In my K'lash building of late, I've used several parts made to order from "one of the guys on the boards."
After placing another such order recently, one "guy on the boards" has been particularly effusive in gratitude for the business. Only fair that I bring him to light here.
So hotbarrel, please take a bow. Quality kit and shamefully low price, he does it for the fun. The only way to reach him, that I know, is to join the gunco.net board and look for him under that name, 'hotbarrel', and PM him.
By all means, do, if you're taking up the (endangered) craft of home Kalashnifacture.
20070410
Happy happy, Joy joy!
| Examination Scored | ||
| Congratulations on passing the NREMT cognitive examination. Your passing result on the cognitive examination will remain valid for a one year period from the date of the examination, 4/x/2007 (provided you meet all current requirements for National EMS Certification). | ||
| Please allow 2 weeks for the NREMT to mail out results letters. |
20070401
Quote for the day
. . . changes in corporate law cannot eradicate poverty or materially change existing distributions of wealth, except by impairing the creation of wealth. Changes in corporate law will not clean the environment. And changes in corporate law will not solve the labor question. Indeed, the only changes in corporate law that will have a substantial effect on such issues are changes that make the world worse, not better.
HT Instapundit. And what, exactly, is "the labor question"?
20070329
What do you get when you cross . . .
Probably the greatest incarcerated fraction of society in US history, receiving the closest thing to socialized medicine short of the VA, drawn from an illiterate underclass, that still has access to all the drugs it wants and gives hypodermic needles and tattoos to each other?
A hepatitis-C time bomb.
Whom do we get to thank?
Addendum, 1 April: Don't forget prison rape.
A hepatitis-C time bomb.
Whom do we get to thank?
Addendum, 1 April: Don't forget prison rape.
20070313
Idea number 1201
Megan McArdle, guestblogging at Instapundit, quotes a blogger charting the trajectory of music along technology, wondering what comes next, and how to recapture the magic of music you haven't heard yet:
Well, it seems simple enough : equip your player with a Bluetooth transceiver and hope enough other player owners do too. Tuck a protocol between the Bluetooth and your player, such that when two players come within range of one another, they compare their inventories and exchange songs that the other does not have. For intellectual property purists, set a flag to play it once and delete it, but leave a chit identifying the incoming, once-played track. At the end, sound a prompt to the listener, "keep, or clear?" If you choose to keep it, it stores the artist, album, label, license terms and so forth so you can find it and (if the artist demands) buy it.
If you are among several people with shareplayers (a long workout, say), enter a share-ffle (shruffle?) mode that gives each player a turn to offer a track to everyone else.
A lurker mode allows you to walk down a crowded street, allowing other shareplayers' tracks to fade in and out of hearing. The protocol already skips tracks you already have, could even be told to skip artists, albums, labels, and genres you choose. FF allows you to skip a track from one player and go to the next-most-audible player. Play grabs a track, or its tag, whenever it sounds interesting.
As much as it pains me to say it, mobile phones with mp3 features are probably better-positioned to deploy this capability than straight mp3 players. They already pack Bluetooth and they're supported by companies that have a history of charging out the ass for simple features (remember paying a separate fee for "tone dialing" on your landline phone?).
As always, this reminds me of High Plains Drifter: somebody is leaving the door open and the wrong dog can come home. Serious consequences for a mobile phone. Equally serious for a non-phone mp3 player that eventually comes to dock in at a computer. But these are the same risks that file sharers take already.
[the iPod confers] incredible levels of control over what we listened to at any moment. It’s simply next in the progression from LP (moving the needle from track to track), to cassette (pressing FF and guessing), to CD (pressing next, but still limited to one album). Now, at your fingertips, there is the power to pick any song, play it for any length of time, and skip to another song, and keep skipping until you find what it is you want to listen to. While there is great, great joy to be had in simply shuffling at random (the wild success of the iPod Shuffle definitely illustrates this), I think all will agree that it is not enough.
Well, it seems simple enough : equip your player with a Bluetooth transceiver and hope enough other player owners do too. Tuck a protocol between the Bluetooth and your player, such that when two players come within range of one another, they compare their inventories and exchange songs that the other does not have. For intellectual property purists, set a flag to play it once and delete it, but leave a chit identifying the incoming, once-played track. At the end, sound a prompt to the listener, "keep, or clear?" If you choose to keep it, it stores the artist, album, label, license terms and so forth so you can find it and (if the artist demands) buy it.
