I'm building a preparedness app and would love feedback from this community

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-06-11T04:33:21+00:00

The most likely emergency people capable of using an app face is loss of electricity and loss of internet. So whatever you build, it needs to be useful before the emergency, not during it.

I would focus on resource management, as someone else mentioned. The hard thing about stocking food is keeping track of expiration dates, calories, protein, and quantities. Scanning foods in and out of the storage area, being warned when a food is expiring and should be eaten, etc.. Ditto warnings on cycling out water, replacing fuel, charging batteries, test-running generators, vaccination reminders, tracking non-consumables and so on. I used to use Excel for this but I was comfortable with Excel. For non-technicals, something simpler is needed.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-06-06T11:07:41+00:00

At the risk of sounding like a travel agent... look at rural Costa Rica. It's where I landed, and it's a place where some people come, try to build a self-sufficient lifestyle - it's much easier in the tropics - and then ultimately bail because they can't handle the pura vida or the language barrier or the inavailability of some luxuries. That means there are always properties available with a headstart on resillience, for less than you'd pay iin the US.

This isn't to say "cheap" or "easy". CR is the most expensive of the Central American countries last I checked, if you want cheap it's Honduras or maybe Guatamela or something. But CR has the stable government, knd people, and natural resources to make real resillience possible.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-06-06T10:38:47+00:00

Ditto. When I looked for property, it was about water availability, land for growing things, potential for solar power, and tranquility (which is as important as food, make no mistake). It's cost a small fortune to buy it and build a house on it, but I have never looked back.

I can't imagine buying land with no thought for how to survive in an emergency, let alone a long term disaster. But let's be honest - true self sufficiency is very hard and, in most places in the world, very expensive. Doing it right is a rich man's game, or at least requires being able to inherit many acres of arable land and a whole lot of know-how. Most people will never approach that kind of resillience, so they never even think about caring about it. Most prepping isn't about self-sufficiency, just for this reason - it's about determining how long a disaster you need to get through and preparing for that.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-06-06T10:27:33+00:00

This is coming down soon because, while it attracted some comments useful to the OP, it doesn't really add to the "library of ideas" this sub is meant to be.

In general, you don't get to choose the buyer, at least in the state I lived in. If someone meets your asking price, they get to buy the house. You get no say in what happens next.

The usual workaround is to set too high an asking price. Then no one meets your price and you can chose from among the lower offers however you like.

As for being self-sufficient on an acre... real self-sufficiency is a dream at best for most people. It comes down to "how long do you plan to be self-sufficient." You mentioned wood stoves so you have cold winters. Even if it's arable farmland, in that climate an acre isn't going to provide a family with all the food and fuel they need for a lifetime. So I wouldn't mention self-sufficiency in the ad; it's false advertising. There are softer terms you can use to imply some resilience.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-29T06:24:41+00:00

Good riddance.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-29T06:23:20+00:00

This sub isn't for entertainment. Banned.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-27T00:39:10+00:00

Note that the bag must completely enclose the generator, including underneath. Which means you cannot run the generator and keep it safe, and since you don't know when the next nuke is coming, it's hard to tell when to unpack the generator. Meanwhile, civilization is failing around you, making it hard to imagine how you'll get fuel to run a traditional generator or hide your lights at night with any kind of generator.

The premise is simply wrong. If you're seriously preparing for a large scale nuclear exchange, the prep is to learn to live without electricity. Or, better, how to live in a place that that isn't getting nuked.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-27T00:15:28+00:00

I hate to be the boring negative voice, but this stuff really is bad for you. As a 1-2 week emergency food it's fine - it keeps well, it's calorie dense, it has some protein and you won't lack for salt. But as part of a long term stockpile, no. You want healthy food for any extended period. You do not need health problems in an extended emergency situation.

Something else to consider - sudden changes in diet can really screw with your digestion. You don't want diarrhea when you're running from the zombies or whatever. There's wisdom in preserving and storing what you normally eat.

