Security and Resilience
Practical skills that reduce dependence or exposure, maximize safety, and mitigate risk.
Check out our posts on wild foraging, budget meals, cyber skills & best practices, emergency preparedness, avoiding fraud & scams, or just browse our list of security and resilience related posts below.
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Wild foods: Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica)
For years, I’ve been harvesting Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) on the west coast. I blanch them (quickly boil and then ice bath), squeeze them into a ball, and freeze them on a tray. Super simple, and if I harvest enough in one session or two, I can stock the freezer to get me through to
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Film and TV: Survival, Resilience & Decision-Making Under Pressure
Stories about survival aren’t just about the environment—they’re about human nature. Strip away systems, routines, and safety nets, and what you’re left with is decision-making under pressure. These films explore what happens when things go wrong, resources are limited, and outcomes depend on judgment, adaptability, and resilience. Below are some of my favourite survival /
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Guess Who? A Practical Look at Today’s Threat Actors
Aka, who’s actually out there, doing shady stuff… Understanding the different types of threat actors is one of the most effective ways to make sense of how and why incidents actually happen, and why many of them are far less sophisticated than we tend to assume. In today’s article, we’ll be exploring some of the
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Gmail address tagging… How and why to use it
A Simple Email Trick to Track Your Online Exposure There’s a small trick built into Gmail that most people either don’t know about or never think to use—and it can give you a surprising amount of insight into where your personal data ends up. Google refers to it as using email tags. On the surface,
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Your email is more than just your contact…
Your Email Address Is Not Just Contact Info It’s easy to think of your email address as something trivial—just the place where messages land. You give it out to sign up for things, to receive receipts, to log into services. But from a personal security perspective, your email address is one of the most stable
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Don’t Let This Be You – Falling for a Tutoring Scam
Back in 2021 and 2022, I was doing some English language tutoring as a volunteer with Powell River Immigrant Services. Things were going so well that I thought, “hmm… maybe I should put my name and email on a tutoring services list running out of the local university.” After all, it’s always good to have
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My grandpappy didn’t die so you could continue sending me SPAM
My grandpappy fought long and hard, and gave his life for my right to an uncluttered inbox… Okay, maybe I don’t have a grandpappy that died in a spam war, but hear me out for a sec. As a Canadian, you have certain rights related to your email inbox as a commercial communications channel. Those
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Product Recalls, Safety Warnings, and Risk Notifications
As a consumer, we have rights… including the right to safety, and to information that can support that safety. Thus governments, manufacturers, and independent organizations publish safety information every day, as is their responsibility, but that information is spread across many systems and easy to miss. This page consolidates the most reliable places to check,
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Wild food identification resources
Okay, first of all… make sure you’ve read our Terms of Use and Safe Harvesting Tips… Now you can keep reading 🔎 The Pacific Northwest is amazing. In the qathet Region and beyond, the forests, fields, coastline, intertidal zones, and even the disturbed areas offer an exceptional diversity of edible organisms, including plants, fungi, and
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Safe Harvesting Tips
Safe Harvesting Practices Harvesting wild resources, whether plants, fungi, or other natural materials, is fundamentally about judgment. The risks are rarely dramatic or obvious; they are cumulative, contextual, and often invisible. Safe harvesting is less about memorizing rules and more about developing good habits. This applies equally to foraging food, collecting medicinal plants, or gathering