If you are among several people with shareplayers (a long workout, say), enter a share-ffle (shruffle?) mode that gives each player a turn to offer a track to everyone else.
A lurker mode allows you to walk down a crowded street, allowing other shareplayers' tracks to fade in and out of hearing. The protocol already skips tracks you already have, could even be told to skip artists, albums, labels, and genres you choose. FF allows you to skip a track from one player and go to the next-most-audible player. Play grabs a track, or its tag, whenever it sounds interesting.
As much as it pains me to say it, mobile phones with mp3 features are probably better-positioned to deploy this capability than straight mp3 players. They already pack Bluetooth and they're supported by companies that have a history of charging out the ass for simple features (remember paying a separate fee for "tone dialing" on your landline phone?).
As always, this reminds me of High Plains Drifter: somebody is leaving the door open and the wrong dog can come home. Serious consequences for a mobile phone. Equally serious for a non-phone mp3 player that eventually comes to dock in at a computer. But these are the same risks that file sharers take already.
20070312
Abject terror in the Di'trick
I've skimmed the ruling on Parker v DC, and read much of what the blogosphere has had to say about it, and have little to add, other than:
I'm still stocking up on C/BE of various flavors.
Update, 30 March: GOP preparing to dick it up. See, I told you.
- About damned time.
- The Supremes can still dick it up, by ruling its applicability so narrowly, and government's compelling interests so broadly, as to render the Parker ruling itself immaterial. See what good the Fifth Circuit's Emerson ruling did for Emerson the man.
- The Republicans in the Congress and the Executive can also snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by bowing, scraping, being conciliatory and bipartisan, and otherwise slicing their own throats along with ours.
I'm still stocking up on C/BE of various flavors.
Update, 30 March: GOP preparing to dick it up. See, I told you.
Andy, where's my 15 minutes?
All I want to know about 300 is whether Elephantinos the tinker appears and utters his signature line.
20070304
Ungulate sur la tension
- You'll need a cut of some red-meat animal, game meats will do well, we cooked this recipe with antelope, a roast of about 2 lbs.
- Four medium potatoes
- Half a medium onion, diced finely
- One 10oz can of cream of mushroom soup
- Half a cup of fresh mushrooms, sliced
- A tablespoon butter
- A pressure cooker
Dice the onion and toss it into the pressure cooker over low heat with half of the butter, and chase it around with a wooden spoon until it begins to brown. Take it off heat and add 1 tsp garlic powder.
Eye and dice the potatoes so they are in chunks roughly half an inch on a side. Peeling is optional. Spread them in with the onions to an even layer.
Cut the meat into chunks about an inch on a side. Lay them upon the potatoes.
Dump in the can of mushroom soup and scatter the mushrooms over all of it. Sprinkle with black pepper. Add the remaining butter. If this is game meat, kinda lean, you can also add a teaspoon of bacon fat if you have it.
Add 1/2 cup of water. Bring the open pressure cooker to a simmer, remove from heat, put on and lock the pressure cooker's cover. Put back on heat, run the heat up until the cooker's regulator indicates it is at pressure (a hiss, usually) then back the heat off to lowest simmer; find the burner setting that maintains the pressure cooker at a continuous faint hiss.
Simmer for 20 minutes, then relieve pressure according to the cooker's directions. Serve.
20070303
Indian tanning
The animal hides I harvest this year will be braintanned. It just logically follows that if I shoot it myself, and dress and butcher it myself, with ammunition I handloaded myself, the rest of the animal deserves preservation that I can also accomplish. Ever the cheapskate, I want to do it cheaply even if that means more work, and maximize the products resulting from the animal.
I mentioned this to the two female offspring units, and they sound very enthusiastic about helping me. They'll get to keep some bones or other animal parts to show at school, maybe.
Mlle. Sklodovska is very interested in beadworked American Indian clothing, and a chamoised antelope hide would serve very well for that.
We'll see whether this enthusiasm persists when it comes time to scud a sopping wet hide, or mash an antelope's brain in a bucket.
I mentioned this to the two female offspring units, and they sound very enthusiastic about helping me. They'll get to keep some bones or other animal parts to show at school, maybe.
Mlle. Sklodovska is very interested in beadworked American Indian clothing, and a chamoised antelope hide would serve very well for that.
