Category Archives: Technology

Do you like your eyes?

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If you like your eyes and are a shooter you need to read this post:

Non-ballistic eye protection is fine for keeping relatively slow-moving objects away from your face. Empty cases ejected from a firearm, dirt kicked up by muzzle blast, etc. For faster-moving projectiles such as ricocheted bullets, you need high quality, tested eye pro. I would personally prefer eyewear with a single piece lens for any activity where my face might be struck by small, fast-moving objects.

There are lots of tables and video of the test results. I would have liked to have seen more brands tested but I wouldn’t have wanted to pay for even the selection they did test.

To the people at LuckyGunner.com, good job guys.

Web anonymity

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It’s tough to be anonymous on the web but there are some things you can do to improve your situation. Here is a mini-review of Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers. An provider that doesn’t keep logs can help keep even the most determined stalker from getting a clue of which city you live in from your web presence.

Quote of the day–Kurt Eichenwald

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Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees.


Kurt Eichenwald
August 2012 Issue of Vanity Fair.
Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
[Via email from Ry. I could rant for an hour about this. It was a strong contributor to my leaving Microsoft.


But the final straw was a manager who several people on my team independently concluded, “He’s insane!”. The most inspired and brilliant thing I have ever done with software, a new algorithm for estimating the location of device based on the presence of cell and Wi-Fi signal, was termed by him to be, “A negative contribution to Microsoft.” A month or so later the bug this algorithm change would have fixed was termed to be a Priority 1 bug that had to be fixed ASAP. When I pointed out I had been telling him for months that we needed to make this algorithm change he then marked the bug, “Won’t fix” and it was forever ignored.


He asked us all what we liked to do best and did well then gave us tasks there were just the opposite of that. The most incompetent “engineer” on our team was promoted to a senior engineering position, the same level as me. He didn’t qualify as an engineer in my book. Had he been an intern I would have recommended he not be hired or brought back for a second internship. Others “promised” promotions by our previous manager were given poor reviews and told they were on their way out of the company if their performance didn’t improve.


I could, and have—just ask Barron, rant for many hours about this guy. He was the worst manager, by far, I have ever had in nearly 35 years of being an engineer. And I’ve had an alcoholic, one who said things to me that would be considered sexual harassment, and just plain stupid and incompetent managers. But seldom would they get in the way of you getting your job done or doing it right. This guy was counterproductive, actively destroyed moral, and degraded the quality of the product.


Four out of five people on our team complained to our skip level manager about this guy. He did nothing. Three out of five people on the team quit Microsoft because of him.


The last I heard he still works for Microsoft. If I ever get a call from a Microsoft recruiter I will tell them there is no point in continuing the conversation if this guy still works there. Any company that holds on to someone like that is not a company that I will work for.


Still, I think Windows Phone 7.x is finest mobile phone available and I am extremely proud of helping build and ship that product. I will continue to favor Microsoft products over others. But Microsoft has problems. The culture I experienced in the mid and late 1990’s was gone when I joined as a full time employee in 2006 and while I thought the culture from the earlier time needed some changes what it changed into was worse for both the employees and consumers. Microsoft needs to make some serious changes and I hope they are up to the task.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

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Over the weekend someone told me, “Drop the logic; embrace the real.” The short version of my response was, “I have no idea what this means.”

Yesterday as I was walking to the bus stop I was listening to The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Yet, I was still trying to get my mind around the implications of “Drop the logic; embrace the real” without concluding such a statement was an invitation to delusionville.

The author was talking (literally, he was reading his own book) about simulations of “universes” and how we might detect if we are in a simulated universe such as those explored in Hollywood with movies like “The Matrix“. Compared to some of the first alternate computer games I was aware of such as the text based game Zork computer games do an amazing job of creating simulated universes. Combined with the predictions of Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology we can imagine we are getting close (perhaps less than 40 years) from creating virtual universes which will be extremely difficult to distinguish from reality.

