Letter Re: How I Made My iPhone a Useful Survival Reference

James,
I depend on your invaluable books and Blog daily. I wanted to share with you and your readers my Archives Library system for when SHTF.

I have an iPhone 3Gs ( and a spare one ). I feel that this is a more readily accessible and portable device as compared to a Kindle. I have loaded with many useful applications (“apps”) for survival and references. The main apps are :

Carpenters Helper

Photo Album and iTunes (for family viewing of pictures and my DVD collection DVDs ripped at 700Kbps VBR 2 pass h.264 is pretty good and saves on space)
MotionX GPS 9.4 and more importantly the now localized maps for it. (This is for once cell phone networks are non-functional.)
Morse Decoder and Encoder (for semi-secure transmission… just increase the WPM count, the put the iphone next to the receiver and type your text and it will send our tones, at the other end you do the same with the decoder tool
Bible Reader4 – allows you to read the entire Bible offline

Most importantly, I use Evernote which is my central library for all my other reference content, from clipped content to the web, to PDF books and all my scanned household legal documents. Evernote can sync content between multiple clients to the web but nonetheless have it localized on all hosts (that means I populate evernote from my laptop, it’s replicated to their hosting site and then sync’ed to my iPhone). Note that Evernote is available for PC, Mac/iPhone, Blackberry and WindowsCE.

Interestingly, I have downloaded all the pertinent blogs and web sites of importance to it for my portable reference guides using Site Sucker and other similar apps (Note for blogs where you don’t care for the images, just download the HTML files)

I use a SOLIO for photovoltaically charging my phone

Finally I have both a Otterbox Defender Case (for day to day work) and a Otterbox Armor for when I am transporting it in heavy rain or over water.

God Bless, – LC