Oh. Duh.

I am embarrassed to say that I was today years old when the etymology of "iglesia" suddenly popped into view, like staring at the same picture of a candlestick your whole life and all of a sudden realizing it was two faces in profile.

.

Gear Check

I've learned in the past to check and make sure I had a memory card in the camera when I left the house. Apparently I need to remind myself to check and make sure the battery's got a good charge on it before leaving, too.

I got to the Fair yesterday morning with the Sony a700 and, after my customary morning lemonade I wandered over to the Pioneer Village show to start taking pictures, and the camera wouldn't power on. I pulled the battery and reinserted it and it had just enough charge to illuminate the screen with the "battery is exhausted" message.

The a700, which is really just a Minolta Maxxum 7D successor in Sony drag, is one of those cameras that will slowly drain a battery as it sits. Put a fully charged battery in it and in four or five days it'll be spent. I'd last checked the battery on Sunday around lunch and by 10AM on Tuesday morning it was kaput.

Fortunately it was Two Dollar Tuesday at the State Fair yesterday so I wasn't out a sixteen buck gate fee.

.

Backyard Safari

So, on Thursday I needed to put some miles on the Mustang to keep the battery charged up, and I decided I'd nip down to Roberts Camera after lunch and grab a couple rolls of film to toss in the freezer for later.

I got in the car with my camera and the little canvas tote bag I carry that holds my iPad and my handy umbrella and motored on downtown. It's not far, a fifteen or twenty minute drive on surface streets. One of the guys who works there lives near me and he does it by bicycle on the Monon Trail nearly year 'round.

My tote bag.

I got there and grabbed a couple rolls of film. While I was idly nosing around in the used camera department I spotted an old Nikon D2H pro body in really nice shape. They had it packaged with an inexpensive 50mm f/1.8 AF-D Nikkor, a battery & charger, and a formatted CF card already installed for a little over a C-note.

Now, I'm a sucker for old pro bodies and the D2H's slower, higher resolution cousin, the D2X, has been a stalwart for me. The D2H is doubly interesting because it used Nikon's proprietary LBCAST sensor technology, the only camera to do so, before Nikon went to CMOS sensors like everyone else.

I rang up my purchases and was on my way out the door when I glanced at the wall of clearance bags hanging on the wall next to the exit, and there was a blue Peak Design Everyday Sling, like this one, but in the smaller 6L size. "Think how much money I'm saving!", I thought to myself as I took it to the cash register.

So I got home with my purchases and began unloading the car. Now, I had three bags and the DSLR around my neck to ferry through the detached garage and to the picnic table in the back yard where I would set them as I unlocked the back door of the house. 

I transferred them in stages to the hood of the Zed Drei in the garage, shut the overhead garage door, then staged them in two trips to the picnic table, pulling the door on the garage shut behind me after the second trip, giving the knob a little conscientious twist to make sure I'd locked it.

Now to unlock the back door of the house...

...uh...

...with the keys that were still sitting in a little pile on the roof of the car in the locked garage.

So I got to spend Thursday afternoon sitting in the back yard waiting for Bobbi to get home from work.

Oops.

That's a relief...

The day I was supposed to leave for TacCon, I hopped in the Mustang and noticed that the dome light didn't come on.

Dammit, I did not need this. That was a nearly brand new battery and I was sure we had tracked down and plugged the hole in the electrical system where the electrons were leaking out.

Oh, well, there was no time to do anything about it then,

This morning I went outside to hook up the charger to the battery and when I opened the driver's door to pop the hood, I saw the source of my problem: Some real genius had gone out driving the car in the rain last Monday and left the lights on when she got home.

D'oh!

.

Oops...

KMUX (San Francisco) is down and needs a critical part replaced but, uh, everybody's government credit cards have been turned off. They can still get a part via a P.O., but that's gonna take longer. Efficiency, comrades!

.

Privacy Nightmare

Technically you don't have any reasonable expectation of privacy while you're just driving down the open road, on public thoroughfares.

I don't know that the Founding Fathers had thought through the implications of license plate readers, though...

Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security made a series of YouTube videos showing vulnerabilities in a Motorola Reaper HD ALPR that he bought on eBay. As we have reported previously, these ALPRs are deployed all over the United States by cities and police departments. Brown initially found that it is possible to view the video and data that these cameras are collecting if you join the private networks that they are operating on. But then he found that many of them are misconfigured to stream to the open internet rather than a private network.

ALPR being "Automated License Plate Reader", of course. These cameras are common enough tech that you can buy a variety of them on Amazon.

You may recall the fun I had with a botched license plate read back in the early days of this blog if you've been around long enough.

.

Snitch Culture on the Skids...