One of the suggestions the author made was that if we know of existence of millions or billions of virtual universes, such as those instantiated by all the people playing video games, and we question the reality of the universe we live in then the following logical conclusion might be entirely valid. Since we know that there are X million virtual universes in existence and only one universe that we have questions about the most likely answer is that the universe in question is also a virtual universe.

I’m pretty sure my friend hadn’t encouraged me to “Drop the logic” with anything this profound in mind but I decided they weren’t necessarily a strong candidate for occupying a padded cell either.

Mid 19th Century Belt-Fed

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Well almost– this uses a closed loop chain, but the concept is there.


Joe and I spoke of this concept many years ago, but I didn’t know until today that it had actually been done.  My version, though, would have been gas operated, but that technology wasn’t tested until some time after the end of the percussion era.  Gas operation and black powder wouldn’t go very well together because BP is so dirty, but it certainly can be done.  Energies are quite a bit lower, but you can throw a projectile of several hundred grains well into the super sonic, from a rifle.  The pistols of the same period could only just make, or slightly exceed, the speed of sound with heavy charges.  I’ve gotten 1130ish fps with a 180 grain pill from an 8″ bbl on an 1858 Remington New Model Army revolver replica, which is on par, energy wise, with the 40 S&W.  The huge 1847 Colt’s Dragoon (Walker) revolver could do somewhat better, but the story goes; it was prone to blow up.  Metalurgy has come a long way since then.


Hat Tip; castboolits.gunloads.com (I learned a lot about casting there, and I still hang out on the muzzleloading section now and then)

Our Vice Moron at it Again

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Imagine, in just a few years, solar shingles on your brand new custom house (all you high school graduates) that cost no more than regular shingles, that will power everything in your house, heating, AC the whole deal.  Imagine crops that don’t need soil (OK, maybe hydroponics) and no water (oops) and no fertilizer.  Magic crops.  “Literally just around the corner.”


And of course none of that can happen if the eeevil Republicans are in power.  Only more of ‘bama’s stash money can make the magic happen.  The private markets?  Meh.  All that’s done is fail continuously for 200+ years, apparently.  What’s been happening in the last few years– that’s the ticket, Baby.


Now if kids actually learned science, physics, biology or basic economics, they’d laugh that gibbering idiot off the podium.  This is where our Soviet-style education system comes in.  Of course now anyone can look up maximum and average available energy per unit area at their latitude at various times of the year, and the efficiency of the best PV panels, take into account the problem of tracking, or in the case of your magic roof shingles the lack of tracking, and so on.  And naturally, to get the most out of your magic solar roof shingles you’ll have to cut down the trees that shade your house, increasing the AC load.  Or maybe not, being as they’re magic and all.


He had a teleprompter, so I have to assume that he didn’t make that up as he went along.  There had to have been some planning behind it.


The Moron in Chief, to make himself look better by comparison, had pick the stupidest fool he could find I guess, and then put him out there to show the contrast, such as it is.

Others who say our universe is a black hole

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I have this hypothesis that our universe is a black hole. Via Jeff I found out there are some serious cosmologists that a hypothesis similar to mine.

Of course I’m still very interested in knowing the answer to the question, “When do we get ripped apart by tidal forces and our subatomic components get sucked into the singularity?” It affects my deciding whether I should unpack my boxes of stuff from Idaho and do some reloading or spend quality time with my kids.

Free batteries from Crimson Trace

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This is kind of cool (via email from Tiffany Hopp, MarCom Manager, at Crimson Trace):

For Immediate Release;

May 31, 2012

Crimson Trace Extends Popular ‘Batteries For Life’ Program

(Wilsonville, OR) Crimson Trace, the Oregon-based manufacturer of the World’s only grip-activated laser sights today announced plans to extend its hugely popular ‘Batteries for Life’ scheme. CTC customers will receive free replacement batteries for the lifetime of their laser sights, in exchange for registering their products with the company’s customer service department.

“There are very few things in life that are truly free,” said Nate Hoke, Director of Customer service for Crimson Trace. “This is one of them. Just register online or via our 800 number and every year, we’ll send a fresh set of batteries for your Lasergrips® or Laserguard® product for as long as you own it.” Hoke reported that many customers were still using the original batteries in their sights after six or seven years. “While Crimson Trace products have the longest run times in the industry, laser sights are safety devices and as such, should have regular battery changes. We’re proud to be able to offer this program to our loyal customers – it’s one more way for us to show our appreciation to the people who have supported us over the years.”