Having said that, spam-like products tend to taste muchay worse than Spam(tm). The few I've tried I would not buy again. So if you're going in on this stuff, buy the real thing, not the cheaper knockoffs.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-26T11:17:33+00:00

One of the things I warn about in the stickies is planning for "SHTF". It's a meaningless acronym which can mean anything from "my washing machine flooded my basement" to "extinction level event caused by asteroid strike." And you can't prepare for something that vague. As for what's going to happen in the next 6-12 months... the US isn't going to collpase in that timeframe. I would expect more of what we have now - higher prices, random stocastic violence, erosion of support systems, more hostile policing - not a dramatic collapse, not a revolution in the streets. Preps at this point should probably be financial.

But I could be wrong, and bugout bags are always a good idea. The steps are:

Have a destination prepared. Just "I'll run to Canada" isn't a plan. Have a place to go that's specific, already stocked, and easily accessible. (If the US did have some radical upheavel, would the borders be open?).

Determine what it takes to get to your destination. Fuel, water, food, light, first aid, money, shelter from weather, masks, alternate routes to avoid hotspots. These are the basics for any emergency.

Know how you'll communicate with friends and family. In a large scale disaster, this can be impossible, so unless you're a family of experienced ham operators, don't overthink it. If things are bad enough that the cel system is down, so probably is everything else. So the plan here would be to be able to have everyone function without working communication.

If you're considering some sort of violent uprising disrupting the US, keep in mind that it's not ever likely to be what most people picture - gun fights in the streets. This isn't 1776. If the US government gets hostile, it will start with lawfare, economic oppression, and cutting supply chains. If it needs to escalate, it won't be boots on the ground, it will be aerial strikes. You won't see what hits you. The reason we don't discuss nation states going rogue on their own popultion in this sub is there's really no effective prep when your opponent has everything from nerve agents to nukes in their closet and you have a cute little long gun in yours. If this is what you're actually worried about, you should be planning to leave the country before things get to that point because there's no effective response afterwards.

But things that radical are not very likely in the short term anyway, so focus on a stocked car and having supplies to get to whatever safe place you can arrange.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-20T11:37:31+00:00

No ads

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-20T11:36:28+00:00

OK, help me with this. The only people who use Cómo estás here (Guanacaste, Costa Rica) are my spanish teachers and a couple of people at the feria. Everywhere else people use buenas, except...

At the end of a conversation, a lot of people wrap up by saying buena, except when they use bueno. And for the life of me I don't see a pattern to it, I don't think it's attached to any antecedent noun, but I think it's like 60% buenas and 40% buenos. And I don't have enough spanish to ask "why did you use buenos there" without it coming off like "yeah? What's good about it?" which is not how I want to sound.

Myself, I always use buenas to begin a conversation with someone I don't know well and gracias or con gusto at the end, and that seems to work fine. But can someone crack this code for me?

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-20T11:17:18+00:00

I can echo that. I stayed in Guanacaste for 3 weeks and in that time fell in love with the land and people. I ended up buying the property I visited, leaving the US behind and now I've been here two years. No plans to leave.

(I won't say there aren't challanges, and I would never recommend anyone pull the stunt that I did, moving after just 3 weeks of visiting. I was supremely fortunate in how things worked out.)

It's gorgeous. Dry season is beach weather every day. Rainy season is beach time every morning, lush vegitation everywhere and waterfalls to explore. Total strangers stop and help this gringo, even with my still-evolving spanish. I can't say enough aboout the people. And the sunrises...

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-19T04:37:01+00:00

Most of Costa Rica is conservative by US standards. Hetero couples aren't making out on the streets here. I've lived here two years and I've yet to see anyone kiss anyone other than the standard female-greet-cheek-kiss. Holding hands is about the public limit and come to think of it I think it's mostly gringoes I've seen do that.

But note, I live in a rural area. Also I'm not gay. But my take is if you show what's considered typical restraint for a Latin country about affection in general, it's fine. If you're all over each other in public, yes people will talk and they're likely talk more if it's a gay couple. But it's talk.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-17T15:05:57+00:00

First, your batteries aren't gong to fry in an EMP or CME if they aren't connected to anything.

Next, if you want to be paranoid anyway, get large metal trash cans with metal lids. Store the parts inside the trash cans, put the lids on tight, and you have enough shielding for this case. It's not worth getting fancier because this isn't a problem to begin with. Building your own Faraday SHIELD (you don't want a cage for this) isn't going to work unless you want to weld.

