Do You Own It?

If you can't run it offline, you don't own a copy.

If the failure of someone else's computer takes it offline, you're renting it.

A good sized chunk of the nation got an object lesson in this today! 

Dang Technology

Without warning, or apparent reason, the TV's can no longer see my media server.

The computers can see it just fine, so we can use them to play stuff on the TV if we want, it's just irritating to have to. 

I Love The Concept

Way back in the OICW days, the idea of a grenade that air-burst just past the barrier the bad guys were hiding behind had an instant appeal.

The problem with it is the interface.

The operator lases for range, adds or subtracts from that distance for the burst distance and then the computer in the sight tells the round when to go boom after firing.

That transmission was a problem for a long while, but it appears that the XM25 shows that it can be reliable.  The XM25 isn't, quite, ready for prime time and even with hand made rounds it had some issues.

But I see that we're pressing forward with the concept with Barrett taking over the design of the weapon.

TL9 stuff at TL8!  Or TL9 depending on which edition you're using. 

Concussive

File under "obvious when you think about it".

The suppressor on the M7 and XM8 is necessary because the insane chamber pressures and short barrels mean the muzzle blast is otherwise a health hazard.

Even with hearing protection, I am told. 

That's got me wondering just how high the pressure IS at a bare muzzle.

It also has me wondering just how quiet the weapon is, because the M7/XM8 advocates are quick to point out that an M4 is longer and heavier with a suppressor too.

But I know how much quieter an M4 is with the issue suppressor, it's nearly naked ear safe.  That's worth the extra length and mass.

If a suppressor is needed to bring it back to M16 bare muzzle sound pressures...  Couldn't we get the same thing from 5" more barrel and lower chamber pressures?

I ask because 6.8x51mm is emulating .270 Winchester in bullet weight and velocity; the big difference is pressure and barrel length.

.270 is using 24" of barrel, but far lower pressures.

It makes me wonder if my Savage is quieter than an XM8. 

SUDO APT INSTALL

I, alone, and with just one spur, have managed to install the fonts that go missing every time I upgrade the version of Ubuntu!

I hit the search engine and got an answer and, for a change, I've learned enough from the 20.04 days to be able to understand what I was doing!

Go me! 

For the most part it doesn't matter, but there's some spacing issues in my T2K conversion where the substitute for Arial doesn't line up quite right and it throws off the entire document. 

Update Day

Updated the Mother-In-Law's Lenovo T410 from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04.5 to 26.04.1.

Updating Crispy from 22.04.5 to 26.04.1.

Considering doing the same with DerpyPuter. 

M7 To M8

It's interesting reading about the changes to the M7 rifle that lead to the XM8 rifle that are based on troop feed back.

Almost exactly as if the M7 was a prototype that did troop trials and resulted in a production version!

And troop trials is something that's been sorely missing from weapons procurement since, at least, the Johnson administration.

When you skip handing a new weapon to a private, you lose a lot of important information about how the gun will get treated, used and abused.

Why did we stop troop trials?

The troops keep preferring the wrong gun.  That's why the M14 is a T44 not a T48 (aka FAL).  That why so many pistol competitions led to the M1911 being retained.  It's among the reasons the M4 carbine kept trucking on.

Troop trials find flaws in designs and that leads to politically connected companies not getting contracts!  Gods forbid a congressman not get feathers to line their nest! 

Troop trials take time and, sometimes, you need to get something out the door in quantity and fix it on the fly.  You do this too many times and you get to thinking this is the normal way of things.

This happened when production problems with the M14 led to MacNamara saying, the troops need a rifle, the M16 is a rifle and the Air Force is happy with it, therefore the Army will be happy with it too (even if I have to order them to be!)

It's actually astonishing, considering the political pressure being brought to bear that the Army got a different version of the M16 from the Air Force AND that it got to the troops, as the XM16E1, as quickly as it did.

Vietnam served as the M16's troop trial.

I seem to recall that rollout was a bit bumpy... 

The Headline I'm Waiting For

"We easily gained access to the device because it lacked viable encryption.  We have corrected that oversight!"

I was reading about how someone stole a Flock camera and managed to download much of the data onboard.