All Crimson Trace products are proudly designed engineered and manufactured in the USA and fit the widest range or popular self-defense handguns, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Kimber and Springfield.

For further information contact;

Iain Harrison
Media Relations Manager
CRIMSON TRACE CORPORATION
iainh@crimsontrace.com
1-800-442-2406 x1303

I use Crimson Trace lasers on some of the guns I teach beginners with. It think they make fine products.

Metal Oxide Semiconductors

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It’s happened several times before.  Good alternator, good battery, dead battery.  Over the last two or three days, I noticed my good starter getting slower and slower.  Since vehicles these days, inexplicably, have only a voltage meter, I couldn’t tell from my instrumentation whether I had extra drain, a dead battery, or dirty terminals.  You do get a slight clue though, if you watch the voltage closely immediately after start-up.  If everything is working normally, you’ll see the voltage start out a bit lower, then creep up to normal running voltage in a few seconds.  My meter was rock solid.  With a current meter, such as was the norm in the 1960s, you’ll see the charge or discharge current.  Much more useful in my opinion.  Best would be to have both volts and amps.


The pickup barely started this morning, and at work it didn’t start at all.  Like a jerk, only then did I clean the battery terminals.  Still no go, so I got a boost from Dan.  The terminals get corroded and that can sometimes allow current to flow one direction, but not the other (that’s a diode, see).  In this case the batt would discharge just fine, but it couldn’t get any charge current (hence the full voltage immediately after starting– the voltage wasn’t being pulled down by any charge current).  Eventually you’re a walkin’, yo.


I went and bought a new battery anyway, because I’ll have a use for it either way.  By the time I got back from across town, the old battery was fully charged and snappy as ever, so now I have a new one I can use either in my son’s van or my old beat-up T-Bird.  Fun fun fun.  Plus I got a decent charger for the garage, just in case.  If the battery had had only a few less electrons to give up this morning, I’d have been knocking on doors for a boost.  No more.  I have used my ham radio 12V supply to charge a car battery, but it doesn’ like that.  The huge current load tends to blow some fairly important components.


Yeah so; if your starter slows down, just a little, clean your terminals before it gets worse.  You may just have solved the whole problem, right there.  You do keep a terminal brush and some tools in your vehicle, right?

That’s an easy one

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Clayton wants some help:

I have been asked to help write an amicus brief challenging a state discretionary permit issuance. In state after state, as shall-issue laws have worked their way through the legislative process, opponents of shall-issue have repeatedly stated that “blood with run in the streets” “It will be like the Wild West” and similar claims.

Our enemies are one of the best sources for ammunition to be used against them. There own words are riches just waiting to be mined.

The keyword “site:” can be used with both Google and Bing. This restricts your search to just a single domain. Hence the search phrase site:bradycampaign.org “wild west” yields good results (Google yields a few more than Bing but I’m not convinced they are better). site:vpc.org “blood in the streets” is somewhat less interesting.

Why TSA explosives detection is pointless

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If the TSA were to scan for Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer (AN) they would get a very high percentage of travelers testing positive as this guy did:

An 82-year-old farmer from Brush got quite the surprise Thursday when he was briefly detained by Fort Collins-Loveland airport security after his suitcase tested positive for the chemicals used to make bombs.

Large numbers of false positives mean they have to hand examine large numbers of people. This will require far more manpower and increase the frustration with the TSA. If they don’t scan for AN then they leave a huge gaping hole in their security. Yes, AN needs something else with it to detonate. Boomerite, for example, uses Potassium Chlorate (PC) and Ethylene Glycol (EG). Scanning for either of these isn’t going to accomplish anything. PC is one of the main ingredients in matches. EG is the common automobile anti-freeze. False positives are us.