We'll see whether this enthusiasm persists when it comes time to scud a sopping wet hide, or mash an antelope's brain in a bucket.
Firstborn's infatuation
Firstborn now cares for a Tamagotchi, having seen many of her friends caring for them.
These devices appear to have been Furby-ized since I first heard of them maybe 15 years ago; hers has a little IR window through which it can communicate with others nearby, ostensibly so they can exchange electronic genetic material and procreate. Hers has had offspring.
For all I know, these little buggers can receive data through the screen flicker of a computer monitor (not the first time this has been done). This would enable Firstborn to download changes to her pet from one of the fansites, such as new foods, grooming, tricks or a simpler feeding schedule.
She has already "lost" 3 of her pets in this device, one because of a hard reset (I think), others not because of hardware malfunction, but because it must just have been their times to die. She was devastated the first few times, but now sniffles a bit and starts the pet over, always with the same name.
Gets me to wondering: is anybody hacking these things, distributing communicable diseases through the IR port? And how much protection is their Japanese maker placing on these devices to immunize them? And can the immunity also be transferred from device to device?
There's a networking-security graduate thesis in here somewhere.
These devices appear to have been Furby-ized since I first heard of them maybe 15 years ago; hers has a little IR window through which it can communicate with others nearby, ostensibly so they can exchange electronic genetic material and procreate. Hers has had offspring.
For all I know, these little buggers can receive data through the screen flicker of a computer monitor (not the first time this has been done). This would enable Firstborn to download changes to her pet from one of the fansites, such as new foods, grooming, tricks or a simpler feeding schedule.
She has already "lost" 3 of her pets in this device, one because of a hard reset (I think), others not because of hardware malfunction, but because it must just have been their times to die. She was devastated the first few times, but now sniffles a bit and starts the pet over, always with the same name.
Gets me to wondering: is anybody hacking these things, distributing communicable diseases through the IR port? And how much protection is their Japanese maker placing on these devices to immunize them? And can the immunity also be transferred from device to device?
There's a networking-security graduate thesis in here somewhere.
20070224
20070223
BofA BS
We at WUTT! have been outspoken on the topic of illegal immigration; I dare to say we've changed our position on that topic but now have a position we can defend.
I started out at the early P.J. O'Rourke position. He was amazed, humbled, grateful almost to maudlin tears that people risked their lives on makeshift rafts and shark-infested waters to get here from Cuba. All so they can work 7 days a week for 3 or 4 dollars an hour? God bless 'em, here's a phone, call the ones you left behind and tell them to come too. We'll ship the rafts back for them.
Since having been mobilized to serve Uncle Sugar in the trackless sandy wastes, and reading of this fella named Padilla, my view matured somewhat. Not every swarthy undernourished illiterate, or swarthy college-educated H1B visa holder, who risks his life to reach these blessed shores does so to improve his life or those of his children; some seek to end mine or those of my offspring units, and take from me my prized Scotch whisky.
Now that I've listened to anyone who cares to offer his opinion, yes I've grown and now I agree that the borders of the United States should be sealed, effectively, then carefully reopened only to those whom we can positively identify. Bruce Schneier will dispute the equating of identification with security, and he has a point, but not the point I'm trying to make here. We must own our borders.
I offer the foregoing as my bona fides to visitors who identify themselves as conservatives, and any of the talk radio hosts I am inviting. If further bona fides are needed, a quick glance through my archives should suffice. For those needing the executive summary:
You talk radio hosts who are railing at Bank of America's plan to offer credit cards to applicants without Social Security numbers---you have a screw seriously loose.
Have you folks any notion of the problem of identity theft, and the utter dependence of this crime upon the Social Security number?
Have you any idea of the unfettered reach of the Federal government into affairs not of their damned business, all made possible by their slow, steady, now-complete morphing of the Social Security number into a universal identifier?
I find myself agreeing with the Claire Wolfe-types who wish they could get a credit card without the strings of the Mark of the Beast attached to it.
You focus so narrowly on the obvious (I concede) naked (I concede) effort of BofA to cater to a market that you and I agree ought not to exist, that you miss the bigger picture. We have an underground economy because the economy that lives above ground must survive the merciless ultraviolet glare of excessive laws our Federal government has no charter to pass or enforce. Laws that expose us to the depredations of identity theft. Laws that conveniently don't apply to the lawgivers.