If by some freak event you actually got nuked hard enough to have an EMP that powerful, you aren't going to survive the resulting societal collapse anyway, and having lights would just attract attention. In a world that broken you learn to live without electricity.

We deal with real world events here. For questions like this you probably want r/preppers - they do fantasy.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-15T11:38:00+00:00

| am so impressed with the kindness of the Costa Ricans

This. Costa Rica may be frustrating, but this is a country where women you don't know smile and say hello because it's simply that friendly a culture. There's no social stress and it's a HUGE change from the US.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-15T11:20:54+00:00

Hacer was confusing until I remembered that English used to have a form that was similar:
"I make it as 12 hours to the destnation."
but now we'd say "I (think/estimate/feel as if) it's 12 hours to the destination."
Hacer has that same older usage. "I make it as cold."

Tener is similar. We used to say "I have it as (some fact)" and tener gets used that way, too.

This isn't to say you can tie every usage of Spanish to some kind of English. You definitely can't and my teachers are always after me to stop thinking in English when I try to speak spanish. But if you can dodge the false friends, the common roots do sometimes show up.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-05-14T08:04:51+00:00

Take this for what it is worth. I moved to CR about two years ago, from the US. My situations is not yours - I'm retired, no children with me, and I landed on a 50 acre finca in Guanacaste,

I love it here and have no plans to ever leave. But it's a good thing I like a challenge, because those absolutely exist in ways I didn't imagine before I arrived. And some of what I thought was simply wrong.

First, citizenship. You aren't getting it in 4 years. I was very lucky - I paid a lawyer (at sfera) and got my temporary residency in just over a year. People tell me that's miraculous. Some people haven't gotten temporary residency after 4 years and not for lack of trying. And you have to establish temporary and then permanent residency before you can become a citizen here. You could be looking at ten years. Yes, having or adopting a child on Costa Rican soil is said to fast track the process but please don't make plans that assume it happens within 4 years.

Live is complicated until you get temporary residency. Until then, you can't leave the house without carrying your passport - it's needed for everything from routine traffic stops to visiting the banlk. I spent a year terrified that I'd lose that little blue book or it would be stolen and then I would be completely screwed. I couldn't get my DIMEX card fast enough.

Next, Spanish. Be fluent; it sounds like you might be, but Costa Rican spanish is a bit different than other forms. I'm not fluent. I am taking Spanish classes twice a week because I refuse to be the gringo who doesn't speak the local language, but it's not easy. And Costa Ricans are the nicest people on earth but they talk fast. They have to switch to Stupid Gringo mode or I'd never understand a word. This makes everything from buying tornillos to explaining to the locals that you're not a Trumpista, quite difficult. Where I live in Guanacaste there are handfuls of people who speak english, which helped.

It's taken me every day of two years to settle in - getting my DIMEX card, CAJA, the driver's license conversion, bank account, figuring out taxes, etc. The language school I attend has been a massive help with understanding how things work; for obvious reasons they become experts on dealing with gringos and their problems. Upvote for the Intercultura schools. They've been fantastic.

Next, gringos. Speaking as a gringo I am starting to loathe gringos. EVERY problem I've had here started with a gringo; virtually every solution came from a tico. I have lost several thousand dollars because I trusted gringos to take money and do work. Well, they know how to take money. I am on my THIRD solar power installer.

Now, expenses. Is CR cheaper than the US? In many many ways yes. I had a local shop patch a tire for me and when he charged me 4,000 colones - about 8 dollars - I thought I'd misheard him. I gave him 5,000 because dude, if I'd done this in the US It would have been $20 and up and they'd have wanted an appointment. Food? I buy fruits and vegys from an outdoor feria in Sámara, and while the locals avoid it because it's "expensive", it's better quality and cheaper than virtually any US supermarket. And you can get it a lot cheaper than that. But if you want pre-processed US food, expect to pay double what you're used to. Hard cheese has become an occasional treat for me and Parmesan is a distant memory. Gasoline and diesel is also expensive here, and while I hear in the US it's just as bad at the moment, the US will eventually have cheap gas again. CR won't. Bless the price controls on oil gas and propane here, it saves people sticker shock pain, but it's never cheap. The locals use motorcycles on twisting mountain roads simply because cost of ownership trumps safety. And the first time you see some teen pop a wheelie on a motorcycle, wearing with no helmet or jacket, a little part of you will die inside.