Scanning for all three, AN, PC, and EG would detect Boomerite but there isn’t anything particularly magic about those three. AN with any number of things will explode. Here is just a partial list of things I have used:

  • Aluminum powder
  • Diesel
  • Model racing fuel
  • Powdered milk
  • Powdered sugar
  • Wheat flour
  • Propylene Glycol
  • Nitromethane
  • Acetone (nail polish remover)
  • Methanol (wood alcohol)
  • Naphthalene (moth balls)

Basically anything that will burn will enable detonation of AN. So unless TSA is willing to detain and hand search every passenger that walked through their recently fertilized lawn and then ate a powdered sugar donut on the way to security there is no point in scanning for AN. Plus this assumes that a real threat would not be able to seal and clean up their explosives device and themselves sufficiently that they couldn’t get their chemical profile below the detection threshold.

Since explosives detection is pointless and they do not hand examine every passenger TSA is really nothing but A Security Theater.

RFID shielded wallet

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The NRA is selling a wallet which shields your RFID cards from being scanned.

I’m a little torn as to whether I want to get one or not. It’s very convenient to just swipe my wallet over the the scanner when I get on the bus to go to work. If I had the shielded wallet I would have to take the card out to scan it.

On the other hand Ry recently demonstrated an app for an Android phone that could scan that same card and get my public transportation history for the last 10 days.

High Praise for Windows 8

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From John at work. We are both working on Windows 8. Occasionally we will complain about some problem or another we have run into with the prerelease bits we are dealing working with.

This morning he sent out some email:

I don’t know what all the Windows 8 bashing is about the new UI is clearly superior: 

image

Obviously he is correct. As Greg (at work) pointed out, “This is a much more pleasing shade of blue.”

What a ride

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I suspect even with a civilization with our level of technology and capacity for building durable shelter that nearly everyone would be dead in a few days should something like this happened. But man, what a ride if you could manage it:

Planets in tight orbits around stars that get ejected from our galaxy may actually themselves be tossed out of the Milky Way at blisteringly fast speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour, or a fraction of the speed of light, a new study finds.

Quote of the day—Ken

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Generally speaking, it isn’t “progressive” to want to repeal the Industrial Revolution.

Ken
March 18, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day–Helen Caldicott.
[But “progressives” aren’t progressive. They yearn to implement a proven failed political and economic system invented over 150 years ago. Perhaps it’s a mere coincidence but the rise of Marxism marked the end of the Industrial Revolution. “Progressivism” is the propagation of a lie that people desperately want to believe:

Therefore when a “progressive” wants to “repeal the Industrial Revolution” they are just being true to their nature.–Joe]

Memory wipe

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I’ve written programs to securely wipe your hard disk upon your command. I wrote a prototype ‘virus’ that wiped your newly installed hard disk on the first boot even if you had removed all previous disks, CDs, DVDs, and thumb drives. I have reduced permanent storage devices to their molecular components.

But to the best of my knowledge (if I wiped my own brain would I know?) I have never wiped a human brain clean of memories before:

While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.

I guess I’ll have to just keep trying.

On the seventh day

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If you follow my Tweets you will know that I submitted a Windows Phone 7 application on February 25th. In my Tweet I asked, “Does anyone know how long it takes for it be certified and published?”

No one responded.

Yesterday I asked a guy at work who had gone through the process. “About 60 days” was his response. But then he explained it was a very special case that involved getting special permission, blah, blah, blah…

I dug deeper into Microsoft App Hub and found:

Certification takes an average of five business days. If it has been longer than seven days to complete Certification, contact Support from the e-Form from your account Dashboard.

Today, just a few hours from it being a full seven days, I received an email telling me the app had been published.

Still it doesn’t show up in the market place. After some more searching I found (on the same page as the previous quote):

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the app to show up in the catalog.

So my work is finished and now I must wait a day.

And so on the seventh day it was finished and it was very good. And on the seventh day I rested.

So here is a direct link to “As the Crow Flies”. It isn’t currently active but will be within 24 hours.

