Category Archives: Technology

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.

I want one

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I have the software for this. I just don’t have a way of integrating it with the proper hardware. It sounds really nice:

The next generation of battlefield optics will empower infantrymen to hit enemy targets from twice the effective range of the M4 carbine if Defense Department scientists get their way.

This summer, officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are scheduled to begin testing prototypes of the Dynamic Image Gunsight Optic, known as “DInGO.”

…

Currently, the device weighs about a pound and is approximately five inches long, three inches wide and three inches high, Wojnar said. It has a digital micro display that originated in the cell phone industry.

I know there are similar devices on the market now but the ones I have seen are larger and more appropriate for the .50 BMG or at least a .30 caliber rifle. Something small and compact for an AR-15 class rifle would be nice.

H/T to reader Richard R.

Terminator building blocks

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Implementation of SkyNet and the Terminator are a little behind the original schedule but progress is still being made:

“The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: ‘Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns,” Jacobs said.

“Today it tracks objects. It’s actually not programmed, it’s taught.”

Jacobs laughed at the silence in the room, conceding he evokes images of “The Terminator.”

SkyNet building blocks are falling into place as well:

The long term future belongs to optical interconnects, low power processors and new kinds of memory architectures, said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs in a DesignCon keynote here.

Banerjee described the path to a terabyte/second optical bus as one step toward its vision of future systems architectures. Engineers need to embrace the new technologies to deal with the coming flood of digital data, he said.

“By 2020 your end customer will be living in a world where people access 50 zettabytes of data from 30 billion cellphones and 1.3 trillion sensors–and all that data will have to be analyzed by computer architectures you have to design,” he told a packed audience here.

Unreasonable searches

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I could see the day when the government attempts to get a search warrant for your thoughts:

A group of neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, reported they may have come up with a scientific way to read people’s minds.

They can already demand blood samples so why not connect you up to a machine to see if you have anti-government thoughts or knowledge of a crime?

Laser Guided Bullets

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We had radar proximity fuses in use in AAA rounds during W.W. II, and they of course used vacuum tube technology.  One of the members of our local ham radio club worked on that project in the ’40s.  One of the challenges for his team was developing tubes that could withstand the 10s of thousands of Gs at launch.  Ouch.

Now we have this, via an e-mail from my nephew.  I find it fascinating, funny, and a little disturbing all at the same time.  Ordinary rifles spin a bullet at 2K RPM?  They missed that one by an order of magnitude or two.  A rifle chambered for the 5.56 NATO round for example rotates the bullet at around 300,000 RPM, more or less depending on barrel length, rifling twist and bullet weight.  But as I often say; what’s an order of magnitude (or two) between friends?

It is very telling, if not entirely predictable, how they smear the general public in the article– government = good, whereas regular citizens = dangerous or at least troubling.  They of course have it entirely upside down and backwards in that department.

A hint

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Drones may be a significant threat:

It allows truly scalable global coercion:  the automation of comply or die. 
 
Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn’t that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).
 
Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

…

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them.  When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Drones also need to be built, communicate with people on the ground, refueled and rearmed. And if they are using your cell phone for tracking and terminal guidance that phone doesn’t need to remain in your possession. It might just be that a vehicle supplying the drone base could use an old cell phone for a few days.

The Ultimate Reloader

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Spending more time on the loading press.  Thinking hard about a progressive, as this one step business grates.  The loading rates they talk about are of course totally wrong, as they don’t include the hours upon hours spent prepping cases before you can start “reloading” on your 600 rounds per hour progressive machine.  I once timed a guy with his new state-of-the-art case prep center on Youtube, and came up with eight hours per thousand, IIRC.

I once sat down and figured how much technology would be needed to take your spent brass from the range and go straight to the progressive with it.  There was a motorized cleaning station, an RF induction annealing die, followed by a water-cooled sizing die (the brass would come in hot, you see, and since you’ll have to run water through your annealing die there’ll already be a cooling system) plus trimming and chamfering stations.  Depending on the case and bullet type, there may be an “M” die station.  I think I once came up with twelve or thirteen stations in all, to really have it all, no matter what.  I don’t know– $20,000.00?  Thoughbeit a small one, I figure there’d be a market for it.

I was looking at the Hornady L&L, but I’m being told the Dillon 650 is a better bet.  It’s listed for something like 600 bucks, but looking at the required hardware for actually loading a few calibers it’s over a thousand for sure, and from there you spend a little more.  I’ll have to resign myself to prepping cases the old-fashioned way– one at a time.

You have to like it, considering it a hobby, because if you figure the value of your time I don’t see the numbers working out.  You do get a little bit of independence from it, though you still need a supply of consumables.  If you want near total independence you should have a flintlock, make your own black powder using nitrate from the stockyard (I’ve heard of it being done without sulphur. It’s less powerfull but it works. If you live near an active volcano you may be covered there) and cast your own lead from scrap.  Ah, but you still need a supply of flint.  Man, this deteriorated quickly.  Sharp sticks.  There you have it.

Random thought of the day

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With partial credit given to Jeff Foxworthy…

If you can count to 1023 on your fingers then you might be a computer jockey.