[NikolaNovak]

I'm from Sarajevo, spent two years in civil war as a child. This post brings memories, and yes that's exactly right - things that wouldn't fly in million years in my current home in Canada, were perfectly viable solutions in warzone.

Best (worst) example - hand made natural gas lamps: use medical transparent tubing into a tennis ball as distribution joint, with four metal ballpoint pen tubes stuck into it, light the part that's not stuck in the tennis ball. Voila, chandelier!

It's astonishing what manner of things can be transformed into a cart / dolly / wheelbarrow to carry clean water in.

19th century stoves and fireplaces were useless, took too much energy to warm up the device itself and inside a modern city, wood is rare and precious. Sarajevo War Stove was a large 1-2l tin can, conducts heat directly and doesn't absorb much itself, lets you boil water or make some small soup.

Candles could be almost endlessly recycled. Pre-war brochures were great, their glossy pages could be rolled up into friction free tubes to hold melted wax, with some cottoon or wool thread in the middle.

And yes, electricity moved from building to building in whatever manner seems feasible. As a 13year old I've handled live male-to-male 220v cables, and can vouch, they give you quite a nice buzz if you're not careful :-)

(some experiments did not work out great; chain smokers tried to light up all kinds of things, up to and including various kinds of tea; apparently it's just not the same).

[nucleardog]

> things that wouldn't fly in million years in my current home in Canada, were perfectly viable solutions in warzone.

You’d be surprised!

I’m near Ottawa and in the past year I’ve been without power for 8 days, 5 days, and a handful of other times.

I’m on well water and our septic system requires a pump. When the power is out we have no water, sewer or heat.

The cell tower nearby only has about 1-2 hours of reserve power. There’s no hardwire communication here so we lose all outside communications after a couple of hours.

During the eight day outage, everywhere within about an hour drive was out of power. Gas stations were closed, grocery stores were closed, etc. That’s if you could even get anywhere—many highways and roads were closed due to fallen trees and power lines. Our own driveway had half a dozen mature trees across it.

It’s no active war zone, and it’s certainly not _two years_, but a lot of stuff you might not think would fly in Canada was exactly what many people were doing to get by.

[mlindner]

It doesn't solve the "if no power, no internet" issue completely, but have you looked at getting Starlink? Seems perfect for your situation, assuming you have a generator or batteries. You can get the roaming version and not activate it if you already have good internet and then only activate it during a month in which you lose power.

[nucleardog]

Yep, that's pretty much how we manage.

In normal use we rely on Starlink for bulk data and a slower fixed LTE connection for low latency/jitter. Once the power's been out a couple of hours... we fall back on the Starlink. If we need to call anyone, we use wifi calling through my cell provider over the Starlink. I have a backup set of Starlink hardware already linked to my account.

I've got a cheap (~$1k) 10kW generator. Pretty much a necessity since we need power for our water/sewer to work.

Generator can run on gas or propane. We've got a couple big propane tanks to provide fuel for heating/hot water/cooking/etc. So we've got that as an option, or generally about 150L of gas on hand. Keeping the generator running all day so I can work and on-and-off through the evening, 150L lasts us about a week.

We had no power for eight days and a lot of people were having to run down to the fire station for drinkable water. The town hall opened up so people could come recharge their phones and get a hot cup of coffee. A lot of people missed out on hot meals and showers.

I didn't miss a day of (remote) work. We had hot showers, coffee in the morning, hot meals, and generally besides the dull drone of the generator outside during the day and the absolute eerie silence at night when I turned the generator off... nothing was really all that different.

[imoverclocked]

Can you reactivate Starlink without other outside communication?

[Someone]

> Sarajevo War Stove was a large 1-2l tin can, conducts heat directly and doesn't absorb much itself, lets you boil water or make some small soup.

Efficient stoves can indeed be fairly simple, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverage-can_stove, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_stove or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove.

A hightech variant has a battery-operated fan. I find that a weird combination, but apparently, it works well (https://www.techxlab.org/solutions/zz-manufacturing-sierra-z...)

[jmiskovic]

This is another great example: https://thefunambulistdotnet.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/bosnia...

[nibbleshifter]

> chain smokers tried to light up all kinds of things, up to and including various kinds of tea

I've tried smoke a lot of things, including tea.

Don't recommend it.

[pfffr]

Mullein, raspberry leaf, lots of other herbs can be a decent alternative that don't satiate the physical craving. Mullein helps clear out your lungs and can actually help you quit nicotine. You can also cut tobacco with these kinds of herbs. I'd recommend researching herbal smoke blends to anyone interested. Can also be used as a safer alternative if you want to cut your spliffs with something other than tobacco.

[ftxbro]

> Mullein helps clear out your lungs

Maybe drinking it as an expectorant tea, but I can't imagine smoking it would be helpful overall.

[Sharlin]

> (some experiments did not work out great; chain smokers tried to light up all kinds of things, up to and including various kinds of tea; apparently it's just not the same).

Might satisfy the social and psychological aspects of addiction, but the physiological part is rather difficult to sate without nicotine.