Check out the Mandelbulb, a 3-D mandelbrot.
Incredible!
Month: November 2009
Frustration
All weekend all I thought about was reloading.
I think the appeal is that there’s a lot of science, but there’s also art and craft to it. There’s satisfaction in working with your hands, and when you go and shoot the loads being able to say “I did that”. It’s neat.
While I certainly was thinking about the 9mm experiments, more so I was thinking about reloads for .38 Special. I spent a good bit of time pouring through books and reload data online trying to find something that would work. There’s the fact .38 Special cases have a lot of volume so you want powder that can fill that volume and ignite well and completely without creating too much pressure. I would figure I would want a faster burning powder since these loads would be shot out of a snub revolver. Plus the bullets I picked up were 158 grain jacketed round nose, and trying to find load data with such a bullet is impossible. I just don’t know enough yet about how to adapt existing recipes to cope. For instance, I can find recipes that are almost the same but would use a Hornady XTP bullet, which is a hollow point, thus the overall length of the cartridge wouldn’t measure the same. So how to adjust? I was told the rule of thumb for when in doubt is to go longer, so I’d likely do that. Plus when data tends to be for lead cast vs. copper jacketed bullets you might need to add 0.1 or 0.2 grains of powder to help overcome the friction of the jacket.
I just don’t want to risk anything. 🙂
So all sorts of things swirling in my head. Emails will be sent out to some experienced folk to ask for their input.
Crazy thing is, if I had a choice as to what to do today? I’d rather be in the garage cranking out some reloads. 🙂
Sage Advice
For those of you that think “it can’t happen to me” because of whatever reason, like you live in a good neighborhood, think again.
Brigid recounts her recent experience, along with reinforcing lessons learned.
Perfect Examples
Bob S. provides some perfect examples of why you and only you can be responsible for taking care of yourself.
I believe the world is full of mostly good people. But there are evil people out there and all it takes is one to ruin your life.
Sunday Metal – Skid Row
I admit it. I didn’t like Skid Row at first. I thought they were a bunch of pretty boy hairspray rockers, “I Remember You” and other wussy stuff like that. OK, “Youth Gone Wild” was pretty cool, but I pretty much blew off the band based upon their first album.
Guns N’ Roses were on tour for their “Use Your Illusion” albums and Skid Row was opening up. Skid Row was promoting their “Slave To the Grind” album. I remember it pretty clearly. Sitting at the arena, lights go out, crowd goes nuts because the show is starting. A lone spotlight shines down, perfectly vertical above the drummer’s seat. Rob Affuso is standing there, hand and drumstick held high in the air, foot beating on the bass drum… getting the crowd going with an “are you ready?” sort of vibe. After building the crowd for a few moments, 4 hits to the high-hat and the stage just exploded. The band opened with “Slave to the Grind” and I was floored. This was Skid Row? This was the same band playing that pussy “I Remember You” shit? Holy crap! And they proceeded to blow away the crowd for 30-45 minutes… don’t remember exactly how long the set was, I was just amazed.
I was a convert.
I still think their debut album is a little glossy and glam, but it’s really not too bad. But “Slave To The Grind” is awesome. “Subhuman Race” was heavy. Total ass-kicking metal. Skid Row even took Pantera on tour with them; how cool is that?
Another little story.
Early ’90’s and I’m working in college radio. Kix was playing The Bayou in Washington DC (awesome show). I got guest listed and took my friend Tori. As a bit of pre-show entertainment the local rock radio station, DC 101, was doing an air guitar contest. Tori talked me into doing it. You chose one of two songs, then got up on stage for a couple minutes to rock out to it. I chose “Monkey Business” and proceeded to jump about the stage being the best rocker I could be. I didn’t win (some dude being all sexy for the ladies did), but I certainly put on the most entertaining show… I remember the emcee (DJ from the station) being a bit taken aback by my energy level on stage. It was pretty cool and a lot of fun. 🙂 Sure I made an ass out of myself, but life’s too short to take it too seriously and not have a little fun now and then.
BTW Tori… where are you? miss you girl.
My First Reloads
I finally reloaded (on my own) my first ammo!
I say on my own because truly the first reloads I did were when Karl was teaching me. But today I reloaded my first rounds on my own equipment. Insert a little James Brown “I Feel Good” right here. 🙂
Until now all I’ve been doing on my reloading equipment is resizing and decapping 9mm brass. I figure since all I have is a single-stage press I might as well do some things in bulk, so I’ve been going through all my 9mm brass. I haven’t finished because I’ve got a lot of brass, but the kids seem to enjoy helping with that effort so it’s all good. But I was getting tired of just resizing and decapping, I wanted to produce something. So a goal for this weekend was to produce something and shoot it.
