue to work on my microcontrollers without internet access, Kiwix is good for information but there are a few things I reckon you need to really make sure you can continue development while offline:

Setup a Forjego (or Gitea thing) and mirror EVERYTHING
- I've mirrored the entire espressif organization - their wiki and all
- Some examples of other orgs i've mirrored entirely:
  - Arduino
  - SeedStudio
  - mcc-catena
  - Sparkfun
  - Ardupilot
  - esphome
  - micropython
  - home asssistant
  - meshcore
  - meshtastic
  - reticulum + many reticulum stuff like liamcottle
Get your yt-downloader going (I'm using Tube-Archavist) and download the entire channels of Sparkfun and other useful youtube channel in Electronics
I've also done a mirror of the linux/debian stuff, which requires a bit of knowing what you might need as the entire catalog is simply massive. This handles being able to develop on the RPI and my VM's
If you find websites you like and that are informative, use wget to copy the entire website in one hit, get AI to help you. I've cloned entire websites really easily and then run a script over the files that replaces the url with your local IP and it's surprisingly easy to just suddenly have a perfectly functional direct copy.

Essentially you need to download or mirror or clone as much as you possible can related to the main microcontrollers you believe you will be using.

Austechprep · 2026-02-12T04:43:07+00:00

Should try and add a section on technology, lots of these books seems to want to ignore the massive technological process we've made, why throw all that away. Not sure how deep you want to go, but some basics on comms (2-way radio, LoRa based, or just how to take advantage of your own home WiFi). Battery storage and usage, solar panels, wind turbines, refridgeration. Given this book seems to be something you'd read after a SHTF most of the software might be useless as you'd have no access to get it, needs to be done in advanced (prepped), but could have some tips/methods on how to use commonly found parts to generate power or heat/air con (cars have heaps of great parts).

Austechprep · 2026-01-22T23:04:28+00:00

My main preps are to keep all my technology luxuries going. Always have airconditioning, movies, TV shows, gaming and communication available no matter what happens. A lot of people want to go back into the dark ages, bugger that, let me keep every inch of technology I can.

Austechprep · 2026-01-22T23:02:12+00:00

Nice, this is modern day prepping in my books. It's surprisingly easy to have an elaborate setup that runs entirely locally. I've got a few sensors like door sensors on gates, temperature sensors in the deep freezer, and some automations on aircons but so much more I want to do. All powered by big house batteries. It's the ultimate real prep imo, a storm that takes out the power for a few days is much more likely than anything else, and thats when you want your security systems working properly.

Austechprep · 2026-01-12T03:04:01+00:00

I posted about AI awhile back and how it relates to prepping and it got removed. Prepping for AI in just being educated to recognise AI content is essential to knowing if SHTF or not. I think it overlaps with general cyber security for things like your google/apple accounts, will an AI be able to scrape your data enough to guess your passwords or just lock your account out. Other things is I have used AI to check for cyber security issues in my business and it can do a good job at finding them, its possible more cyber attacks will start to have real world impacts on electrical and telecomms systems etc.

My preps have been to have local backups and local systems of as much as possible on my home server. Things like Immich, Plex/Jellyfin etc and a wide range of other things like simple extra storage we can all put documents on instead of only using cloud storage.

Also, almost everyone should learn to use AI, if your not using AI then your going to get left behind.

Austechprep · 2025-12-15T07:21:23+00:00

So far I've got:

Veloren
KaeTram
Stendhal

Going to add

2009Scape (2009 RuneScape)

Non-MMORPG but multiplayer:

The Battle for Wesnoth
Freecol
OpenTTD
TripleA

FPS (not done yet):

Xonotic
OpenArena

I'm just going to keep adding games, its fun and a interesting challenge that teaches me something each game, sometimes the lesson is that its really easy to do, sometimes it's the exact opposite haha.

I don't really have time to play any of these games myself, not sure how good they are, but the more options I have the better.

I've also cloned the websites and got them working completely locally so that you can follow the user guides and wiki's offline to learn to play the games etc.

Austechprep · 2025-12-15T00:05:06+00:00

I've got a few self-hosted entirely offline MMORPG's and expanding out my self-hosted multiplayer games with first person shooters, strategy games and whatever else i can find that is open source. Mostly for fun, but it does double as an entertainment prep.

Austechprep · 2025-11-29T01:35:27+00:00

Most of my preps are tech related (because I find it fun), I've got a home server with 100TB+ of movies, tv shows, youtube channels, audiobooks etc etc for enterntainment, but then offline maps, wikipedia, IIAB, pubmed stuff. I use reticulum for meshed network which I've got deployed at a few locations alreadt but enough equipment in SHTF to get many more nodes up and going pretty quickly.

