Upgrade Your Junk Drawer

Intro

The Texas Winter Storm of 2021 — Winter Storm Uri — was a wake-up call. Store shelves went bare, gas stations closed, and widespread power outages even knocked cell towers offline. It was a crash course in just how fragile our everyday systems are.

Since then, I’ve made sure to keep a reasonable supply of water, food, and sanitation products on hand. You don’t have to be a “prepper” to see the value in having a couple of weeks’ worth of essentials ready for when things go sideways.

One day, while reorganizing my so-called junk drawer, I realized there was another kind of preparedness I’d been overlooking: information. What happens when you lose internet access and the cloud goes out of reach? Whether a short outage or Planet of the Apes time, it’s incredibly useful to have these tools waiting for the day they might be needed.

That thought experiment turned into a small, practical project: a pair of USB drives that would give me both digital rescue tools and a personal offline internet.

These are the two upgrades I made to my junk drawer:

YUMI tools disk

A multiboot USB drive, built with YUMI, packed with rescue ISOs, OS installers, and diagnostic tools. It’s the Swiss Army knife of boot media.

YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) is a free utility that turns an ordinary USB stick into a multi-boot Swiss Army knife. Instead of carrying a dozen separate thumb drives for each operating system or rescue tool, YUMI lets you store multiple ISOs on a single device — with a friendly boot menu to pick the one you need. Luckily the process is simple and YUMI has links to a large list of isos to include. Adding a custom one is not hard at all!

It supports a huge range of images, from Linux live distros and Windows installers to antivirus rescue environments, memory testers, and disk cloning tools. You can add, remove, or update ISOs without wiping the entire drive, which makes it perfect for keeping your toolkit fresh.

I built mine as a go-to rescue and setup drive, loaded with:

• Windows 10 and Windows 11 Installers / repair disks
• MemTest
• Boot Repair Disk
• Ultimate Boot CD
• GParted
• Finnix
• Kali Linux
• Ubuntu Desktop
• Antivirus Live
• Kodachi Anonymous browsing
• Spinrite
• and more!

Each of these images live on the disk as an ISO with a single multi-boot loader. The rest of the disk is available as storage so I also loaded it up with a collection of Computer and Networking cheatsheets and pdfs. I tried to cover topics from pc hardware to networking to Operating System specific references and more.

The last piece of the puzzle is PortableApps. This is an easy to set up collection of windows applications that do no require installation. With hundreds of packages including standards like VLC, Chromium, Firefox, and more, it provides a portable toolkit that come in handy if you find yourself on a guest computer or are without Internet and have things to fix.

I’ve only reached for my YUMI boot drive a couple of times since I built it but it’s a huge relief knowing it’s there. It’s like knowing your spare tire is aired up and in good shape. The peace of mind is priceless.

The Hardware

I’ve made a few of these for friends using 128 GB and 256 GB drives, and they work great — but I got hooked on building the ultimate boot drive.
The one I recommend is the SSK 512 GB or 1 TB thumb drive.
As of publication, the 512 GB is about $50 and the 1 TB about $77.
It’s pleasingly heavy, solid metal, and has been rock-solid in my testing. Amazon link.
If you’re on a budget, 128 GB or 256 GB will still get the job done — but I wouldn’t go smaller.

Offline Internet

If the YUMI drive is my digital multitool, this is my pocket library — a self-contained slice of the web that doesn’t care if every ISP from here to Guam goes belly-up.

It’s built around Kiwix — free, open-source software that reads .zim archives (think: an entire website, squished into a single file). With the right ZIMs, you can browse huge swaths of the internet without ever going online.

Kiwix’s Library offers hundreds of site archives which you can preview live without downloading. Some are tiny but packed with value; others are massive, like the English Wikipedia — over 6 million pages with images and links. You’ll also find medical and first aid guides, language resources, practical skills manuals, and technical collections like StackExchange.

Can’t find the site you want? You can make your own ZIM. It can be a bit of a black art depending on complexity, but I’ve had success creating more than ten — including foragingtexas and textfiles.com.

• Wikipedia (English with images) — ~110 GB
• Wikivoyage — offline travel guide, ~1 GB
• Stack Exchange dump — the collective Stack brain, ~50 GB
• Project Gutenberg — 60 GB of public-domain books
• Medical & first aid references — WHO, CDC, wilderness medicine PDFs
• Military Field Manuals - on a huge array of topics from carpentry to earth moving to emergency medicine.
• Much More - over 80 zim archives comfortably fit in a 512gb drive. You can really splurge with a Terabyte or more

Kiwix runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, even Android. You can just read locally, or flip the switch on its tiny built-in server so other devices on your LAN/Wi-Fi can browse your stash like it’s the real thing.

📚 Supporting files

The Kiwix browser and offline ZIM archives are fantastic, but they still leave some gaps. To fill them, I built a serious directory of practical ebooks covering a huge range of topics. The Internet Archive was my main hunting ground, along with countless niche sites. After some determined searching, I pulled together PDFs on everything from power and water systems, primitive tools, and Amish gardening, to hunting, fishing, automotive repair, welding (for those A-Team–style zombie survival vehicles), woodworking, psychology, negotiation, leadership, electronics, cooking, preserving, law, medicine, and even rainy-day activities for kids and adults.

Building that collection was a blast — I tried to anticipate as many scenarios as I could imagine needing the drive for. Highlights include:

• PDF manuals — Hundreds of guides, how-tos, and reference books across dozens of disciplines.
• AI-generated cheatsheets — Troubleshooters, walkthroughs, and quick-reference sheets for emergencies and complex topics.
• Infographics & diagrams — Wiring charts, ham radio band maps, plant identification guides, and other dense visual references.
• Offline AI models — Compact (4–8 GB) quantized LLaMA/Qwen builds you can run locally for Q&A without an internet connection. Limited compared to commercial models, but surprisingly capable.
• Portable apps — Readers, converters, scanners, accessibility tools (magnifiers, color pickers), and basic media editors — all ready to run without downloads.
• My notes — Not the latest version, but packed with network configs, machine specs, serial numbers, cheatsheets, and setup worklogs.

