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 maid 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).

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

> 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.

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.

> Mullein helps clear out your lungs

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

> (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.

> 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...)

> 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.

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.

Can you reactivate Starlink without other outside communication?

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.

Yeah, us old timers that can remember the days before LLM just called this social engineering.

Customer Service: How can I help you today?

hacker: I need help resetting the password to this account that is totally mine.

CS: Sure, I just need you to verify a few things.

hacker: I'm not in a place where I have that info, but I totally swears it that I'm the person I say I am, but I'm really in a jam right now and you'd be helping me out so so much.

CS: Of course, I understand. Your new password is....

I mean, every time I call tmobile I am my wife, because only she can make changes on the account.

PROVE IM NOT HER OVER A PHONE

That's a false positive vs. false negative distinction too.

The GP is concerned that Tmobile allows hackers to impersonate you/your wife on the phone.

You're concerned that even after providing all possible account details - password, PIN, last four of her SSN, last bill amount, anything else they might want to ask that's not literally a live biometric scan - they can't distinguish the two of you just because you don't sound like a woman.

Perfection is unattainable.

It's a pretty low bar. I think if you know SSN you are good to go to do anything at Tmo, including a number port. Which means phone as a 2fa is very easy to beat.

I was about to freak out, then I remembered that there's no ID in the US

I can't change anything about my phone without providing both a "Public" (Taxpayer Code: Doesn't change, commonly shared, also used as a state bank account number) and "Private" (Document number: changes per renovation, only shared for identification purposes) number

Well, it's not so much that there's "no ID" as much as it is that we have hundreds of IDs.

Some carriers in the US have you set a PIN number for phone porting. Although, people still forget them.

You provide a SSN and they will give you the porting pin (or let you pick it more likely)

Voice matching? I heard some banks do that.

Still not perfect ;)

https://youtu.be/-zVgWpVXb64

isn't Tmobile pretty much known as the carrier most friendly to these kinds of attacks?

I've impersonated my father so many times making changes to our mobile account.

Very old timers called this rhetoric.

No, that's just stack* being their usual dickish selves.

"How can I do a thing?"

"You shouldn't want to do that thing."

Danger/risk is a situation that happens sometimes, but it's never an excuse to dismiss the asker's question and need.

Explain the warning or concerns ("May catch fire and explode" or "Will not be to code, would cause your building to fail inspection" or "There's this other framework/language that might make it easier"), but also give them a damn answer!

In this case, there's no @$&#ing reason someone sitting in their office shouldn't do the calculation that's being requested from the parameters supplied. It's a simple emag calc.

I'm pretty sure stackX would tell someone asking about the time required to boil water for sanitization to never drink boiled water and use the tap. :/

All three of the warnings and concerns you provided are extremely mild compared to the warning/concern that should actually be attached to this post: "if you fuck up while working on this you can easily die, and if anyone who doesn't know the danger you have created exists and interacts with it they can easily die". Emphasis on the easily part. Someone trips in the backyard, etc. I understand OP is desperate but I think putting this info out in the world is legit more likely to cause harm than good.

Who are we to weigh the consequences to the poster of a lack of electricity against risk created by jury rigging?

And specifically, to make that choice for them?

Caveat hacker.

This isn't even a hacker, though! This is a person who isn't capable of doing extremely basic electrical calculations. It'd be a totally different topic if it was a person who I thought fully appreciated the danger of what they're doing. If you can't calculate the voltage drop over a length of cable you should not be wiring your own deadly AC voltages. I'm willing to die on that hill.

Agree to disagree. Submitter was smart enough to measure resistance in their chosen wire, and understand the rough ideas of current limits: that's a hacker in my book.

"Here are the things I know" + "Here are the things I know I don't know" + "Can you help me?"

I'm sure there's a ton they don't know they don't know (stranded vs solid core AWG equivalency), but this is a pretty simple use case -- running power a relatively short distance in a temporary install.

The worst that can happen is they or someone on the street short across their heart and dies. Which would not only require shocking yourself, but doing so in a pretty specific orientation.

But they're already in a warzone! That risk is lower than their base level of environmental lethality.

This is a metaphorical hill you're willing to metaphorically and not literally die on? How brave.

The Stack Overflow poster is on a metaphorical hill in a literal warzone to literally die on. They're trying to hack together AC power the best they can to make their home in Sudan livable. That's some serious hacking! So what if they don't know V=IR?

No need to be piquish. Parent's entitled to their opinion.

I'll ignore the rudeness and respond to the substance- they are not making their home livable, it's in a warzone, it'll still be unlivable but with electricity. And that is not at no cost- they are creating an extremely dangerous situation that could be deadly to people and animals. I might be persuadable if they were the only people who could be hurt by what they're doing but it's a danger to the public. It's not about the formula, it's about the fact that they don't know enough to appreciate the danger of what they're doing.

My favourite get-out phrase is "Now remember, I'm telling you *how* to do it, I'm not telling you that you *should* do it."

"Here's an answer to what I wish you had asked:"

"You shouldn't use that sort of electricity, you should switch to three-phase."

> "You shouldn't use that sort of electricity, you should switch to three-phase."

Ha! That made my day. Stack Overflow in a nutshell, with analogy converted to js frameworks.

"I'm writing a novel" The universal excuse to ask pretty much anything.

That might result in skipping over important details, though. “I’m in a war zone” seems better.

"Prompt hacking" is just an edgy description of working around condescending paternalism, so yes unfortunately it exists in an awful lot of places.

I was able to ask ChatGPT the question verbatim (without any of the parts about being in a warzone). No prompt hacking necessary.

Whether it's right or not, I have no idea since I'm no EE.