Meanwhile the responsibilities and prohibitions that this Federal government has been given, printed in crinkly Victorian black-and-sepia from the first Contract with America, they ignore.
It's not just the criminals and the underclass who go underground just to get away from the UV burns. It's disheartening that one of those Big Impersonal Corporations you (and I) are usually quick to defend is drawing your fire. It's not the fish in a barrel you think it is.
I'm half-tempted to apply for one of those cards. Probably, though, I'd be turned down because I have a (genuine) Social Security number and I work for The Man. Then The Man would add my unpronounceable name to some list somewhere, and the credit I do have will be lost.
So please, Conservative Radiosphereans: rethink that one. It's not about illegal aliens. It's the choice between cola-nut and un-cola nut, between sic utere and salus populi.
I started out at the early P.J. O'Rourke position. He was amazed, humbled, grateful almost to maudlin tears that people risked their lives on makeshift rafts and shark-infested waters to get here from Cuba. All so they can work 7 days a week for 3 or 4 dollars an hour? God bless 'em, here's a phone, call the ones you left behind and tell them to come too. We'll ship the rafts back for them.
Since having been mobilized to serve Uncle Sugar in the trackless sandy wastes, and reading of this fella named Padilla, my view matured somewhat. Not every swarthy undernourished illiterate, or swarthy college-educated H1B visa holder, who risks his life to reach these blessed shores does so to improve his life or those of his children; some seek to end mine or those of my offspring units, and take from me my prized Scotch whisky.
Now that I've listened to anyone who cares to offer his opinion, yes I've grown and now I agree that the borders of the United States should be sealed, effectively, then carefully reopened only to those whom we can positively identify. Bruce Schneier will dispute the equating of identification with security, and he has a point, but not the point I'm trying to make here. We must own our borders.
I offer the foregoing as my bona fides to visitors who identify themselves as conservatives, and any of the talk radio hosts I am inviting. If further bona fides are needed, a quick glance through my archives should suffice. For those needing the executive summary:
- I'm pro-gun, annoyed that the U.S. Congress is as neutered, cloistered, untouchable, and image-obsessed as the leadership of the National Rifle Association (or maybe the other way around); what is my Life Membership paying for?
- After they investigate, arrest, and successfully prosecute Mike Bloomberg for straw-man interstate firearm purchases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can quietly close their doors and liquidate the office furniture. Any agents of theirs worth a damn can serve well in Constitutional agencies. The rest should never be allowed near a gun or a badge ever again. Some of them should be cleaning the toilet Mike Bloomberg will sit on in his prison cell.
- I think that Roe v. Wade was wrong, and States should get to criminalize abortion if their legislatures so choose.
- Global warming is not necessarily the catastrophe Al Gore says it will be, humans don't cause it, humans probably can't avert it, and if we could, why should we? An asteroid impact, on the other hand, surely will be that catastrophe, and we can prevent that with less money and time than curing AIDS.
- Rush told me to subscribe to the American Spectator back in 1992. I did and still do (they had George W Bush's number in the 2000 primaries, bully for them; but Ben Stein's whining about his spoiled brat really turned me off). I listen to Glenn Beck, have since before he got the TV show. I like Mike Reagan. I'd like to listen to Laura Ingraham too, and Hugh Hewitt and Bill Bennett, but they arrive at my pickup's antenna from diiiiissstaaaant KNUS rather weakly. My employer frowns upon streaming audio. So I don't get to hear all I'd like and I may miss some nuance of their opinions about my topic below---forgive me if I do.
- I'm mildly annoyed by the Latino radio stations that are filling in the gaps on the AM band, but I tolerate. I'm positively disgusted that the Federal government allows or even requires election ballots to be printed in any language other than English. And I conjugate irregular Spanish verbs better than a guy with the last name of Lopez.
- I had my misgivings about going into Iraq. But now that we're there, we had better win it, and we can win it and are winning it. Ron Paul's vote against The Surge disappoints me, but he neither lied to his constituents nor pandered to his peers; find no fault with how he voted, but what he voted.
- Once we have done with Iraq, we need to secularize Iran. We should have invaded Iran or at least severely destabilized it instead of taking down Iraq.
- Oil companies are making record profits? Buy their stock and shut the hell up.
