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Hear you on the bugs. Started to take an eggshell foam I found outside of an apartment complex, looked like there was nothing wrong with it. A lady warned me that it was probably abandoned due to bedbugs. I remembered a friend of mine in a complex with a bedbug infestation, it was no joke, so...

I think many of you guys are fantasizing about trade commodities that have no basis in reality. Like listening to amateurs attempting to play the stock market. If you want to get some grounding in commodities or trade practices that actually have value in times of natural disaster or war, go...

Darned foolish. You think you can contend with Nature? One good flood, forest fire, or heavy windstorm and the landscape you thought you knew and had careful notes on is going to be utterly changed. Are you planning to bring in earth moving equipment and search a large area to retrieve your...

For that matter upgrade the size of your internal laptop drive. Just use a program to transfer your system to a new drive. Some of those programs are free / open source. My laptop happened to have 2 internal drive bays, so I just repurposed a USB drive I had by prying its plastic case open...

Going west in the spring YMMV. In the summer the 1st thing you need to do is get out of the Midwest. A few years back I cut north from Kentucky to Cincinnati to South Dakota, thinking if only I kept going north, it would get cooler. It doesn't. It's one big weather system and I learned to my...

That's too cautious. What you can handle depends on the wiring of your car. For my '84 Chevy Citation II V6 carbureted 4-door hatchback, I looked up the wiring specs in my paper copy of the factory service manual. I don't remember all the details, it's been awhile, but the wires for my...

But it would be a baloney argument, much like Pascal's Wager. I've been running a Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop for 4 years, either with a Wagan inverter and Dell (often knockoff) PA12 power brick, a special DC PA12 power brick I got, or just the laptop batteries. My laptop is still alive and...

I bought the largest Odyssey deep cycle battery that would fit in my hatchback's engine compartment, replacing the SLI battery I had. I've probably killed much of the life of the battery over the past 4 years with various charging mistakes. One is that my car's alternator does not match the...

In principle I'm interested in growing stuff in my hatchback while continuously mobile, but in practice the space issues seem insurmountable. Also if one can't grow serious bulk food for one's diet, I really don't see the point from a food security / independence standpoint. "Tastiness" or...

I have a hatchback with the back laid down flat. I sleep on the diagonal. I have a folded up piece of memory foam, about 3' long, enough for my shoulders and hips. My sleeping bag on top of that counts for a little more padding, not much. It's adequate but I do tend to find it slightly...

Aside from sticking out like a sore thumb, theft risk is an obvious problem. One advantage of my old rust bucket is it doesn't look like it would hold anything worth stealing. Which frankly, given how old my laptop is now, it doesn't.

You don't need a tent, although forestry experience is good to acquire. '84 Chevy Citation II V6 carbureted 4-door hatchback is my "tent". Just stop carrying all that gear, you won't need most of it. Leave yourself room to sleep.

Get a mailing address at a homeless shelter, see if that satisfies them. Some homeless shelters do that sort of thing, to give homeless people a place to get mail. It works when applying for food stamps in Asheville NC, don't know about other things. When I'm next in Asheville I'm going to...

Bull-oney. I've been living in an '84 Chevy Citation II V6 carbureted 4-door hatchback for 4 years now. The low tech piece of gear you're looking for to solve the problem is called a solar shade. I eventually modified mine with duct tape and flat hooks made from cut up aluminum cans. Sticky...

False assumption. I have a hatchback, I keep the rear seat down so the back cargo area is completely flat. I sleep on the diagonal. I'm 6' and can sleep flat on my back if I want, I barely fit. I usually prefer to sleep on my side though, and I can't say it's bad for my back in any way...

I keep my gear to a minimum and hide in plain sight, in areas where people are unlikely to care about my presence even if they do notice me. When I sleep, except for my Coleman cooler everything is below the window line of my car. If I want to be less noticeable, or just because I anticipate...

Good to know, but $70 buys a lot of gas in an urban car camping situation. It can be an entire month's worth.

I suppose listening to alerts for a large geographic area might not be totally annoying if you're driving cross-country, but once you're standing still, all those false positives from outside your immediate area have got to be annoying as heck. So stoopid, it would take a trivial amount of...

Ok I see, but don't rule out station wagons or SUVs. It would depend on the money, the MPG, the condition the vehicle is in. Even a hearse! Really old school station wagons would be kewl for 2 people to sleep in, but the parking footprint in various urban areas could be tough. Might not be...

I've occasionally given someone a ride for a short distance in town. Pretty rare though, and pretty contingent upon me assessing the person as harmless. Not a habit. No long distance hitchhikers. I don't stop to help people fix cars either. Even if I have the skills, I'm not AAA, and it can...