They mentioned a lot of the data was still encrypted and they couldn't access it.

But what I wondered about is if someone could steal the camera and change things so it reported healthy and happy to the mothership, but was actually not doing a gorram thing.

Then I wondered if this same someone could encrypt what they'd done so fully so as to force Flock to buy new hardware to fix it. 

Poised

Digging into the, what seems to be excessive, draw of The Beast's electrical system.

It appears to have been a decision on the part of Holden or GM engineers that the body control module never quite goes to sleep.

It stays more awake than the Australian version of the car to make sure that essential police equipment gets a trickle of power and to decide how much.

This amounts to about 0.4 amps.  Which is a lot for a car that's shut off.

The "problem" area is the extra fuse box under the driver's kick-panel.  This is where the fuses for all the Americanizations live.

But, the GM engineers reason, cop cars are constantly in use, the extra draw just won't come up!

And knowing about the draw being normal means I need to start the damn thing at least once a week when the battery is connected or keep a charger on it.

PS: Don't feel too smug about your own car shutting further down than mine, OnStar is calling home every few hours and transmitting.  The dear, departed, Precious would drain the battery sitting idle too. 

The Future?

Our lawn mower died.  Rather, it will not start.

It doesn't seem to have compression.

It's about... um...  11 years old.

I think that's a good run.

I've been wrenching on it for the past five to avoid replacing it. 

We replaced it with a Ryobi 40v 20" mower.  Battery powered.

I kinda feel dirty, but it was still $100 cheaper than the equivalent gas model.

Something I can do with the battery powered model that I can't with a gas one is store it folded up and standing on its end.  No gas to leak out while vertical.

I was surprise at how normal it sounds.  Most of what I think of as lawnmower noise is apparently the blade spinning. 

Slaved To The Gun

Some write ups comparing the fire control of the M60A3 and M1 make it seem like there's no reason to use the M1 fire control system.

Both are fully stabilized.

Both use laser range finders.

Both have wind sensors.

Fruit, fruit.  Tits, tits.

The M1 computer has more processing power and does the job faster, but it doesn't make a big difference when the time choke-point is the loader. 

The gun is slaved to the sight.

What this means is when I'm tracking a target and stab the lase button, my view, and the crosshairs stay on the target and the turret shifts.

But what makes the M1 system better?

In a word, integration.

The M1, and it's fire control computer, were designed together.

The M60's system is an add-on that had to work with existing hardware and that makes it a bit clunky.  This article gives a decent description. 

Who Would Win

I've noticed that the Soviets had better guns and thicker armor than the NATO nations until relatively late.

NATO didn't start getting gun parity until the British 105mm L7.

NATO didn't start pulling ahead in armor until Chobham.

NATO tanks are almost always taller and heavier than their Soviet counterparts.

So, NATO was screwed before tanks like Abrams and Leopard II hit the scene?

Maybe not.

For the gun and armor to matter, you need to hit, and the Western designers put a lot of effort and thought into fire control.

The first step in accurate fire is an accurate determination of the target's range.

You'll see little bulges on the sides of US tank turrets.  These hold the objective lenses of the range finder, either coincidence or stereoscopic.

The earliest of these give the range which is called out and the appropriate stadia in the optic is aligned with the target.

The US miniaturized the mechanical fire control computers it'd been using on ships and put them in tanks.  The range obtained from the rangefinder could be input into the computer, along with wind speed and the reticle would be shifted so the gunner need only align a, relatively simple and uncluttered, crosshair on the target to hit.

This is all happening while the T-55 has no rangefinder at all and the T-62 uses stadiametric ranging.

The US then automated the process by putting a linkage between the rangefinder and fire control computer.

This was in the 90mm equipped M48A2, in 1953!

The M60A1 started with this.  Later versions got a solid state computer, laser rangefinder and sensors to compensate for wind muzzle droop and cant.

This is all in addition to stabilization that allowed for firing accurately on the move.

Of course, to effectively use all this fun technology requires some education and training that's, typically, absent from the Warsaw Pact and Soviet customers.

Israel vs et al kind of proves the thesis. 

Phish Elsewhere

Got an email from a dead email account that still forwards...

It was in my spam folder.

