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Their videos on blow-out kit basics and hemostatics are worth a view. BFE Labs is not updated frequently, but the blog remains one of my favorites for practical skill and tool discussion.
Dick Griffith has pursued human-powered travel in the wilderness areas of the American West since 1946. He pioneered the use of a packraft in 1952. This book chronicles his travels.
The inaugural ITS Tactical Muster was a great multi-disciplinary training event. I had never been involved with planning something like this, and was surprised at how smoothly the whole thing went. A large part of the credit for that goes to the students, who represented a diverse set of backgrounds and energetically attacked all training blocks.
Mike, Eric and myself all flew in to Dallas-Forth Worth on Tuesday. We met up with Bryan, Kelly and Matt Gambrell at the ITS offices and loaded up all the gear needed for the week.
The six of us drove out to Lake Mineral Wells State Park to begin the setup and finalize our class preparations. We had rented a building for our kitchen and indoor classroom. We also had our own private ring of camp sites, far from where any other campers would be.
The following day, Matt Fiddler of SerePick and Nathan Morrison of Morrison Industries and The Morrison System arrived and assisted with our setup. One of the projects that needed to be completed that day was the building of a POW camp – something that I had suggested as part of the FTX that the students would be surprised with on Saturday night.
On Thursday the students arrived, along with Caleb Causey, our final instructor. From there on it was a flurry of activity. I didn’t take many photos.
Classes began on Friday with Bryan teaching knot-tying. That was followed up by a land navigation course, which I instructed. It was difficult to squeeze my instruction into a 4-hour block – we had wanted to start with the absolute basics of how to read a topographic map and go all the way to shooting, plotting and following bearings, resection, and plotting UTM coordinates – but the class seemed to be a success. Everyone succeeded in the exercises I gave them during the class, as well as the navigation aspects of the FTX the following day. After the navigation class, Bryan took over again for the stove building class, in which we had everyone build a fancy feast stove. At the end of the class I interjected some of my thoughts and experiences with using alcohol stoves. Nate Morrison completed the day with a class in fire building.
Saturday began with Nate teaching a basic rappelling class. During the downtime I worked with a few of the students on the navigation skills that I didn’t have time to cover during my class. In the afternoon we transferred back to the dining hall for Matt Fiddler’s lockpicking class. This was the first time I had ever received direct instruction in this skill. It helped me immensely. Lockpicking was followed by a shelter building class, which I was initially scheduled to assist with. Our FTX was scheduled for Saturday night and I had taken point in setting up the navigation element of the exercise. I had to forgo the shelter class and run off with Eric to finalize our preparations. Nate ended up taking over the shelter discussion. As the shelter class reached its end, we let the students know that they would be having a late night. I won’t detail the FTX here as I don’t know which elements of it will be reused next year. I don’t want to ruin the experience for future attendees. I will say that we had a lot of fun planning it and the feedback we received from the students afterwards was all positive. I was a little jealous of them, myself. I would have liked to run the course.
Most of us only had a few hours of sleep that night. Sunday got off to a slow start. The day’s only class was Caleb Causey’s medical course. Afterwards we gave out awards, wrapped-up the event, and said our goodbyes.
Matt Gambrell, who is the artist responsible for the ITS patch and t-shirt designs, is also a cook. He served as chef for the Muster, waking up early to dish up three amazing meals per day. We jokingly referred to the event as an eating experience with a few classes thrown in between meals.
Despite being involved with ITS for over two years, this was my first time meeting the rest of the crew. I enjoyed meeting them all and building our relationships. The other instructors – Nate, Matt and Caleb – are all experts in their fields. I learned something in all of their classes and it was an honor to be included in their company. It was frustrating for all of us to need to compress our subjects into a 4-hour block, but everyone succeeded and the combined total of training that we were able to pull off in two-and-a-half days of instruction was amazing. The students, too, were top notch. Before the event I was anxious about what kind of people would attend. I had no reason to be. Some of them turned out to be readers of this blog (clearly they are gentlemen of good taste). We all enjoyed quality conversation.
As someone who served as both staff and instructor, I have an obvious bias here, but I think that anyone who is interested in this type of thing should strongly consider attending the next event. When pricing for the inaugural Muster was first announced I scoffed a little, thinking “How could a 3-day camping trip be worth that much money?” Now having seen what Bryan and Kelly imagined I think the ticket price is an excellent value. Between food and swag, students had a significant portion of the fee returned to them. And the breadth of skills is unmatched by any other event that I know about. Where else can you attend a class in rappelling, break for lunch, learn how to pick and bypass locks, stay up all night sneaking around the woods, and then attend a class on tactical medicine after breakfast? As Nate wrote, it sets a new standard. Not only is the experience fun, students also leave with at least an introductory understanding of important life skills. If I was not part of the staff, I would certainly pay to attend.
The inaugural event made me proud to be part of ITS. I enjoyed meeting a part of the community around the site, and it was an honor to be included among the high caliber instructors.
Earlier this year I went through a period where I had only intermittent internet access. Constant, high-speed internet access is so common these days that I had forgotten what it was like to work on a computer that was offline more often than it was online. It provided an opportunity to reevaluate some aspects of how I work with data.