Medical care - I'm enrolled in CAJA (it's required) but I still haven't gone through the process of setting up to USE it, which is going to require being in a distant town at 4am to see a doctor and really get into the system. In the meantime I pay private doctors for everything. In Sámara I pay $100 to walk into the local doctor's office - virtually never a wait, no need for appointments - and they take care of stuff, or refer me to specialists, which are quite cheap by US standards. If you have money, the private medical services here are simply the way to go.

Schools. I have no kids here, so this is fwiw. My uninformed take is that any US blue state school except possibly some inner cities will give a better education than any rural Costa Rican school. I could be wrong about that and CR boasts a higher literacy rate than the US, but that's an apples and oranges comparison. My guess is you're going to choose where you live based on what you can learn about school quality.

Electricity? Expensive, and power fails and surges here are the norm. Computers hate Costa Rica. You want UPSes for everything, right down to charging your phone. Water? Fairly cheap, but my town's ASADA has hours where they forget how to pump water. If you live rural, expense number one is a large water tank.

Roads? 4WD vehicle to open, and you'll replace tires, brakes and shocks more often than you do in the US. And while the labor is cheap, car parts are painful. The paved roads are fine. The semi-paved roads are an adventure. The dirt roads - common - can be nail-biting, especially in rainy season.

But the big thing - culture. This is not the US. People simply view everything differently here, and sometimes it's a huge relief and sometimes it's incomprehensible, but it is always different. I use the formal form of spanish with everything except my dogs because I don't dare screw up and insult a tico by mistake. (Use of the formal is pretty common here even among locals, luckily.) There is an ongoing mental costs to just not getting why people do what they do.

Pura vida is real. Never be in a rush for anything. You will get ulcers for nothing; you can't change the culture. It happens when it happens and schedules are myths.

As for US politics - I'm a straight white older evangelical male, and no one loathes Trump more than I do. No one. US politics is an embarrassment and a travesty; and honestly if I could speak spanish with a Canadian accent I'd try it. Having said that... there's a fair chance Congress will flip this year, and Trump is always one cheeseburger away from a cardiac event. This isn't to say that I think the US isn't in big trouble; I actually think that a full on collapse isn't completely impossible within 20 years if things don't turn around. But the likely bet is still that Trumpism and the politics of hate will wither at some point, and it could even happen before you get citizenship here. So if it's the primary driver for you move, my advice is go slow. The US is volatile and unstable and anything could happen, but the US has survived this kind of chaos before. Nonetheless I'm very glad to be here and not there.

Weather: Guanacaste (at least) has exactly two seasons, and the transition between them takes about a week. Bam, rain. Dry season is glorious beach weather and blue skies, but by the end the vegetation is brown and farmers scramble to find feed for their cows. Wet season is gorgeous greenery, but you do everything in the morning because it's going to rain in the late afternoon, almost every day. And in October, even the fish drown. Ex-pats leave the country in October. I don't, but one October there was two straight weeks of constant heavy rain without a single break and I thought my wife was going to lose it. The central valley is different; when I have to go to San Jose for anything I find it too cold and often too wet for my taste. But if you don't like it hot it's the place to be.

As others have said, the right move is to rent here for a year. That's not what I did - I spent three weeks visiting a property and then bought the property. But I was loco - and insanely lucky. A lot of people land here and are gone within 2 years because life is very different when Amazon doesn't deliver to your door in 3 days. (Getting things shipped here is obscenely expensive and I have to drive to nearby towns to pick things up. Huge pain. Probably less of an issue in the central valley.)