Powder Throw
First I needed some way to mount the powder throw. I don’t know how exodus set up the throw for himself, but I didn’t want to mount the throw on the bench as I wasn’t sure how my workflow would go. Plus I know I’m going to buy a progressive press and that must be mounted to the bench so I wanted to avoid bench-mounted clutter. I had some plywood lying around the garage and opted to fashion a small base onto which I could mount the throw. That way I could have a stable mount and I could relocate the powder throw anywhere I needed to.
It’s nothing sexy, but it works. I did that last night, so I could do the actual reloading today.
The Reloading
I decided to only reload 20 rounds of 9mm Luger. Twenty rounds would give me something substantial to work with, but not too many in case of a problem that I couldn’t undo things. Plus I don’t see any reason to reload en masse until the recipe is known good. I used the RCBS’s press to bell and prime (instead of the hand-priming tool). Learning the feel for the priming wasn’t bad… just use firm but gentle pressure and listen to the tactile feedback you get. I do think I belled the cases a little too much, but no big deal… I’ll fine tune that next time.
I looked up the recipe in my reloading manual, weighed the powder and really took my time to weigh, re-weigh, and triple-check that everything was coming out right. Then I seated the bullet and gave it a taper crimp. Lots of using the calipers to ensure dimensions were where they should be. Eventually I had 20 rounds of 9mm Luger.
Here’s my recipe:
Bullet: 115 grain Berry’s TMJ RN
Powder: 6.3 grains Alliant Power Pistol
Primer: Winchester WSP standard small pistol
Cases: used Speer brass
C.O.L.: 1.135″
This was based upon what was listed in my Speer reloading manual.
Trying It Out
I figured if there was any gun I wouldn’t cry that much over if it went kaboom, it’d be my Springfield XD-9 subcompact (3″ barrel). Note that my goal is not to have some awesome load, it’s merely to have a load that functions in the gun, goes bang, no malfunctions. Just work.
Went over to the local indoor range, and as expected since it’s a Saturday, lots of people were on the range that I had no desire to be around. So my goal was to get in, shoot, leave. Sure I paid for an hour of range time and only used 10 minutes, but I’m OK with that.
I started by shooting some of the reloads I did at Karl’s. Worked fine in the gun. Then I loaded up one of my reloads. Worked fine. WHOO-HOO!! Eventually I shot through all 19 of my rounds. Yes, only 19. Before I left the house I ran all 20 rounds through the XD-9 SC just to see how they would feed. After I ran the rounds I remeasured the C.O.L. and one round had significant setback. I don’t know why, but I opted to pull that bullet and reuse that case at another time.
While shooting, I noticed significant muzzle flash; I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much muzzle flash in my life. I don’t know if that’s due to the powder or due to the 3″ barrel or due to something else or some combination of things. Something for me to jot in my notebook. But again, today was not to find some awesome load, just to load.
After shooting my reloads I shot another 10 of the ones I did at Karl’s, then packed up and left.
Success!
I’m pleased with how things went. Nothing blew up, everything functioned. Since the main pistol powder I have is the Power Pistol, I am going to play around with it some more. For instance, reload the same recipe then try it out of my XD-9 Tactical with the 5″ barrel and see how muzzle flash is. Then just continue to tinker with the load from there. (6.7 grains is the max, according to the book). I also have some TiteGroup, which according to this chart burn faster than the Power Pistol. I may play with that too to see how it compares in the 3″ barrel. Hrm. Maybe my next effort will be to load 20 rounds with the Power Pistol, 20 rounds with the TiteGroup, then take all 40 rounds with both my 3″ and 5″ XD and see how things compare.
It’s also sorely evident that if I really want to reload, I must get a progressive press. Certainly I’ll keep the single stage press for things I want the utmost precision on, like making hunting loads. But for bulk practice handgun ammo, a progressive press will be my friend. I am pretty much settled on the Hornady Lock-N-Load AP. Somehow I doubt Santa will bring me one, but I can dream. 😉 Getting a chronograph is probably also a good thing, eventually.
Goal accomplished. Good day.
Errand Day
Got lots of errands to do today.
One thing on my list is loading up 20 rounds of 9mm on my reloading equipment. I cobbled together a base for a powder throw (pics later), so I should finally be able to do a full set of reloading on my own equipment.
More later.
How To Stir the Pot
How do you get a bunch of gunnies all worked up? Start by saying their choice of handgun sucks, both the make/model and the caliber.
