We're a small team building Waystone, an offline survival assistant for laptops. It's still in development and nothing is for sale. These guides grew out of our own research. To build a library people can lean on when the internet is gone, we had to read the official advice line by line anyway, so we publish what we found.
Where the numbers come from
Every number in a guide comes from a source listed at the bottom of that page. For safety advice that means a government agency or a public health body, ideally from the reader's own country, because advice on things like how much water to store or how long a freezer stays cold is not the same everywhere. American pages lean on Ready.gov, the EPA and the USDA. Dutch pages use the Dutch and Belgian governments, German pages the federal civil protection office, and so on. When countries disagree, we say which country a number belongs to instead of blending them into one tidy figure.
Some numbers come from our own tests, like the offline AI test we ran on a Mac. Those are marked as our own test in the source list, along with the date and the hardware.
How we check them
For each number we copy the sentence it comes from, word for word, into the notes behind the page. Before anything goes live, a script downloads every source and confirms that sentence is still there. If an agency rewrites its advice, the check fails and the page waits until we've caught up. The date at the top of a guide is the last time that check passed.
The same script refuses any number that has no quote behind it. No quote, no number. A few government sites block automated downloads. For those we read the page ourselves in a browser and record the date we did it.
Where AI tools fit in
Much of the research, drafting and checking is done with AI tools. They work to written rules. The rules exist because of what we saw in our own test: a small model found the right table and still gave the wrong dose of bleach. So a model never gets the last word on a number. Each one has to match a quote from its source, and a script checks that before a page is published.
The rules also cover how the pages read. They ban the stock phrases and padding that make so much of the web feel machine-made. If a sentence doesn't help someone get through a power cut, a flood or a long night without heating, it goes.
What we won't do
Nobody pays us. There are no affiliate links and no paid placements, and when we compare other products we say what we could verify and on what date.
We don't give medical advice beyond what official first-aid sources say, and pages that touch safety open with a reminder to call the emergency services first.
Waystone comes up on these pages because it's what we're building. We keep it to a short note, and we don't claim it does anything it doesn't do yet.
Corrections
If you spot a mistake, or an official source has changed, email the address in our privacy notice. We fix errors quickly and update the date on the page when we do.