It’s not the whole internet — but it’s my internet, curated for when the big one hits and the only cloud left is the one making rain (or fallout).

Thoughts on Preparing for the Worst

Making these drives was a blast. Beyond building tools for a rainy day, it became a grand thought experiment:
In what situations might I need these drives?

The YUMI multi-boot disk was easy — we’ve all borked a server config or locked ourselves out in a dozen creative ways. I just built the tools and gathered the technical resources I’ve actually needed before. That mix of imagination and past experience was addictive.

The real challenge (and fun) was the Offline Internet project. I spent weeks — months, really — downloading ZIM archives and putting them through their paces. I curated e-books from my own shelves and the Internet Archive, shaping them into a dataset that’s actually usable: hundreds of practical titles across countless fields.

Then came the “what if” game:

• Boring road trip + dead stereo → puzzle books, coloring books, trivia, road trip games.
• Vault Dweller rebuilding society → construction, woodworking, welding, engineering manuals.
• College student mid-paper, Wi-Fi down → research material that just might save the semester.

The result is a beautifully curated collection — resources for woodworking, sewing, gardening, medicine, electronics, philosophy, ham radio, camping, fishing, and more — all right at my fingertips.

Using the drives

I tested these thoroughly while building them, but most of the time they live in an Altoids tin in my desk drawer. The exception is the Offline Internet project, which I also keep on a live hard drive on my network — I use the practical ebook library often. Even with an active internet connection, it’s nice having that kind of information instantly at hand. It’s helped me research everything from repair jobs to obscure technical questions.

You can update the content, but ZIM archive dumps are infrequent. You’ll typically be a year or so behind on major sites, but with so much evergreen material, it hardly matters. Most of the collection remains relevant for decades.

The real value shows when the power or internet go down — whether for an hour or a week. With my MacBook Pro, a decent power tank, a solar charger, a car, and a generator, I can keep my devices running. Add an RTL-SDR radio dongle and antenna kit for picking up broadcasts, my phone’s hotspot, and the Offline Internet drive, and there’s very little I can’t research.

💡 LM Studio

One of the sparks for this whole project came from an ad I saw for a “prepper Raspberry Pi” — a little box that served offline websites and reference material. It was clever, but it made me think: why stop there? I wanted something bigger, faster, and more flexible — not just static pages, but a system that could help me search, summarize, and connect information.

That’s where LM Studio comes in. Running entirely offline, it lets you load a large language model (LLM) and query it against your own data — ZIM archives, PDFs, notes, you name it. Suddenly, the Offline Internet project wasn’t just a filing cabinet; it became an interactive reference librarian. I named mine ‘Sprocket’

Pairing Kiwix ZIM archives with a practical ebook library and an LLM turns the drive into a research machine:

• ZIM archives give you complete websites like Wikipedia, StackExchange, and medical references.
• PDF library covers niche and technical topics that rarely exist as ZIMs.
• LLM in LM Studio helps you find answers, summarize long documents, and connect ideas — all without the cloud.

The result is a tool that works as well in a power outage as it does on a quiet afternoon in your workshop. It’s not just storage — it’s knowledge you can actually use.

🧠 Setting up LM Studio for Offline AI

LM Studio is a free desktop app for running large language models (LLMs) entirely offline. It’s perfect for querying your ebook library or ZIM archives without sending a single byte to the cloud.

Getting started:

1. Download & Install — Grab the latest release for macOS, Windows, or Linux from lmstudio.ai.
2. Pick a Model — In the “Discover” tab, search for one of these recommended models (choose a GGUF build with q4_K_M quantization for best speed/accuracy on laptops):
   • Qwen 2 7B Instruct — Hugging Face (excellent general reasoning, great at summarizing technical docs)
   • LLaMA 3 8B Instruct — Hugging Face (newest Meta model, very coherent responses)
   • Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 — Hugging Face (fast and light, great for Q&A tasks)
3. Download — LM Studio will pull the model directly from Hugging Face and store it locally.
4. Load & Chat — Click “Load Model,” then open a chat tab to start asking questions.
5. Increase Context Window (optional) — If your laptop has enough RAM, set the context size to 4096–8192 tokens in model settings for better long-document performance.

Pro tip:
Enable the Local Docs plugin in LM Studio to add your ebook library folder. Once indexed, you can ask:

“Summarize the welding section in Military Field Manual 3-34”
and get an answer without opening the PDF.

LM Studio stores everything locally — no tracking, no API calls, just a fast, private assistant that works even when the grid doesn’t.

Boot from USB

Be sure to check your BIOS/UEFI for the correct procedure to boot from a usb drive. Here are a few common ones:

🖥️ PC Boot Menu / USB Boot Hotkeys

🍏 Mac Boot Keys

The Mac has a rich set of built in tools for repairing system problems. It can still be good to download and stash a copy of the latest macOS installer or two. You can find instructions here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101578

Conclusion

My upgraded junk drawer has duct tape and WD-40 for fixing the things you can touch — and then there are the tools for fixing the rest. A YUMI drive and an Offline Internet library might never leave your junk drawer… but if you ever need them, you’ll be glad they are there.

It would be simple enough to combine these into a single, curated combination YUMI and offline internet with a big enough drive. Kiwix is easy to run as a server which will make your library available to machines on a network. Never let an inconvenient power outage stop you from doing Information Age tasks.

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