- Big pharma companies making record profits? Ditto. Ironic that most of the people in Congress who contemplate seizing pharmas' profits would be dead but for pharmas' products.
- The only reason I have a Bank of America credit card is that my employer, Uncle Sugar, mandates that I carry one. If I use any other card, Uncle's regs allow him to refuse to repay my travel expenses.
- I left the private sector and took fulltime work in the military, with zero possibility of reaching an active-duty military pension. For the challenge and the satisfaction. If I said it was for the money, I'd be mentally unfit to serve.
- Call me a lapsed agnostic, but I'd be quite content to enroll my four kids in the Catholic school my wife longs for. Just stop collecting school taxes from me for the government school they'd no longer attend.
- Our single-income military family comes painfully close to tithing.
- We're "single income" because my wife and I agree she does a better job raising the four kids than anyone else could, and that is more important to us than the income she could earn as a security-cleared BSEE.
- I "married upward," after asking her parents for their approval.
- I know how to place the apostrophe to form a plural possessive. Can't marry upward without that.
- I support the Fair Tax, mostly out of conviction that every time your next-door neighbors slid a credit card or bought your daughter's Girl Scout cookies, that 17-to-21 percent cut off the top for Uncle Sugar would remind them that they buy more damned Federal government than they can afford. Maybe they'll start voting for people who will cut spending to what a 3 or 4 percent Federal sales tax would sustain, and keep voting that way until it actually happens.
- When the Heritage Foundation sends me their fundraising letter cleverly disguised as a "Conservative Leadership Survey" I strike through their list of whom I'd select as "the three most influential conservative thinkers" and pencil in below "THOMAS SOWELL!!! MALCOLM WALLOP!!!! WARD CONNERLY!!! JACK KEMP!!! VIN SUPRYNOWICZ!!! WALTER WILLIAMS!!! RONALD F****** REAGAN!!! Now YOU pick three from MINE" and return it with a single, crisp $1 bill for their trouble.
You talk radio hosts who are railing at Bank of America's plan to offer credit cards to applicants without Social Security numbers---you have a screw seriously loose.
Have you folks any notion of the problem of identity theft, and the utter dependence of this crime upon the Social Security number?
Have you any idea of the unfettered reach of the Federal government into affairs not of their damned business, all made possible by their slow, steady, now-complete morphing of the Social Security number into a universal identifier?
I find myself agreeing with the Claire Wolfe-types who wish they could get a credit card without the strings of the Mark of the Beast attached to it.
You focus so narrowly on the obvious (I concede) naked (I concede) effort of BofA to cater to a market that you and I agree ought not to exist, that you miss the bigger picture. We have an underground economy because the economy that lives above ground must survive the merciless ultraviolet glare of excessive laws our Federal government has no charter to pass or enforce. Laws that expose us to the depredations of identity theft. Laws that conveniently don't apply to the lawgivers.
Meanwhile the responsibilities and prohibitions that this Federal government has been given, printed in crinkly Victorian black-and-sepia from the first Contract with America, they ignore.
It's not just the criminals and the underclass who go underground just to get away from the UV burns. It's disheartening that one of those Big Impersonal Corporations you (and I) are usually quick to defend is drawing your fire. It's not the fish in a barrel you think it is.
I'm half-tempted to apply for one of those cards. Probably, though, I'd be turned down because I have a (genuine) Social Security number and I work for The Man. Then The Man would add my unpronounceable name to some list somewhere, and the credit I do have will be lost.
So please, Conservative Radiosphereans: rethink that one. It's not about illegal aliens. It's the choice between cola-nut and un-cola nut, between sic utere and salus populi.
20070217
the hyperbole is ramping up
As climate pseudoscience intensifies its stridor, it appears to me that I could easily take a "global warming" press release and splice in the term "asteroid impact" and instantly turn Malthusian guilt-porn into a cause for action with real science behind it.
Except that if we truly do nothing to avert the catastrophe of a near-Earth asteroid impact, no human will be left to carry out a "climate Nuremburg trial" on the asteroid-threat naysayers.
Except that if we truly do nothing to avert the catastrophe of a near-Earth asteroid impact, no human will be left to carry out a "climate Nuremburg trial" on the asteroid-threat naysayers.
Franciszka
. . . is the Polish feminine for "free."
She wasn't quite free, after about $350 in parts kit, receiver flat, and various parts to legitimize her in the eyes of Uncle Sugar. But she's mine.
