More Good Advice

Sometimes it seems like good advice is a dime a dozen, but this seems legit.  I came across a useful Quora post that I'm saving here.

1. Decide what’s important because in 5 years, 80% of what you do today will not turn into anything. It’s just busywork, no useful outcome.
2. Sleep, food and exercise can help you triple your outcome, because they increase focus, motivation and energy levels.
3. The 2-minute rule: if you can do something (like replying to an email, or a house chore) in 2 minutes, do it now. Planning it for later, remembering it, doing it in the future will take 5 minutes or more.
4. The 5-minute rule: the biggest cure against procrastination is to set your goal not to finish a scary big hairy task, but to just work 5 minutes on it. You’ll find out that most times it continues well beyond the 5 minutes, as you enter a flow state.
5. Seinfeld’s productivity chain: if you want to be good at something, do it every day. Including on Christmas, Easter and Judgement Day. No exceptions.
6. Tiny habits, highly linked with the 5-minute rule, helps you create good habits quickly. It works, I tested it.
7. Your memory sucks. Get everything out of your head, even if you’re a genius. Write it down in a notebook, put it in your todo-list app, on your phone, talk to Siri, I don’t care.
8. As few tools as possible. I’ve tested most of the todo managers and finally stayed with Cultured Code‘s Things app and Google Calendar (iCal is ok, but Google Calendar integrates well with Gmail, my default client). It doesn’t matter what you use (pen & paper are fine) if you understand the next rule.
9. Routine beats tools. You need discipline, and this means for me two things: I plan my day first thing in the morning, and I write a short daily log every day. This helps me stay sane, prioritize well, scrap useless tasks, and do what matters. This saves me hours.
10. Pomodoros. That’s timeboxing—for 30 minutes do only the task at hand. Nothing else: no phones, email, talking to people, Facebook, running out of the building in case of fire. Nothing else.
11. Always wear your headphones. You don’t have to listen to music, but it will discourage people to approach you.
12. Email scheduling and inbox zero. Don’t read your email first thing in the day, don’t read it in the evening (it ruined many evenings for me), and try to do it only 3 times a day: at 11am, 2pm and 5pm. And your email inbox is not a todo list. Clear it: every message should be an actionable task (link it from the todo app), a reference document (send to Evernote or archive), or should be deleted now.
13. Same thing for phone calls. Don’t be always available. I always keep my phone on silent, and return calls in batches.
14. Batch small tasks. Like mail, phones, Facebook etc.
15. MI3. Most important three tasks (or the alternative 1 must – 3 should – 5 could). Start with the most important first thing in the morning.
16. Willpower is limited. Don’t think that willpower will help you when you get in trouble. Make important decisions in the morning and automate everything possible (delegate, batch etc.). US presidents don’t have to choose their menu or suit color everyday—otherwise their willpower will be depleted at that late hour when they should push (or not push) the red button).
17. The most powerful thing. Always ask yourself what is the most powerful thing you can do right now. Then apply rule #4.
18. Ship often. Don’t polish it too much—as they say in the startup world, “if you’re not ashamed of your product, you’ve launched too late’!
19. Pressure can do wonders. Use rewards or social commitment. We’ve recently done this with the new Grapefruit website. The previous one took 2.5 years to launch. The new one took 2.5 days and we did it over one hackathon weekend (+Monday).
20. Scheduled procrastination. Your brain needs some rest, and sometimes that new episode from Arrow can do wonders that the smartest TED talk won’t.
21. Delete. Say No. Ignore. Don’t commit to schedules. I love the last one, it’s from Marc Andreessen, because it allows him to meet whomever he wants on the spot. A lot of people will hate you for this, but you’ll have time to do relevant stuff. Do you think you’ll regret that in 20 years, or doing something for someone you don’t really care about, just to be superficially appreciated.
22. Fake incompetence. It’s a diplomatic way to apply the previous rule.

Apparently this is from a site called Thought Catalog.

Wood Sealant

So I'm trying to figure out if I should seal the beehive woodenware or not.  The boxes I built and painted seemed to be in pretty sad shape after one winter, despite using two coats of exterior latex paint.  One article I read claimed that the moisture from the bees during the winter migrates through the wood and causes the paint to peel on the outside.  Seems possible.