It warns me that it's infected my operating system with malware and they used the camera on my computer to catch me doing naughty things while viewing an adult webpage.

They threaten they're going to send the video they took to everyone on my contacts list if I don't send a large amount to their bitcoin account.  They helpfully provide a string for doing so.

Well, scammer...

BRING IT!

I fucking DARE you; NO I double dog dare you to send a vid of me jerking off to everyone on my contacts list.

The worst I will get is, "Why the fuck, Angus?"

My contacts don't care, so titillate them, Mr Scammer.

Fragile Tough

We had a bit of a squall run through here.

The power went out for about three hours and I now know that my uninterruptible power sources aren't good for that long.

A fan, light and radio, each powered by Ryobi One+ batts, do last for that long.

So I was reading a book when the power came back and everything came back online just like it was supposed.

I'm pretty pleased about that!

I learned that some people are better prepared for outages than me too!

I don't have the scratch for a whole house backup, but I am, officially, jealous now! 

Benficial Change

Derpycomputer sitting on the desk with one monitor running on the side pulls 0.045kW.

The Mac Pro, idling, with two sleeping monitors pulled 0.250kW.  It pulled over 0.800kW more than once while doing something stressing the processors like a flight sim or crunching AutoCAD.

This cannot help but reduce my electric bill at the end of the month.

AI Slop

Caught a short vid on YouTube talking about a battle in the Pacific in WW2.

The Garands were firing 3-round bursts as fast as an M16, and shooting, at least, 30 rounds with no reloading shown.

Looked good except for the that obvious flaw. 

Admission

It only took a year and a half, but I have finally moved my Thunderbird profile from Crispy IV to DerpyPuter.

I guess it was time to admit that Derpy is the main computer.

Procrastination was more at fault. 

Why Does Not Answer How

Ubuntu has three "Power Modes."

Performance, Balanced and Power Saver.

Performance notes, "High performance and power usage."

Balanced notes, "Standard performance and power usage."

Power Saver notes, "Reduced performance and power usage."

I have Balanced selected; or so I thought.

Derpyputer was not performing up to spec and it was right after a restart for an update, a browser update and installing a different music player.

Uh oh.  Which of those things broke the computer?

I just endured the slower performance while I waited for my brain to hit a space where I could endure looking for the answer.

Somewhere in here, while tabulating the stats for the Type 64 rifle, I noticed the built in screen would dim much sooner than expected.

So I went into the settings to change the time setting for that.

Turns out there's no discrete setting for that, but this is where I see that "Power Saver" has been selected.

I changed it back to "Balanced" and all is better! 

I have no idea how this setting got changed!  There's supposedly no keyboard shortcut for it, but I suspect feline involvement. 

Older Is Newer

There's no iTunes for Ubuntu.

There was iTunes on my Win7 and OSX 10.6.8 installs on the dead Mac Pro.

This has led to a discovery of just how much music was in the DRM locked m4p format.

Amazon is happy to sell me the music again in mp3 format without any DRM attached.

SIGH.  I sometimes miss Napster.

Going to be a bit of a slog finding and replacing the locked music.

But I get the bitter amusement that this is not the first time I've had to repurchase a large chunk of my music.

I've gone from vinyl to cassette to CD to mp3 to m4p and now back to mp3!

Yay! Fun! Yay! 

Power Only

I noticed that I didn't have a song I wanted to listen to on my phone.

Then I discovered that I did have the file on my phone, but it was DRM locked from iTunes.  You can't have iTunes on an Android phone.

No problem!

Buy the song, again, from Amazon, in a DRM-free mp3 format.

Plug in the phone to transfer the file.

No little notice asking if I wanna change from charge only to file transfer.

Mutter under breath...

This is the first time I've tried to do this since getting the Samsung, so maybe a default setting is wrong.

Search the search engines for answers.  Find them.  Change settings.

Plug in phone.

Nothing.

Get frustrated.

Realize that I might have a charger only cord plugged in.

Try different cord.

Get the expected notice asking if I wanna change from charge only to file transfer.

Move song from computer to phone.

In fact, I deleted the contents of the music folder on the phone and replaced it with the music folder on the computer, just to make sure I have all my tunes again.