This is a very simple app that measures the great circle distance between any two points on the surface of the earth using Bing Maps with aerial photography. The points could be your office and that beach in the Bahamas. It could be the opposite sides of the Space Needle. It could be the distance from your shooting position to that cardboard box filled with explosives on the hillside.

Update 3/5/2012 4:24 AM: The link to the app above now works but searching in the marketplace still does not.

Update 3/5/2012 6:45 AM: The app is fully active in the marketplace now.

How to make Potassium Chlorate

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Potassium Chlorate is one of the ingredients in Boomerite. I’ve often fantasized about making it myself because it’s the most expensive component, it requires an ATF explosives license to purchase in the quantities I need, and my sole supplier is in New Jersey.

Here is how to make it in your garage/kitchen/basement:

I think I will continue to purchase it. We use about 350 pounds per year and scaling up the process above to meet our needs just doesn’t look worthwhile.

Skynet is near

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I’ve been listening to the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. If you never have had any concerns about Skynet becoming reality this book will shake you up. If you thought Skynet was science fiction but plausible this book will put you on full alert.

Wow!

Author Ray Kurzweil makes a strong case that technology (and as an aside, biological evolution) advances at an exponential rate. I forget the exact numbers but he claims that we can now expect to see the equivalent of all the advances we saw in the entire 20th century to happen in the something like first 20 years of the 21st Century. Then those advances again in something like 10 years. He also claims a case can be made that the exponent in the exponential growth equation is itself increasing exponentially!

The reason the technological growth can increase so rapidly is that we have created tools to create technology more easily. And we create tools to create tools. We have computers that can be taught to see and track objects. We have computers sitting under our desks that have the “brain power” for some task that exceed the capacity of several planets of sentient beings. Soon we will have computers that can not only be used technological levers guided by humans but can create their own tools.

The maximum communication speed of biochemical signals of animals is about 100 meters per second. And the distances those signals need to travel during thinking are on the order of centimeters. These factors are hard physical limits on how fast we can think. A computer has similar problems but the physical limits are not nearly as constraining. Communication speed is approximately 300,000,000 meters per second and the distances are on the order of millimeters. This gives a computer an speed advantage of approximately 30,000,000.

In communication and teaching others humans are limited by our language and our ability to learn a new skill. How many words per minute can a person read or hear and understand and apply? If you are skilled in the field you may be able to read and understand what another subject matter expert tells you but it will still take practice before you can perform at the same level as your teacher. With a computer it can “teach” another computer at whatever rate it takes to transfer the software. The cellphone in your pocket “learns” a new skill with perfect repeatability from other computers in the few seconds it takes to download the app through the sky via the nearest cell tower from the ‘net.

Today that ‘net is the Internet.

Update: Sarah recommended the book to me. She has more to offer on the topic.

Random thought of the day

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Time travel is obviously possible. Everyone does it all the time. Just sitting around doing nothing we travel through time at a rate of 1 second per 1000 milliseconds. What’s more interesting is how we can travel through time at a different rate and how this prohibits any time paradoxes from occurring such traveling into the future to meet an older version of yourself.

As I have posted before we are always traveling at a constant speed. This is the speed of light and we cannot change that. What we can change is the direction in which we travel. Nearly all of our velocity is on the time axis but as soon as we move in the conventional sense our velocity in time slows down such that the magnitude of our velocity vector remains constant.

What this means is that every time you travel away from someone and come back you are out of synch with them in regards to time. In nearly all cases the difference is in femtoseconds and is totally irrelevant. What is be more interesting and is conceptually possible is to spend a year (in your perception) and travel two (or ten) years in time as perceived by the people you left behind.

If such a machine were built it would more properly be called a “time vehicle” than a “time machine”. To travel any interesting distance in time would require enormous amounts of energy and you cannot retrace your path or go backward in time.

Using such a machine it would be impossible to meet yourself in the future. Use of the vehicle would be exactly analogous to taking a shortcut to some geographical location your friends were traveling to. You will have traveled a shorter distance than your friends but arrive at the same location. It is not possible for you to travel both paths simultaneously.

I woke up at about 4:00 AM this morning and it took an hour or so of thinking about this before I could go back to sleep.