However, finding something non-toxic / food-grade is an exercise.  One problem is that I want to paint over the sealer, and not all of them are paintable.  I was considering boiled linseed oil--but then I found out that the commercially available stuff uses metal salts to accelerate drying, and it's really raw linseed, not boiled.  No dice.  An article on natural wood sealers and another on non-toxic paints gave me a list of things to check, but the one I found was via a source I don't remember.

AgraLife makes a couple different products, Lumber-Seal and Hive-Seal.  The former is available at Home Depot and is supposedly food-safe.  The MSDS for Lumber-Seal notes that "All Products except Hive-Seal contain 1% Zinc Oxide/Borate for film protection and are not considered hazardous by EPA."  However, the actual composition is noted as a "trade secret," which makes me somewhat suspect.  What I don't know for sure is if the stuff is paintable or not.  Perhaps it'll say on the can.

Perhaps I'll pick up some Lumber-Seal for the pressure-treated base and hive stand, and do the outside of the woodenware for now.  I could always apply Hive-Seal to the interior when I'm able to obtain it.

Another interesting product I found was Seal-Once Marine Waterproofer, which is paintable.  It doesn't show as food-safe, but if I were sealing a deck or something it appears like a good candidate.  Actually, I might try their Concrete Rust Remover on a couple spots on my driveway and garage floor.

There was one more that intrigued me because it's linseed oil, but there wasn't much info about how it was produced: Earthpaint's "Special Linseed Oil."  It's back to where I originally started looking as far as wood sealers go.  On the other hand, it's twice the price of Lumber-Seal ($66/gal vs $35/gal), plus S&H ($22+ for the gallon container).

Do What Contributes

Digging through some of my old public posts on FB, I found a post with Marc Andreessen's tweeted career advice; briefly, "do what contributes" not "do what you love".  The article linked to a Navy SEAL's commencement speech, which gave some interesting life advice.

I put this here, since I'm currently considering, "now what?"

Update [2017.04.06]:
I'm adding the list here in case something happens to the article.

1. Thesis: "Do what you love" / "Follow your passion" is dangerous and destructive career advice.
2. We tend to hear it from (a) Highly successful people who (b) Have become successful doing what they love.
3. The problem is that we do NOT hear from people who have failed to become successful by doing what they love.
4. Particularly pernicious problem in tournament-style fields with a few big winners & lots of losers: media, athletics, startups.
5. Better career advice may be "Do what contributes" -- focus on the beneficial value created for other people vs just one's own ego.
6. People who contribute the most are often the most satisfied with what they do -- and in fields with high renumeration, make the most $.
7. Perhaps difficult advice since requires focus on others vs oneself -- perhaps bad fit with endemic narcissism in modern culture?
8. Requires delayed gratification -- may toil for many years to get the payoff of contributing value to the world, vs short-term happiness.

I do find it amusing that Andreessen misspelled remuneration, though.

40mm (and 20mm)

So I was looking for "sin stocks" to invest in this morning, and came across a link on a website for thematic investing (motif) that had National Presto Industries under "Guns & Ammunition".  Their site is for crockpots.  Well, it turns out from their investor info that one of their subsidiaries, AMTEC, manufactures ammunition for government contracts.  Apparently they also manufacture 20mm cartridge brass!  Information comes from the strangest places.

Walther PP

Info on the Walther forums: date codes, serial number ranges, etc.

The Mouse

At the end of last year, a lady named Wendy Byers posted on Nextdoor that she used to own The Mouse at Miracle Mile for 16 years.  According to an old post by a Post-Bulletin staff member, the store closed in December 2015.  Apparently Ms. Byers is now a realtor.

Too Much

Apparently I've been too busy to post much here in the past year.  I've got a bunch of tabs in my browsers open...so I need to do a link dump soon!

SurplusRifle.com

I recall reading this SurplusRifle.com guide back before I filed for my C&R FFL.  There's a PDF of the guide, accessible via The Wayback Machine.

Sabrina Nichole

Found an animated GIF of this gal on a Chive post.  Via Google image search, I found out it's a Playboy model, Sabrina Nichole.  Apparently the GIF is from a video ("Lathered Up") on Playboy Plus.  Nice.  TijuanaBoobs?  Her Instagram has various headshots at least.