Receiver flat is from Curtis, the ak-builder. Parts from Gunthings. Tapco trigger pack and muzzle device. Headspace set by Manson go/no-go gauges. Et cetera. Receiver done in Brownell's Teflon-Moly oven-cure coating, the rest in clearance Rust-oleum barbecue paint. All cured in the kitchen oven for 30 minutes at 300F.
I'll have to sandblast the receiver cover and gas tube and give them the appropriate treatment, and the bolt carrier too. But now that I'm getting the hang of this Kalashnifacture thing, I'm running out of parts kits. I'll redo Jadwiga in one of Curtis's receiver flats, maybe Nadia too, sometime this summer.
Until then, perhaps I'll entertain y'all with a very sick-sexy centerfold of the three of them lying together on a bearskin rug or something. And I'm trying to figure out what to use, or how to use it, to put a color inlay in the range markings on the tangent rear sights. Fingernail polish doesn't work very well and its carrier strips off the barbecue paint. Maybe a water-based enamel? Any ideas?
20070212
Today's aphorism
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Plans do not have survival as their purpose. Soldiers do. The purpose of the Plan is to get the Soldiers into contact with the enemy, at the time and place most advantageous to them, and with sufficient resources to survive long enough to get to the next Plan.
Plans do not have survival as their purpose. Soldiers do. The purpose of the Plan is to get the Soldiers into contact with the enemy, at the time and place most advantageous to them, and with sufficient resources to survive long enough to get to the next Plan.
20070109
Now I get to wear this
. . . instead of the DRF patch.
It's not much of a trade. Now my career field badge looks like the same dark blue smudge everybody else is wearing above his pocket flap. Took long enough for it to happen, too.
At least it's an interservice- and internationally-recognized symbol for what I do. No offense, guys, but Prime BEEF ain't about me.
It's not much of a trade. Now my career field badge looks like the same dark blue smudge everybody else is wearing above his pocket flap. Took long enough for it to happen, too.
At least it's an interservice- and internationally-recognized symbol for what I do. No offense, guys, but Prime BEEF ain't about me.
Farewell, old friend
I'm not supposed to be wearing this anymore. Hard for me to take it off, I've been wearing this since 1986.
20061231
The next K'lash
I made some mods to the 555th flat folding fixture today, the better to process receiver flats into beautiful sheetmetal carbines.
Flats usually have holes stamped in them at fore and aft so they center themselves on the fixture. That's only if the fixture has pins to engage those holes. So I marked and drilled holes and fitted pins that align with the holes. The bottom plate of the fixture needed some relieving so it would fit over the pins. Now I just set the flat on the center piece of the fixture and press it upon the pins.
Flats have dimples struck into them to align the magazine, to put tension on the selector lever, and to align the hammer and trigger axis pins. My fixture is relieved for the mag well dimples but none of the others. I made shallow drills at the right spots, then hogged them out somewhat with good buddy rotary tool, so the fixture won't damage the dimples. Below, the selector lever dimple on the op side.
Then I figured out that I could pre-bend the sidewalls of the receiver box by using the side plates of the fixture in a sheet brake. Yup, got one of those from Harbor Freight some months ago, so I clamped it all together and got the sidewall bends started. Below, the op side fold.
Since I was this far along, I figured I'd go ahead and bend the flat the rest of the way. This is a flat from AK-builder, and it's far superior to the Tapcos. I'm seeing great things in this K'lash, which is a Polish underfolder from the good people of Gunthings.
Flats usually have holes stamped in them at fore and aft so they center themselves on the fixture. That's only if the fixture has pins to engage those holes. So I marked and drilled holes and fitted pins that align with the holes. The bottom plate of the fixture needed some relieving so it would fit over the pins. Now I just set the flat on the center piece of the fixture and press it upon the pins.
Flats have dimples struck into them to align the magazine, to put tension on the selector lever, and to align the hammer and trigger axis pins. My fixture is relieved for the mag well dimples but none of the others. I made shallow drills at the right spots, then hogged them out somewhat with good buddy rotary tool, so the fixture won't damage the dimples. Below, the selector lever dimple on the op side.
Then I figured out that I could pre-bend the sidewalls of the receiver box by using the side plates of the fixture in a sheet brake. Yup, got one of those from Harbor Freight some months ago, so I clamped it all together and got the sidewall bends started. Below, the op side fold.
