Things I'd want on a desert island (was Re: Transistors...)

Tony Duell wrote: I'm going to make the usual assumption that the desert island in question is reasonably warm (i.e. not in the Arctic Circle or a similar bloody cold place). Taking that assumption into account, this is what I'd want, roughly in descending order of importance: - A knife. Victorinox, Leatherman, Stanley, anything will do as long as it's sharp and reasonably clean (or can be easily cleaned). If you were in a plane crash, go scavenge the wreckage. - Some way of starting a fire. A few chunks of wood and a bit of string, some wire and a battery, or some form of lens (think about that one for a minute). Hell, I'll take a chunk of clear ice if I can cut or melt it (see "knife") to form a lens (although I think Mythbusters might have busted that one)... Can probably find enough stuff to make a half-decent bow-drill on the island. - A few days worth of food (ideally a week, but anything's better than nothing). Again, if the plane is in good nick, go scavenge in the wreckage. - A metal or other heat-proof tin would be useful (for cooking food and boiling water). - Water. Lower down the list because unless you just found a crate of mineral water stashed in the cargo hold of a plane that just went down, you need some way of making it safe to drink. That means fire and some form of heatproof and waterproof container. See above :) - Operable radio transceiver (read: with a decent amount of battery power) and a spool of wire (for a "Bodgit and Scarper" style longwire aerial). My ideal would be some form of HF rig, but an aircraft VHF rig would probably do as an alternate. Steal the battery from the plane (if you can find it), pull the radio, and bodge some cabling for it. - GPS receiver. The radio transceiver is useful, but it's even more useful if you can tell the person you just contacted "I'm Bill Bloggs, I was on XYZ Airlines Flight 123, which crashed at 1.2345 North by 2.3456 East." Bonus points if the GPS can tell you what country you've landed in, and if it's within reasonable distance of any populated areas. If I ended up (say) on a plane that crashed on a desert island, I'd like to think I could probably salvage enough stuff from the wreckage to be able to get a fire going, find enough food to last about a week, and (assuming the avionics survived the rapid-contact-with-terrain) get the radio to work and (depending on location) contact someone. At the end of that week? I'd probably be up the proverbial creek in a wire mesh canoe with no paddle, unless I somehow ended up half a mile away from civilisation. "Oh god, I've been surviving on cream crackers and corned beef for TWO WEEKS and there was a city WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE?!" -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/