AR308

In looking to SBR an AR-style 7.62 rifle, I needed to find 1) a DPMS-compatible rifle, and 2) one that was in stock.  That's been a challenge.  I almost picked up an Aero lower; fortunately I didn't because it was AR-10 style rather than DPMS.

One article I found comments on compatibility.

There's a spreadsheet that details some of the variants; however, it doesn't differentiate between DPMS gen 1 and 2, and the Aero Precision M5 is compatible with DPMS gen 1.

Brownells has a bunch of AR308 parts, of course.

Topical Black Rifle Stuff

A link dump, of sorts.

• San Tan Tactical's STT-15 lower receiver: I need this ambi receiver for my 2nd SBR.
• The Maxim Defense CQB stock looks like a good alternative to the MVB ARC stock, being 4 oz lighter, but 1/2" longer.
• Tennessee Arms Company has hybrid polymer lowers for cheap; featured in Firearms News along with the KAK Industry .358 Win barrel.  Also has 80% polymer lowers.
• Veriforce Tactical has M-Lok handguards, some in pistol size that cost under $100.  Sounds like a good deal for a car gun.
• The GunTec USA M-Lok handguards look almost identical, but were advertised in Firearms News.
• Thordsen Customs has a CAA stock saddle basically mounted on the buffer tube.  I think I prefer the KAK Industry Shockwave Blade, but this is kinda a cool look.
• And of course there's the Shockwave Blade: Not as bulky as the Sig brace, still counts as a pistol, but in a SHTF scenario, could be shouldered (illegally).  The .358 Win barrels pointed to by Firearms News are pretty cool.  Might have to build myself an AR-10-style rifle.

So many items, so little time.

Can Design

Some light reading this evening on silencer design:

• Rules of thumb for suppressor design (generalities)
• Beating a dead horse back to life (interesting Q&A, answers here)
• Pressing freeze plugs into M baffles (improvised tools)
• Omega baffles (wut.)
• .30-cal can design (lots of pictures of the cone baffle design) 

There was also a funky thread on .510 Whisper that's worth reading.

American Bags

So I've been looking for a decent pack for a 72-hr application.  Most of the items of non-domestic manufacture are of poor design, so I'm looking for domestic-made gear.

• Kifaru
• Triple Aught Design
• Mountain Ridge Gear
• Hill People Gear
• Sandpiper of California

I believe these are all U.S.-made, but I'll have to verify.  Also, Spec-Ops Brand seems to be domestic MFG.

HESCO MIL

Apparently the military uses this product for barriers.  It consists of a welded-wire frame and a fabric to retain native soil.  Could be used for a shooting range's berm....

gizmag

Links I found as a result of an article on Jet Capsule's floating ocean home.

• Tracked concept motorcycles
• Loft beds
• Manta saddle (I may need one, even at GBP125)

De gustibus non est disputandum

Latin for "In matters of taste, there can be no disputes" or "There is no accounting for taste".  Apparently.

Guns & Radio

MNGunTalk has a thread on free trusts mentioning Dakota Silencer, Ben Rust, and GOCRA.

qrz.com has a thread comparing the Kenwood TM-V71A and Yaesu FT-8900.

EMP

The EMP Commission reports, both the 2004 and 2008 editions, can be found at the EMPact America website.

mods.dk

For ham radio hacking, there's mods.dk.

SHTF Channels

Another post on Slack #radio was for SHTF channels to program into radios.  I need to do this.

Amusingly enough, the site has a list for militia channels, too.

Disks for Data Centers

Google released a whitepaper on their wishlist for HDDs.  It's somewhat amusing that they appear to think that ECC is still used.

"An obvious question is why are we talking about spinning disks at all, rather than SSDs, which have higher IOPS and are the 'future' of storage. The root reason is that the cost per GB remains too high, and more importantly that the growth rates in capacity/$ between disks and SSDs are relatively close (at least for SSDs that have sufficient numbers of program-erase cycles to use in data centers), so that cost will not change enough in the coming decade."

Updated PiFM

One of the guys on Slack #radio at work tried PiFM on his RPi2 and found that it didn't work.  Apparently the project's been abandoned.  He found an updated project, rpitx, that does work.  His interest was using it as a foxhunt transmitter, which is also pretty cool.