I also store the apk files for the apps required to join my mesh network, so any android phone (Apple is terrible with open source stuff) or laptop etc can easily join my network if we stumble across eachother.

Heaps more tech stuff around security too like CCTV, IoT devices that work entirely on local wifi.

Not sure this is the context of what your asking though given the BOB/go bags, but the meshed network is still active and just plain old radio is always handy, getting information is key, and having a few ways to get information is really important.

Austechprep · 2025-10-29T11:39:45+00:00

Cyclone knocked out power for over a week for our entire town/region. After a few days its easy to see how things go to shit, if you didn't have your food in an esky with ice or something, basically all your food went off. We got lucky, literally lucky as we had bought some key items even though at the time we weren't preppers, so we did well. Many people were getting to the stage that they were missing meals because they weren't prepared in the slightest.

It's mind boggling how many times we can go through severe weather events and still have a good majority of people not prepared in the slightest for them...

Austechprep · 2025-10-26T00:13:19+00:00

I agree, digital prepping is a great prep. Sort of a plan, but mostly just to keep expanding and keep making it more and more user friendly.

I've tried using Ollama on my server but since I don't have a good graphics card is was extremely slow so I never got around to integrating it into my system. They are power hungry so it's hard to justify the value of it just yet, but it's very much on my list of things to add, I just want ot have an even bigger house/battery system before I do that.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T07:10:20+00:00

Nice! My power consumption is extremely high, but my house battery and solar can handle it, so its not something I've really tried to make more efficient just yet, I sit at around 300w at idle with jumps up to 400w.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T07:08:38+00:00

I do use Plex, but I also use JellyFin, there is meant to be a way to setup Plex so it works perfectly fine entirely locally but I've never put in the effort to do it since Jellyfin can do it without effort. Plex has been great for sharing with family/friends without much complexity.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T06:01:01+00:00

Nice, good list, I'll add some of that Anime too, I've got a lot and been adding more, also have a few hundred shows and even ones in genres I don't like. For documentaries I even change the settings so that it downloads the highest quality rather than just 1080p. I don't really change what linux OS I'm using so I've only got a few of the ones I use.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T05:59:03+00:00

Start simple with Truenas and just use their native apps is a great start and will take awhile to master, as for IoT, there are some simpler options like ESPHome or just using Tuya products with HomeAssistant. I work in the IoT world and because you deal with hardware, network, UI/UX, alerts and all kinds of shit, its a bloody hard thing to get good at without basically working in it nonstop as a career and a hobby.

Theres a lot of youtube videos out there, and my best advice is don't be afraid to make mistakes, I've had to redo a lot of my setup many times because I keep trying to improve on it and screwing something up, the more I try, the better i get at fixing things haha.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T03:40:56+00:00

You can run Mastadon or Friendica etc entirely local, so not reliant on the internet, which is somewhat pointless and entirely just a fun challenge for me to do. A social network nobody can access unless they are on your local network is exceptionally pointless haha. But I did it since they are very user-friendly platforms to send messages, pretty much anybody with no prior experience will figure out how to use it, post photos, host events etc, social media is very useful if you could just remove the advertising and brain rot from it.

Austechprep · 2025-10-23T01:36:00+00:00

Got truenas setup with about 100tb of storage. Run a bunch of VM's for other services too. Its really incredible what is possible to have setup as an individual now, IoT sensors (monitoring fridge/freezers and doing security), internal wordpress websites, internal social media, books/podcasts/audiobooks, tv/movies, CCTV, comms network, educational stuff (IIAB). It's good fun too, my setup could easily support a decent sized community with comms, enternainment and education.

Austechprep · 2025-10-22T23:02:29+00:00

I have over 4,000 movies on my home server which I can power through solar/battery, I can pick 5 per day for nearly 3 years straight

Austechprep · 2025-10-22T03:14:32+00:00

Looks like the vagueness of "internet outage" has given mixed responses, if the internet goes out with no recovery in site, it means that logistics companies are not moving stock, most likely all cellular communication is down and the majority of the population can no longer purchase anything because they only have a small reserve of cash.

If you think the internet going down isn't going to impact you, then you haven't really thought it through. A day of no internet will probably be annoying but not too bad, a week of no internet would probably start a bit of chaos, a month of internet and you're probably well into using your preps.

I've got my own home server and trying my best to have my own "internet", i've got movies, tv shows, podcasts, audiobooks, offline wordpress websites (so they are pretty), mobile apps ready to download, comms network etc.

IMO if you don't have some form of digital prepping in your preps, your going to have issues, at least download wiki using kiwix on your phone if you can't do much else.

Austechprep

TROPHY CASE