So it goes without saying that the second installment of InSights Training Center’s series on equipment choices, Handgun Design, is going to ruffle some feathers. 🙂
The thing you have to realize is, these guys see many many guns, many many levels of skill, and hundreds of thousands of rounds going downrange. Between what the Insights instructors do as trainers and then what they do in whatever other job they may hold, they see a lot. No handgun design is 100% perfect, but there are those better than others.
A lot of what they say echos what I’ve said before about choosing a gun. That’s not too surprising as Insights training has been an influence on me.
One thing Jeff writes about that I take a bit of exception to is dealing with new gun designs:
One of the most important criteria for selecting a firearm for self defense is reliability. The gun needs to go bang every time. For defensive purposes, guns should only be considered if the platform has seen years of use and millions of rounds down range. I have no interest in being a guinea pig. The latest gun design might be cool to own, but it has no business out on the street until someone else has verified it with a very large sample and lots of rounds. This generally restricts our selection to guns that have been issued to large government organizations.
I’ll start out saying I do agree with him. Reliability is paramount and I too have no desire to be a guinea pig. The trouble is if everyone adopts this mentality then no new gun design will ever make it out onto the street as a carry tool. If you do think some new gun is snazzy then by all means go ahead and buy it. But before you entrust your life to it, ensure it’s reliable. Take it to the range. Take it through training classes. Lend it to trusted friends to shoot. Put thousands upon thousands of rounds through it. See how it performs. Report your findings, like what ToddG did on pistol-training.com with the M&P-9 and H&K P30. Make sure that it’s a reliable platform for you to entrust you life to. Of course in the end it is your life, so value it as you wish. Point is, you should not necessarily leave the reliability testing to “someone else” because if everyone did that then no one would do it. Instead, if you want to be one of those cutting edge folks, please go ahead and do so. Just keep it in perspective that it’s worthwhile to ensure the platform is proven and solid before you trust your life to it. You really don’t want to have the first spectacular failure be when you need failure the least.
I’ll also add about deviating from original design. This is why you tend to see 1911-style guns in chamberings other than .45 ACP not always running well (or at least, not without a lot of work). But there are some exceptions to this rule, such as the Springfield EMP, which was designed from the ground up to have a 9mm (or .40 S&W) chambering.
Finally regarding 9mm well… I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. All pistol rounds suck, but the shootability of 9 speaks for itself.
Better than setuid – BetterAuthorizationSample
While scanning my RSS feeds I ran into this post from JongAm. It’s in Korean so I really don’t know what he’s talking about specifically, but generally I can tell he’s writing about Mac OS X’s authorization mechanisms. (BTW, I love that URL’s and such don’t choke on Hangul).
There’s something at work I’ve been fiddling with the past some days. The issue is that something has to be done and that something requires authorization. Unfortunately, due to how things can work under the hood by the drivers and the OS interacting, it’s possible things could change and thus require the user to authenticate again. This is not a desirable user experience because the need to re-authorize is an under-the-hood detail, not something the user would be aware of. Thus to the user the user experience is randomly, or not, being asked to reauthenticate. Not good.
So what’s the solution? The original thought was to create a little helper tool app that would have its setuid bit set and be installed as root, thus the user would have to authenticate at most one time and the little helper tool would then be authorized “forever” to do the necessary voodoo. A reasonable thing. And setuid tools are not a new concept and are well-established, but still they’re considered tricky and risky because you’re still running code as root which opens up all manner of security issues.
As I searched around for information, I came across Apple’s BetterAuthorizationSample. Obviously written by Quinn (thus you know it will rock), it’s provided as a way to achieve the same results as a setuid tool but in a safer way by use of launchd. What’s even better is BAS provides a library and mechanism to make it easy for you to utilize this functionality in your own code. There is step-by-step documentation that walks you through the whole process, and of course a sample app to demonstrate various levels of complexity. For more information, read the ReadMe, the Design and Implementation Rationale, and the lib HOWTO.
Getting it up and running in my app wasn’t too difficult a task. Just follow the HOWTO guide. It does take a little bit to wrap your head around it all just because there’s a lot going on, but the documentation is thorough and complete. Just do as it says and you’ll be up and running. Works great in my app. I’m pleased.
I will note that if you don’t have an uninstaller for your application, this is one situation that might find a simple uninstaller to be a welcome thing. There are not only files in odd places to remove, but also you will need to unload the Launch Agent from launchd. There’s also the question of removing the entry in /etc/authorization but there’s really no good way to do that. Still, something you need to consider.
All in all a fantastic bit of sample code, and while not necessary for all authorization needs, if you are considering writing a setuid tool for Mac OS X, you should look at this mechanism instead.
Good stuff. Share and enjoy.
Buy Ammo
Courtesy of New Jovian Thunderbolt, remember Buy Ammo Day is coming on November 19.
Stuff From Hsoi 