DIY Foxhunt Hardware

Using an RTL-SDR and four switched antennas to direction-find: link and paper.

Can Comparison

On the Minnesota NFA FB group, a guy posted a link to an Arfcom thread and YT video of a comparison of a bunch of popular rifle suppressors.  Very cool.  Apparently the Rugged Surge, Dead Air Sandman, or Silencerco Omega are the ones to consider.

DIY Heat Treating

I came across this post on heat treating that looks quite useful.  It's reproduced here in case the page goes down:

First, know your steel. If you bought commercially available tool steel you should know precisely what it is. But if you are using something found, scavenged or of otherwise uncertain provenance you may have problems hardening it. The steel used in any given blade is not an easy thing to determine. A metallurgical lab charges a fair amount to test for alloy and there is no home test kit that I know of ("Look, Honey, it turned blue!") And there is some risk in quenching, say, an oil hardening steel in water. It could fracture at worst or warp like crazy at least. The old-timers "sparked" steels to tell what was in them. The sparks generated from a grinder will burn with different visual characteristics depending on the alloying elements. (Like the different colorants in fireworks.) So you can grind a corner, observe the sparks, then grind a known steel and try to compare the little spark-flares for shape, brightness, complexity, etc. and attempt a match.

Mostly we're talking oil vs. water hardening steels. The air hardening ones are the Cr-V and stuff that us Galoots don't use too much and that weren't used in old tools at all. It is safer to quench an unknown, perhaps water-hardening steel in oil than vice versa. The water-hardening steel may not harden in the oil and if that is the case, you can try again in water. I don't mean to muddy the water with all this but, hey, if it were easy, everybody'd be doing it.

The first step is to get the metal to its critical temperature, which with good old O-1 (the oil hardening stuff) is 1450° - 1500°F. Got a good pyrometer? No problem. During the crystal transormation from ferrite to austenite steel ceases to be magnetic at that temp. This phenomenon is called the "Curie Point" after the discoverer, Pierre. So one can simply heat the metal till the magnet is no longer attracted to it then quench in oil. I like to use peanut oil because the flash point is very high which minimizes the risk of fire (the risk is still there, though; be prepared: use long tongs to handle the work to keep your hand out of the way, wear gloves and keep the fire extinguisher handy) and it smells nice(r) when it smokes. How to get the blade to the Curie point is probably the biggest problem for the DIYer. When the metal is glowing red, the carbon behaves as if it's in a liquid and can therefore migrate around as it pleases. This is necessary for the hardening to occur but near the surface of the metal those unfaithful little carbon atoms would just as soon run off with any available oxygen-sluts it runs into (oxygen is soooo seductive) and they're lost then forever. We hate that. We attempt to prevent this by: heating the metal in an inert (oxygen free atmosphere) and/or limit the time at red-heat (in air) to as little as possible. A torch makes both of those very difficult. It's very hard to heat something as large as a Norris-type blade evenly with a small torch-generated spot of heat. A forge fire is better because of its uniformity and it can be starved for air a bit to decrease the oxygen in its immediate vicinity. A small lab-type test oven works quite well. (Also used for ceramic glaze tests.) Toss in a charcoal briquette to scavenge some of the oxygen.

Update: There are coatings that prevent oxidation and carbon loss at www.rosemill.com that promise to make home heat treating a more successful endeavor.

When it's hit critical temp, remove it from the heat and quickly dunk it into a sufficient quantity of room temperature oil. Swish it around a bit until it's cooled throughout to below 150°F. It should now be very hard and too brittle to use. (If you attempt to file it, the file should skid on the blade.)