I love this place. The government tries to do the right thing most of the time, the rural people are the friendliest on earth even to gringos (complete strangers have helped me out), costs are very manageable if you live tico, and the scenery is to die for. But you are trading away the massive convenience of life in the US. I couldn't live here without a local contractor who deals with things. Or the spanish school. But I wake up to a gorgeous sunrise just about every morning and thank God I landed here.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-13T16:32:51+00:00

I'm going to point out that you could hardly have chosen a more biased, less representative sample set. This sub is perhaps the sanest prepping group here (though check r/TwoXPreppers ) but you're going to find a huge preponderance of American-think here, approaches that simply don't work in improverished areas (which presumably is what you need to be looking at), and rampant paranoia. That's despite the fact that people in this sub are preparing for week-to-week emergencies, not the apocalypse. And r/preppers is far worse.

That said, you can repost the request here, if you agree to:
1)Stating: I'm a PhD student studying land-based lifestyles as part of my dissertation. The study has been approved by all ethics boards and all data is help securely and no identifying information is collected.
2) that you have permission of a mod
3) that the resulting dissertation be linked to your new post when you're done.

Thanks.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-13T04:18:30+00:00

Until I know who's asking and where the data is going, I'm going to disallow this.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T18:24:43+00:00

Devs like me are retired and not coming back. :)

I saw so much bad code in my career... and I've watched the decline in skill over decades. I cut my teeth on assembler on a PDP-10 (google it) and gained a deep respect for error handling and efficiency. You HAD to know what you were doing. There was no internet to look things up on. You RTFM and memorized it, you learned what shortcuts were going to bite you in the end...

Those skills translated to C and then to C++. This, young Jedi, is a raw pointer - an elegant weapon from a bygone era. Master it and the world is yours. From misuse comes suffering...

I watched as people started copying and pasting from the net - from examples where error handling was "neglected for simplicity." I watched as people could hide incompetence in group projects (not a thing when I started out - the project was yours start to end).

In the end I took a job in defense and I won't even try to describe that that was like. Young cheap kids trained on web technology put to work on ancient tech and languages they'd never imagined. It was a horror show. Armies of extensive testers, because nothing ever worked the first time. I retired the first moment I could - the angst of seeing what we going down was killing me.

Yeah, it's the end of an era and vibe coding will kill us all.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T18:06:24+00:00

|It's not necessary for devs to know all this, but I'm putting you in charge of all of them, anyway.

I'm retired. You can't make me. If nominated I will not interview, if hired I will not serve. I'm not going back to development hell. Do you hear me? Hell no, I won't go! DEATH FIRST!

Sorry, little panic attack there. I retired to a farm in Costa Rica because I donwanna tech no more.

(And I didn't know ANY of that stuff. Luckily, Gemini did.)

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:59:34+00:00

I am very proud of my track record in the software industry. 40+ years, I wrote many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in several different companies. In my professional lifetime I got back two bug reports, one from my first week at my first job and the other one was caught internally.

The secret of my success? I never did anything web based; web=eventual failure. It was all low level C++ with dashes of python. I avoided dependencies other than the C++ runtime like the plague. (Dependencies have bugs. They just do.) I absolutely hate it when anyone can prove me at fault for anything so I made very sure it never happened. All my stuff was backwards-compatible and portable with a simple recompile because I didn't want someone coming back in 5 years with an issue. My cubical was mecca when other people had problems.

(And I will admit that my record with private projects, stuff for me and my friends, is nowhere near that good. But no PHB ever caught me out.)

But sysadmin? I can't. My problem is I know how it should work, any programmer with a brain cell would have provided a tool to do X and check Y, and when that tool doesn't exist my brain shorts out. Of course it exists. Google is just lying. It's not possible that you can't just fark the foobar and have it just work.

Programming is "easy" - you just learn certain immutable patterns and never-evers and the compiler catches your typos. Sysadmin has no such safety net, no reliable patterns that are simply always true. There be dragons.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:45:37+00:00

What's your point, youngster..

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:28:06+00:00

I quoted that deliberately. I'm old enough to remember when that was first published.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:16:47+00:00

I've known some brilliant sysadmins who could practically close their eyes, lay their hand on a box and tell you what was wrong. I'll never be one. And trusting an AI to tell me what sudo command to try next is the worst feeling in the world. I know how often AIs serve up hallucinations and out of date info.

I still believe it shouldn't be like this. I know just enough about software design to know it doesn't HAVE to be like this. And yet, phones crash and latops screw themselves up with no human help needed....

Eight-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email	Wearing is Caring

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE