The recommended usage is to load 1 Safety Bullet in the chamber and 1 in the top of the magazine with live rounds below that. If you actually need to use your firearm, you then rack the slide twice to get a live round in the chamber. If you forget to do that and attempt to fire, you have a gun that will not function and you will likely die.

Revolvers are even worse, you load a Safety Bullet in the next chamber to be fired. To use the firearm you have to manually rotate the cylinder one notch before firing. This is a rather delicate task, and if you lose count and attempt to fire 6 rounds instead of 5 (or 5 instead of 4, or 8 instead of 7, hmm how many rounds does this revolver hold again?), guess what? Gun locks up!

So, under the stress of an attacker beating down your door, or coming up your stairs or beating a loved one with a pipe, you will have to remember this procedure or render your defensive firearm inoperable. It’s well understood that under this kind of life or death stress, lots of things go out the window. Fine motor skill and complex reasoning (uhhh … like math) being the big ones. I will say it again, this is downright dangerous if used in a home defense firearm. Using it in a stored firearm would not have these issues, so I’m ok with it in that application, but that’s not how it is being marketed.

I’m all for safety and protecting our dear children, but this is just not an acceptable solution to me. If you’re concerned about your stored firearms, lock them up, even disassemble them if you like. If you have a home defense firearm please look into other solutions that don’t potentially disable the gun for the rest of your life. There are many quick access safes and locking devices out there that are much better solutions than this.

OpenOffice to the rescue! Since Verizon makes call details available as a CSV download, they can be easily sucked into a spreadsheet where you can do all sorts of unholy data manipulations.

Here’s the, somewhat ungraceful, procedure I worked out to find out who we call the most. I’m sure things could be automated more, but I’m also pretty sure it would take me a lot longer to do that than this took. All this stuff should work in Excel too, but no promises.

1. Login to your Verizon account, Go to My Bill then Bill Details.
2. Select the date you want and the number you want.
3. Hit the Download to Spreadsheet link to download your call data into OpenOffice, you’ll need to repeat this for each number on your account separately. The default import options should work fine.
4. Get all the data pasted into 1 spreadsheet page. I did a page per month, but you could mash it all together too.
5. Turn on Data->Filter->Autofilter.
6. Filter out the calls to other Verizon numbers that don’t count towards minutes.
   1. Click the pulldown that appeared at the top of the Usage Type column.
   2. Select each type of in network call. The are listed as M2MAllow, M2M Allow,CallWait, IN Allow, or IN Allow,CallWait. Depending on the date of your statement. You may also want to filter out nights and weekends (N&W), but I left that in since I really just wanted to know who we call the most regardless of time.
   3. Select all the filtered rows and delete them, repeat this for each type. Don’t delete the header.
   4. Select All in the filter to get back to the remaining data.
7. Now, here’s the good stuff, select the entire sheet and go to Data->Subtotals.
8. Select Number for group by, Minutes to calculate subtotals for, and Sum as the operation. Click Okee Dokee.
9. Violin! The little elves will group all the unique numbers and place a subtotal of the minutes under each group. If you click the little 2 on the far upper right, you can collapse it so you only see the subtotal lines.

Just go and pick out your top 10 from there, easy peasy, well, easier peasier.

I began using F-Spot to manage the photo uploads from the camera, and from our previous archive, and to do all the tagging. Then F-Spot can directly upload to Smugmug. Everything works pretty well except for the tagging. F-spot stores the tags in the “Subject” field of the EXIF data, while SmugMug looks for them in the “Keywords” field. As a result the photos on SmugMug had no tags. Sad Clown.

Once the problem was discovered, with some help from SmugMug’s forum, a little Googling revealed an almost fix in this blog entry. There was a slight problem where it was munging multiple tags into a single multi-word tag, but that was easily fixed via the -b flag, or -sep on newer versions of exiftool. The version in Ubuntu 8.10 still uses -b but try -sep if that doesn’t work on yours.

So the following command successfully copies the Subject fields contents over top of the (empty) Keywords field. Since the path restricts it to a single month, it doesn’t take too long, and everything is peachy afterwards.

exiftool -overwrite_original -r -P -b -”IPTC:Keywords<XMP:subject”  ~/Photos/2009/02/

Incidentally if you decide to sign up for SmugMug, you can get a $5 discount with my referral code: Wo6AztZyF7W7I

Yes, I get a kickback too.

Well at this year’s Shot Show, PSE introduced something that really breaks the paradigm of what the AR can do. They’ve announced the TAC-15 AR crossbow upper. Yes you read that right, and here’s a pic to prove it.

Much like the spray pancake batter, I’m not sure if this is incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid. It seems to be quite long compared to a normal crossbow, though with the limb design, it’s narrower. I’m just not sure there’s  much advantage to slapping a crossbow on top of an AR lower. A crossbow isn’t considered a firearm, so it’s not like you have to go through the 4473 dance to get one and given it’s relative size, it just doesn’t seem that much smaller than just having a whole crossbow ready to go. At $1299 it’s no cheaper than a standard crossbow either.

Still, it’s neat and I want one.

New Palm Pistol

To that end, Constitution Arms has developed a palm pistol designed to be used by the elderly and disabled, or anyone who is unable to use a standard handgun. As you can see from the rendering here, its ergonomics are quite different from a standard handgun. I can see how this would be easier to use by someone with limited hand dexterity or strength. It has even been approved as a medical device, so it can actually be prescribed by a doctor and is eligible for insurance coverage, that’s certainly interesting. I applaud Constitution Arms for taking on this challenge and developing this firearm.