Two ways to temper to a useable hardness/toughness: by colors or by temperature. If you have a very accurate oven in the kitchen, just heat it to 325°F and you're done. An accurate deep-fryer will do the same but use a good thermometer to double check on the oven or deep fryer's thermostat. Without accurate temperature control, you'll have to use the surface oxide colors to know when enough is enough. First, clean some part of the blade (probably the flat area back from the bevel) till it's bright metal again. When heated, that spot will change colors (you've seen the rainbow of colors on any overheated steel) starting with a very faint yellow (called light straw). Since we like our blades Good-n-Hard(tm), stop there (remove from the heat, quench if necessary to stop any further increase.) Any color beyond the faintest straw is too much. (The blade will still work, it just won't hold the edge you want.) Be overly cautious with tempering. You can always re-temper a too-hard blade, but if you go too far and soften it too much, you have to re-harden it all over again. So if a blade seems too hard, just toss it back in the oven and go a little higher. The oven/deep fryer method is preferred, however because you can leave the part at tempering temperature long enough for true tempering to occur. The torch method, using the surface colors, may leave some of the transformation undone.

You're done. If the blade looks awful, you can sandblast or grind it pretty but it should work well regardless. Before honing, be sure to grind back the bevel a bit . That thin section probably took more than its fair share of carbon burn-out abuse and you need to get to the good stuff. (it could take as much as .025" to get through the de-carbed layer.) Same for the back. Doing a good job on the back is at least if not more important than the work on the bevel. A little extra elbow grease will remove the de-carbed layer and get to good metal. Don't forget: the back IS the Cutting Edge. Think about it. If the back hasn't been honed deeply enough, the blade will never work well.

Good luck!

-- Ron

Rem 870 Receivers

When Black Aces Tactical was still selling receiver kits separately, I thought about assembling a mag-fed shotgun...but wasn't sure where to get all the parts.  Similarly, if I wanted to build a tactical tube-fed pump, I'd have to buy a normal one and trash the stock parts (or pay out the nose for the stock tactical).  I'd heard that the Police and Marine models had superior non-MIM parts, too.

So I found a site, AI&P Tactical, that sells both virgin receivers and parts.  Cool!  The owner also builds custom shotguns, but as of 2016 only will do 50 per year to avoid the excise tax on firearms manufacturers.

Can Knowledge

Mobile link dump.

I had been concerned about having "extra" suppressor parts, like mounts and endcaps.  Here's an example of apparently acceptable use in the industry.  There's a post on Reddit NFA regarding a SilencerCo Octane 45 that has an available 9mm endcap, apparently only available at SilencerShop.  (The description says "replacement," so perhaps that's how they get away with it.)  The interesting thing on the Reddit post was hole dimensions of the baffles: they seemed fairly loose at 0.493-0.495" for each of the eight, and 0.509" at the endcap.

Another post on Form 1 builds is from SilencerTalk.  It linked to an apparently famous thread dating back to 2008 regarding one user sub-sonic's build of a freeze plug can.  This must've been the prelude to the whole solvent trap suppressor craze....

The original thing that drove me to question mounts was mention of YHM Wraith cans, which apparently had the flash suppressor be the back of the can, yada yada yada.  Apparently it's a non-issue normally.

I came across another site that definitely treads the edge of legality, because it isn't until halfway down the page that it mentions one needs an NFA stamp to do this legally.  Unconstitutional or not, if one gets caught with an oil filter can and no stamp, one's gun rights are gone.

Formula

Another couple tabs that were in my browser from at least a year ago....

About organic formulas
Making baby formula

OBD-II

These links have been open in my browser for months.  Time to dump them!

ELM327 support in Linux
Viewing OBD-II codes on an RPi

Being able to adjust engine parameters would be amusing, although my understanding is that they're proprietary.

RPi Power Save

Haven't posted here for a while...no time!

Since I'm looking at running an RPi B or B+ for a HomeGenie server to drive a Z-Wave network, power consumption becomes an issue.  I started looking into power options.

This one Muslim dude (I wouldn't have known except the final comment in the post) has a page listing some of the options, which are to disable the USB hub/Ethernet, use the model A, underclock the core, and disable video output.  I hadn't realized that dynamic clocking could be used as power save; that somewhat compensates for the lack of sleep functionality.

The config.txt file is described at raspbians.com (which sounds like some strange flavor of lesbians...).  Actually, the official documentation is at raspberrypi.org.  The arm_freq_min, core_freq_min, and sdram_freq_min settings are used for dynamic power as long as force_turbo=0.

Edit [2016.01.24]: Using external hardware, it's possible to put the RPi into a suspend mode: Sleepy Pi and Witty Pi.  What I really want is something that'll go from suspend to active on network traffic (not WOL, which boots on network traffic).