Since I was this far along, I figured I'd go ahead and bend the flat the rest of the way. This is a flat from AK-builder, and it's far superior to the Tapcos. I'm seeing great things in this K'lash, which is a Polish underfolder from the good people of Gunthings.
Like a Braille keypad on a drive-thru ATM
Why do you think socks are offered for sale in a resealable bag?
Do the makers think I'll wash my socks then put them back into the bag? Better yet, that I won't wash my socks, then put them back into the bag all stanksome? Like, this is a way to get them home from the gym without stanking up my car?
HS Reset time again
My valued Palm m500 once again gave me the Gray Vibrate of Death.
It could have been one of those little static shocks when I get out of a parked car---they happen all the time in the arid high plains---or it could have been a static hit from putting her in the pocket of my fleece jacket. But it's all it takes to put a Palm m500 into a death spiral.
The light in the on/off button illuminates, the vibrator sometimes runs, sometimes doesn't, and the screen goes as black as the waning voltage in the battery can stop it down.
The reset hole in the back of the unit won't revive her. I have to let her run the battery the rest of the way down, then recharge her and restore her memory from an SD backup. Good I had one less than 30 days old. I usually do.
But when this happens the USB port will not function, period. Palm's tech support, after about the fifth call on the same problem, sent me an SD card with a backup utility and an app called "HS Reset."
It backs the Palm up to the SD card, then runs the battery absolutely, positively dead dead dead. A soft setting of the USB port's clock speed gets erased---tech support says the static scrambles it so the USB port is inoperable---and then HS Reset puts the clock to the proper speed. Restore from the backup and you're able to HotSync again.
This is, IIRC, the seventh time I've had to do this in 3 years. The Palm is out of service for a full 12 hours while the reset app runs.
This got me to thinking, wouldn't it be nice to upgrade to a Palm that didn't have this problem. After a quick stroll of Amazon's new and used Palm offerings, it seems not only that I'm lucky to keep this m500 operating, I'm lucky I got the tech support that I did at the time---they sent me that SD card with HS Reset free, in Spring of '03.
In fact, I appeared twice in their database so they sent me two. I encountered a friend (Hey, TK!) who had the same problem with the same model, so I gave him the spare. These days, Palm charges bux just to take the phone call, and they are probably far less forthcoming about potential glitches like ESD sensitivity.
No LifeDrive in the immediate future for me. No Tungsten E2 either. I'll keep this m500 limping along until one of my offspring units drops it and cracks the screen.
It could have been one of those little static shocks when I get out of a parked car---they happen all the time in the arid high plains---or it could have been a static hit from putting her in the pocket of my fleece jacket. But it's all it takes to put a Palm m500 into a death spiral.
The light in the on/off button illuminates, the vibrator sometimes runs, sometimes doesn't, and the screen goes as black as the waning voltage in the battery can stop it down.
The reset hole in the back of the unit won't revive her. I have to let her run the battery the rest of the way down, then recharge her and restore her memory from an SD backup. Good I had one less than 30 days old. I usually do.
But when this happens the USB port will not function, period. Palm's tech support, after about the fifth call on the same problem, sent me an SD card with a backup utility and an app called "HS Reset."
It backs the Palm up to the SD card, then runs the battery absolutely, positively dead dead dead. A soft setting of the USB port's clock speed gets erased---tech support says the static scrambles it so the USB port is inoperable---and then HS Reset puts the clock to the proper speed. Restore from the backup and you're able to HotSync again.
This is, IIRC, the seventh time I've had to do this in 3 years. The Palm is out of service for a full 12 hours while the reset app runs.
This got me to thinking, wouldn't it be nice to upgrade to a Palm that didn't have this problem. After a quick stroll of Amazon's new and used Palm offerings, it seems not only that I'm lucky to keep this m500 operating, I'm lucky I got the tech support that I did at the time---they sent me that SD card with HS Reset free, in Spring of '03.
In fact, I appeared twice in their database so they sent me two. I encountered a friend (Hey, TK!) who had the same problem with the same model, so I gave him the spare. These days, Palm charges bux just to take the phone call, and they are probably far less forthcoming about potential glitches like ESD sensitivity.
No LifeDrive in the immediate future for me. No Tungsten E2 either. I'll keep this m500 limping along until one of my offspring units drops it and cracks the screen.
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