How it works
Every part of Ledsten, in order.
From the first five minutes of setup to the day the power goes out: what each part of the app does, and how all of it keeps working without the internet.
On this page
1 · Setting it up
7 steps, one download.
Setup walks you through it in order. Ledsten reads your computer’s memory and free space, suggests the version of the assistant that fits, and downloads it — the one time it uses the internet. Then it proves it’s offline: it tries to reach the internet on purpose, three different ways, and shows you each attempt being stopped.
No internet at all? Choose Install from file… in the download step and pick the assistant’s file from a USB stick. Ledsten checks it exactly as it would a download. The offline install kit lists the files.
All 7 steps →2 · Overview
Where you stand, at a glance.
The first screen shows how ready your household is: a handful of checks — enough water, enough food, nothing about to expire, a plan in place — each with the one thing to do if it isn’t passing. Along the bottom, three signals: the assistant is loaded in memory, the guides are installed, and outgoing network traffic is blocked.
Example numbers
3 · Asking questions
An assistant that shows its sources.
Ask in plain words. For each question, Ledsten finds the most relevant passages in its guides and your own documents and hands them to the assistant, which answers from them. When an answer comes from a guide, that guide is named underneath.
It can still get things wrong, like any AI — so an answer that comes from a guide names it, and you can read the whole thing. Keep separate conversations for separate topics; each one remembers what you asked earlier in it.
To close the main valve, give it a quarter turn so the handle sits across the pipe instead of along it. Use a non-sparking 12-inch wrench or a gas shut-off tool. Once the main valve is off, a professional has to turn it back on and relight your appliances.
Example · the answer comes from the app’s gas shut-off guide
4 · Your own documents
Your papers, answered too.
Add your own PDFs — the house manual, a medication list, insurance papers, your town’s emergency plan — and keep them in one place on your computer, next to the built-in guides. The 5 official handbooks the guides draw on are there too, complete and exactly as published.
Your PDFs stay in Ledsten’s folder on your computer. Ledsten reads the text in them so the assistant can use them, but for now its answers lean almost entirely on the built-in guides and rarely draw on your PDFs, and answers don’t name your PDFs as sources yet. Scanned pages that are only pictures, with no text in them, can’t be read yet.
5 · Supplies
How many days you’re covered.
Paste a list, open a spreadsheet, CSV, text file or PDF, or scan a QR code, and Ledsten sorts it into items for you to check before anything is saved. Give food its calories per item and water a volume unit (litres or gallons), and Ledsten works out how many days your water and food cover for your household, using the standard planning figures — one gallon of water and 2,000 calories per person per day — and warns you before anything goes out of date.
Set particular items aside for particular people, like one person’s medication. Then run a stress test: pick a power cut, a water outage or being cut off at home, and Ledsten plays it forward day by day against what you actually have, showing what fails first, what holds, and what it can’t know from what you’ve logged. Any fix can go straight into a plan.
Example · days of supply use the standard official planning figures
6 · Plans
Checklists that notice what’s missing.
Make a plan for a power cut, an evacuation or a winter storm and tick things off as you go — or save one straight from an answer. Ask for suggestions and the assistant looks at your plan, your household and your supplies, and suggests what’s missing.
The suggestions appear in their own window. You untick any that don’t fit, and nothing is added to the plan until you say so.
Example · plan items from the app’s power-cut guide; suggestions are added only when you choose
7 · Comms directory
What to do when the phones stop.
Which stations to listen to, which numbers to dial and which radio channels to use when the phone network fails. Ledsten starts you off with a US starter kit in which every number and frequency has been checked against an official source, and points out gaps — no local station to tune a battery radio to, or a two-way radio in your supplies with no channel agreed for it.
It’s your list: rename, regroup or delete anything. It goes into the printed packet, and the assistant uses it when you ask about staying in touch.
8 · Library and quick cards
51 guides and 14 quick cards, written out in full.
Guides on first aid, drinking water, power cuts, fires and evacuation, keeping in touch, finding your way, chemical and radiation emergencies, and looking after children and pets. Quick cards are single pages for the worst moments — CPR, choking, heavy bleeding — meant to be read in thirty seconds, and each prints on its own page.
43 guides are always there; 8 more in optional packs (field medicine, water, radio, chemical emergencies) are already on your computer, so adding a pack downloads nothing. None of it depends on the assistant.
See every guide and quick card →9 · In an emergency
Paper, a phone copy, and a sheet for the paramedics.
The emergency packet prints your household’s medical details, supplies, plans and comms directory; you choose what goes in and see every page before you print. The phone copy puts the essentials — medical details, first-aid cards, supplies and plans — in one file that opens on any phone without the internet.
While you help someone, paramedic handoff logs what happened and what you did with one-tap phrases, each stamped with the time, and lays it out as the AT-MIST sheet a responder expects — with the person’s age, conditions and medications filled in from your household list.
Example · you choose what goes in, and see the pages before you print
10 · Staying offline
It keeps an eye on itself.
Ledsten’s window is locked so it can’t reach the internet, and a guard stops, counts and logs anything that tries anyway. In normal use the count stays at zero, and the Offline status screen shows it to you, along with this session’s log.
From the app’s Offline status screen · example