Big-Bore Airguns

Found this one via Codrea's blog: "Quackenbush Air Guns".  Unfortunately the guy isn't taking orders at the moment.  A .50-cal bullet at 800 fps from an air rifle?  For under a grand?  Sign me up!  Oh wait, there's an 8+ month wait.  Well, there's gotta be other manufacturers out there...?

Liberty Training Rifle

The recommended rifle for an Appleseed shoot is the so-called "Liberty Training Rifle", described both on the Appleseed forums and the blog.

The suggested sights are "Tech-SIGHTS" (dunno what's up with the capitalization).  The set for the 10/22 replace the front dovetail sight and screw into the factory scope rail holes in the receiver.  I've heard that the sights are made in China, though, which would be highly unfortunate.  The other two open sight options I've seen are Eagle Zephyr and Williams FireSights; the former appears to be no longer made, and the latter is poorly reviewed.  Apparently one of the first appearances of the Tech-SIGHTS was on the forums on The High Road.

Vortex and Primary Arms Red Dots

AIM Surplus just posted the Vortex SPARC scope in their Facebook updates.  I'd never heard of it so I'd checked the manufacturer's page.  A little searching on the forums seemed to have mixed reviews, but the negative ones weren't by people who've actually used the device--just people who prefer Aimpoint's or Trijicon's offerings.  People who actually own the sight seem to like it.  One post referenced a Primary Arms red dot, saying that if you're not going to go with the gold standard you might as well go with the el cheapo solution.

American Precious Metals Exchange

I found APMEX when looking for alternate sources for gold/silver.  They have some backdated coins and accept credit cards.  They're located in OKC.

Implements of Fire

Joel at work sent me a link to AK47, an Italian design shop that does mostly patio fire implements.  Pretty funky stuff.

Ads

...that I got in the mail.

• Coleman's Military Surplus (milsurp in mostly small quantities)
• United Country Real Estate (looking for land?)
• Excalibur Dehydrator (made in the U.S. apparently)
• LED Ropelights (coupon code GET10)
• Bradley's Military Surplus (mostly military-style stuff rather than surplus)
• Sierra Trading Post (outdoor wear)
• Gourmet Mushrooms (grow your own)
• Minelab (metal detectors)
• Mantis (tiller/cultivator)

Kit

From the always useful Sipsey Street, there's a link to a description of a bug-out bag called a "speed bag", which links back to a Sipsey piece on first aid kits.

Gotta have quikclot or similar for temporary patching of gunshot wounds....

Contrarian Stocks

WSJ had an article a couple weeks back about how often the stocks that Wall Street likes at the start of the year aren't the ones that turn out at the end of the year to have performed well during the year.  The list:

The ones they like:

• Thermo Fisher Scientific
• Apple
• Agilent Technologies
• Compuware
• Halliburton
• Express Sprints
• EQT
• Celgene
• Google
• R.R. Donnelly & Sons

The ones they didn't like:

• AIG
• Apartment Investment & Management
• Brown-Forman
• Diamond Offshore Drilling
• Ameren
• Eli Lilly
• Nicor
• Berkshire Hathaway
• Cincinnati Financial
• Sears Holdings

Might be worth a look—if it's not too late.

DuPont Analysis

Via a Motley Fool article, I read about the DuPont identity, a formula that describes the elements of return on equity (ROE):

ROE = ( net profit / sales ) x ( sales / assets ) x ( assets / equity )

Put another way, the rate of return to stockholders is the profit margin times asset turnover times leverage, which makes intuitive sense.

Mosin-Nagant

Some informational links regarding the Mosin-Nagant M91/30:

• FAQ at 7.62x54r.net
• Disassembly instructions at 7.62x54r.net
• Manual from Century International Arms
• Info at world.guns.ru
• Lots of info at SurplusRifle.com

Slings

In searching for U.S. web sling manufacturers, I turned up a link on THR that had pointers to instructions on how to use the military leather and web slings.  The links were busted, but I found them again on the site.

Also, it appears that CJ Weapons makes slings in the U.S., in both cotton and nylon web varieties.  My guess is that CDNN is selling their slings, but it's not clear.  KMK said that CDNN's are made in the U.S., whereas the Fred's ones are made in China.  Hmm.

Anti-Gun Bozo

This anti-gun chick, Jackie Kuhls, is full of shit—she has no idea what the fuck she's talking about.  "Assault weapons" is a recent term, and it refers to semi-automatic versions of military weapons that have features deemed undesirable by anti-gun factions, such as pistol grips, large capacity magazines, and an intermediate cartridge between that of a battle rifle and a pistol.  "Assault rifles" would be the proper term for what she's describing, but those are fully-automatic machineguns which are heavily regulated under the NFA.  Lawfully possessed MGs have only been used in crimes twice, and once was by a police officer.  However, the posterboard the anti-gun chick is holding shows a M10 or M11, which is a submachinegun and not considered an "assault rifle" but rather a "machine pistol" in either .380, 9mm, or .45.  That would not pierce most police body armor.  5.56x45mm or 7.62x51mm would go through body armor without reinforcing plates design to absorb a rifle round.  People like this make me sick: they know absolutely zero about the item they're villifying.

Political Reading Memo

Woodrow Wilson's interventionism set the stage for bad U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century.  His Fourteen Points speech proposed the League of Nations, which, while not ratified by the U.S., proved ineffective in forestalling World War II in Europe.

Bretton Woods was the system that pegged world currencies to gold, which was terminated by Nixon.

Jesus, when was the last good president we had in the U.S.??

Sued

A few days ago a coworker asked me and MRG to produce a list of products since Jan. 1, 2003 with the corresponding data channel used.  He said it was for a patent lawsuit, but didn't have additional information.  Yesterday he told me that the plaintiff is a company called Lake Cherokee, so we googled it and found the lawsuit: Lake Cherokee Hard Drive Technologies v. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, LSI Logic, STMicroelectronics, Marvell Semiconductor, et al.  ("Hard Drive Technologies"?  What the fuck do they do besides sue real HDD-related companies?)

Turns out this has to do with something I heard about a couple months ago: the senior integration guy was looking for specs dating back to the late '90s.  This was before I joined, but I knew where to find the info.  The first item in the lawsuit shouldn't apply to HGST, because the internal channel's error measurement circuit predates '98—we have prior art.  The second one might be applicable; I don't actually know the details.

Slamfire Shotgun

I'd heard that old Winchester 97 shotguns can shoot by holding down the trigger and pump-cycling the action.  That got me thinking as to whether the disconnector could be removed from the trigger group of a Remington 870 to do the same thing, so I searched for such info.  After all, someone on the interwebz had to have tried it.

Apparently it's not possible on the 870:

as one who performed warranty repair on both mossberg and remington, their nomenclature for disconnector is the part that leaves the hammer cocked when you cycle the arm with the trigger pulled. it would be pointless to disable these parts, because the design of those two particular arms would only allow the hammer to follow the bolt. it would not behave like an old ithaca 37, or win '97 or old m-12.

The poster also brought up the good point that such a modification might be considered a machinegun conversion, since continuously depressing the trigger might be considered a single trigger pull.  A different forum post noted that the Ithaca model 37 has the same behavior as the Win 97.  Whether that's true of new production guns isn't clear.

Pendrive Linux

Just read a mention of multiple bootable OSes from a single USB memory stick via Pendrive Linux.  There's the universal installer and multiboot.  That could be fun to play with.