Old Palm Pistol

Now, the concept of the palm pistol isn’t really a new one. Here’s one example from France in the late 1800′s. There were several other designs along these lines. The primary purpose was as a hide-away gun to stick in your vest or hat for dire situations, but as you can see, it resembles the new one quite closely in basic form. This particular example is in the, quite anemic, .32 rimfire caliber with a 10 round capacity, but as they say, “Any gun is better than no gun“.

So why am I writing this? Is it really to laud Constitution Arms for their vision and civic responsibility? No, it’s not. While I still do commend them for taking this on, I think there’s a rather large problem with their design. Unlike the 1800′s version above, the new model is in an acceptable defensive caliber, 9mm, which is good. However, also unlike the 1800′s version the new model is single shot. While still keeping the “Any gun is better than no gun” axiom in mind, this is a severe limitation. Given that this is targeted to people who are already at a defensive disadavantage, giving them only one round of 9mm (or any caliber) is simply not enough. 1 shot, even if well placed is not a reliable attack ending response, and gives you no recourse for multiple assailants.

So, I’m challenging Constitution Arms to build upon this first step and develop a handgun that will provide those that really need it, an effective defensive tool. Please feel free to send one to me for testing.

Watch out Granny!

Enter the Xlink-BT.

This little gem wires into your existing phone system. You can either hook it up to the wiring, or just plug a multi-handset cordless phone into it, which is what we did. It then connects to your phone via bluetooth, just like your Borg headset. Just like that, you can use your home phones with your cell. It can connect to 3 cell phones at once, and each gets a distinctive ring, so you know whose phone it is. Once paired with your cell, it will automatically bond when you get in range. The cell phone handset is still enabled when it’s connected to the Xlink, so it won’t steal your calls like the headsets do.

I did have a few issues initially getting things working, but I downloaded new firmware from the Xlink site and updated the device and everything cleared up. The firmware application is Windows based, but it worked fine in a VMware image. As hard as it is to resist hooking up everything right away, I’d recommend getting the latest firmware first thing.

This is really a wonderful little piece of kit. It never causes any problems and just works transparently. You can leave your cell plugged into the charger and never have to worry about running out the door with a depleted battery and never have to go looking for the cell when a call comes in.

There is one complaint I can make. The name portion of the caller id is lost somewhere in the chain. So on your house phone you’ll see the proper number that is calling, but the name will always be “Xlink-BT”. It really is only a minor annoyance though, and I imagine there’s a good reason why they can’t make it work.

Now that it’s over, I’d say it went very well (thanks to advice from my lovely wife). I was last on the agenda, so the kids were a bit drained and antsy, but I managed to keep them occupied and interested. I had an activity planned in which some volunteers represented parts of a very simple program, a bubble sort. I had them physically act out the operation of the algorithm and when it was completed they could see the results (the volunteers were now in alphabetical order). They were actually enthusiastic about participating in this little exercise, which was probably my biggest fear. It would have gone much differently if I had to drag kids up, or bribe them with the M&Ms that a certain someone suggested I bring. It was inspiring to see some of the kids watch the process, expressing confusion as it wasn’t immediately obvious what was happening, but then as it progressed, they got what was going on. I think they really enjoyed it.

The blatant pandering of using a screenshot of Super Mario Galaxy and one of the Google map to their school actually resulted in cheers. So I’ll keep that in the toolbox for the future.

One thing that didn’t work was sarcasm. If you know me, you know how integral that is to my daily life and the kids mostly just didn’t get it. I guess I should have seen that up front, but at least some of the teachers got some chuckles out of it.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience, the kids asked a lot of good questions, though several were about salary. I hope they all got something from it.

Here’s my presentation, if you’d like to see it.

Took a little while to get everything working smoothly, but once I had the rhythm worked out, I was cranking out shells pretty quickly. I only dropped shot on the floor twice

Considering that a weekly trap shoot can burn through 4 boxes of shells, this should pay itself off rather quickly. Reloaded shells are about half the cost of factory loads, and the reloader came with enough components (powder, primer, shot, wads and hulls) to recoup what I paid for it.

Coincidentally (?) there is also an errant satellite that will be shot down during the aforementioned eclipse. Also neat.

I see this going one of 2 ways, either completely uneventfully, or horribly, horribly, wrong.

The former option probably doesn’t require much exposition. Missile, Satellite, Boom. It’s the latter, and far more interesting option that is not quite obvious, so I’ll lay it out for you.

Some aspect of the eclipse will cause the missile to fail to impact the target. It may be that the alignment of the Earth, Sun and Moon causes a slight change in the gravitational field of the Earth that messes up the guidance system, or maybe just a rather important Navy officer gets distracted by the spectacle, not important which. This error causes the missile to continue traveling through space until it finally strikes our poor, defenseless Moon. The resulting explosion is enough to fracture the little planetoid into several chunks. As the eclipse subsides it reveals the shattered Moon to the horrified population of the earth.

Over the course of the next few months, the orbit of our own planet around the Sun is affected by this change. The Earth’s path becomes more elliptical bringing us both closer and farther away from the Sun at the extremes. The result is stifling summer temperatures and brutal winter conditions. Over time, the climate degrades further and further and we are periodically peppered by the smaller chunks of debris from the moon.

Eventually, the increased radiation from the close proximity to the Sun mutates those who spend too much time outside into bloodthirsty zombies (there are always zombies). The population dwindles as more of us become, or are consumed by, these zombies, and the environment becomes increasingly toxic.

Finally, despite the efforts of a plucky oil drilling crew, the largest pieces of the moon come crashing into the Earth, instantly wiping out huge chunks of the remaining populace. This event pushes our orbit even farther out of alignment resulting in complete, yet spectacular, destruction as we collide with Jupiter.

I’m sure everything will be fine, but would it really hurt to just push the missile launch off until tomorrow?