For a period of a couple years I accessed my mail through the Gmail web interface exclusively. About a year ago, I moved back to using a local mail client. That turned out to be a lucky move for this experience. I found that I had three requirements for my mail:
Those requirements are fairly basic. Most mail clients will handle them without issue. I’ve always preferred to connect to my mail server via IMAP rather than POP3. Most mail clients offer to cache messages retrieved over IMAP. They do this for performance reasons rather than to provide the ability to read mail offline, but the result is the same. For mail clients like Mutt that don’t have built-in caching, a tool like OfflineImap is great.
Wikipedia is too valuable a resource to not have offline access to. There are a number of options for getting a local copy. I found Kiwix to be a simple and effective solution. It downloads a compressed copy of the Wikipedia database and provides a web-browser-like interface to read it. The English Wikipedia is just shy of 10 gigabytes (other languages are of course available). That includes all articles, but no pictures, history or talk pages. Obviously this is something you want to download before you’re depending on coffee shops and libraries for intermittent internet access. After Kiwix has downloaded the database, it needs to be indexed for proper searching. Indexing is a resource-intensive process that will take a long time, but it’s worth it. When it’s done, you’ll have a not-insignificant chunk of our species’ combined knowledge sitting on your hard-drive. (It’s the next best thing to the Guide, really.)
For folks like myself who run Arch Linux, the Arch Wiki is an indispensable resource. For people who use other distributions, it’s less important, but still holds value. I think it’s the single best repository of Linux information out there.
For us Arch users, getting a local copy is simple. The arch-wiki-docs package provides a flat HTML copy of the wiki. Even better is the arch-wiki-lite package which provides a console interface for searching and viewing the wiki.
Users of other distributions could, at a minimum, extract the contents of the arch-wiki-docs package and grep through it.
Open wireless networks are dirty places. I’m never comfortable using them without tunneling my traffic. An anonymizing proxy like Tor is overkill for a situation like this. A full-fledged VPN is the best option, but I’ve found sshuttle to make an excellent poor-man’s VPN. It builds a tunnel over SSH, while addressing some of the shortcomings of vanilla SSH port forwarding. All traffic is forced through the tunnel, including DNS queries. If you have a VPS, a shared hosting account, or simply a machine sitting at home, sshuttle makes it dead simple to protect your traffic when on unfamiliar networks.
YouTube is a great source of both education and entertainment. If you are only going to be online for a couple hours a week, you probably don’t want to waste those few hours streaming videos. There’s a number of browser plugins that allow you to download YouTube videos, but my favorite solution is a Python program called youtube-dl. (It’s unfortunately named, as it also supports downloading videos from other sites like Vimeo and blip.tv.) You pass it the URL of the YouTube video page and it grabs the highest-quality version available. It has a number of powerful options, but for me the killer feature is the ability to download whole playlists. Say you want to grab every episode of the great web-series Sync. Just pass the URL of the playlist to youtube-dl.
$ youtube-dl -t https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL168F329FADED6741
That’s it. It goes out and grabs every video. (The -t flag tells it to use the video’s title in the file name.) If you come back a few weeks later and think there might have been a couple new videos added to the playlist, you can just run the same command again but with the -c flag, which tells it to resume. It will see that it already downloaded part of the playlist and will only get videos that it doesn’t yet have.
Even now that I’m back to having constant internet access, I still find myself using youtube-dl on a regular basis. If I find a video that I want to watch at a later time, I download it. That way I don’t have to worry about buffering, or the video disappearing due to DMCA take-down requests.
I keep backitup.sh in my network profile so that my online backups attempt to execute whenever I get online. If you’re only online once or twice a week, you probably have more important things to do than remembering to manually trigger your online backups. It’s nice to have that automated.
Anne over at Hunt Gather Study Medicine discusses the problems with pre-packaged first-aid kits and reminds us that knowledge and experience are more important than gear.
When I first learned about the Bitcoin currency a few years ago, it didn’t excite me. A purely digital currency tied to no material good seemed an interesting project, but I didn’t see that it could have the practical value of, say, a digital gold currency. When the media blitz occurred last year I took another look and reached the same conclusion. A few months later I realized I was looking at the currency all wrong: bitcoins are not a value-store, they’re a means of exchange.
It doesn’t matter that Bitcoins are the digital equivalent of a fiat currency, with no inherent value. It doesn’t matter if their value fluctuates in relation to other currencies. There’s no reason to store wealth in Bitcoins (unless you’re a gambler). When you need to send money, purchase some Bitcoins and send them. When you need to receive money, accept Bitcoins and exchange them immediately for another currency. The value of the bitcoins only need to remain stable for the amount of time it takes to complete a transaction.
Every so often there are stories announcing the fact that emails are not legally protected or that G-men can access email older than 180 days without a warrant. There will be some minor uproar, complaining about how outdated the law is, but here’s the thing: it’s irrelevant.
You don’t need to trust your service provider. You don’t need to trust your storage provider. You don’t need the law to protect you. You simply need to take a little self-responsibility and encrypt your data.
Any private data stored on hardware that you do not physically control should be encrypted (and it’s a good idea to encrypt private data on hardware that you do physically control). Problem solved. Unless you’re in the UK.