The anonymous Pennsylvania McDonald's employee who dimed out the CEO shooter could have a hard time collecting his reward.

The FBI's reward payment system is contingent on conviction, and the NYPD gives you a special PIN code when you call in a tip that is necessary for receiving reward payments and the fast food worker called local 911 and not the NYPD.

.

Not Made in America

So, Glenn Youngkin has released a very patriotic, motivational commercial, of the sort floated by people trial-ballooning presidential runs.

It’s time to usher in a new era of American values. It’s our turn to choose life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. pic.twitter.com/IH8enVaL5B

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) May 18, 2023

There's kind of a technical problem with the obligatory "Bless our Troops, Rah Rah Military" part of the clip, though.

Pick a U.S. military jet instead of a Eurofighter Typhoon, Glenn.

.

Oops.

So at CanCon, I was there as a freelancer with the RECOIL crew helping to cover the event. On the first morning we got our event staff name badges and everyone sets to filling theirs out with Sharpie.

It wasn't until I looked around and realized that everyone had been carefully printing "Fred Smith, RECOIL Magazine" or "Suzy Jones, Off-Grid Magazine" did I realize I might have been doing it wrong...

A little embarrassing, there.

I might as well have printed something dumb like "I'M GUMBY, DAMMIT!"

.

Cracked Up

It finally happened...

The iPad 6th Gen that I picked up in New Hampshire back in 2018 has been doing yeoman work since then as a mobile writing machine.

However a few weeks ago, I was exiting Fresh Market and juggling groceries, camera, and iPad when the latter item squirted out from under my arm, spun through the air with its keyboard case fluttering (in seeming slow motion, as these things always happen) and hit the concrete of the sidewalk smack on the corner of the case.

The screen now sports a spiderweb of cracks like a ghetto cell phone.

Fortunately Amazon is having that big "Early Access Prime Sale" today, so I picked up its replacement for 18% off, as well as a replacement keyboard cover. (The 6th Gen iPad was the last to use the 9.7" screen of the original iPad.)

This time I remembered to get a keyboard cover with a loop for the Apple Pencil, too! I got the pencil back when I got the iPad for a screaming deal because the Office Despot up in West Lebanon, NH was closing them out, but I've hardly used it for lack of a handy way to keep it attached to the iPad. I bet it'll be turbo-handy for photo editing.

.

Side Note...

The previous post could be subtitled "How I found myself in my pajamas and winter boots, squatting in the snow in the back yard with my EOS 5D Mark II and a macro lens, before realizing I'd locked myself out of the house in 20°F weather and had to bang on the glass to get Bobbi to let me back in."

.

Who Guards the Guardian?

 I've talked up Surefire's Guardian before. It's my go-to travel light, especially on the (admittedly rare) occasions when I fly and don't check a bag. It's a one-light solution that gives me everything from a wide, even 15-lumen MaxVision beam for finding my way to the loo between tent pegs and camp chairs at Paul-E-Palooza to shining a conventional, focused 800-lumen spotlight on the tree line across the lawn at Castle Frostbite. 

Even if I have my regular EDCL2-T along with me, the honkin' big internal batteries on the Guardian save wear on the pocket light's CR123s. I also liked that it could theoretically be used to juice up a dead phone or other USB accessory...

I say "theoretically", because I did inadvertently discover one weakness. While it claims to use a "USB-C" connector, it's a variety of USB-C that matches no other connector in Roseholme Cottage. Having not used it since SHOT back in January, I pulled it out of a traveling jacket pocket to find it was flatter than the Texas Panhandle and I couldn't find the cable. No other cable in the house, not even on the numerous squids, fit it.

It's going to be in the camera bag pocket I use for other critical cables from now on, ensuring that I always know where it's at, as well as making sure it comes with when I travel.

Range Fumbles

Imagine my chagrin when I decided to be clever by swapping out the grip module in the .357SIG conversion kit with the one from an original X-Carry...and then I get to the range and notice that the .40/.357 magazine has the floorplate with the finger-grip dinguses and the original gangsta X-module isn't relieved for them. 

D'oh! 

At least the ammo fairy left a forgotten box of 115gr TulAmmo in the trunk of the car, so it wasn't a complete waste of a range trip.

Speaking of TulAmmo...

That's a weird little failure to eject on the last round, with the spent case performing a backflip into the ejection port. I've had pretty good luck with rather a lot of cases of this stuff over the last few years, but in this one box I had this failure to eject and two failures to extract, one of which saw the claw pop off the case halfway out of the chamber and the other left a stuck case in the chamber that required a bit of force to be applied to the slide to get it out. I was half expecting a split case or something, but it appeared normal to the eye.

.

Sizing Error

Monday's range trip, I decided to do a bit of "just for fun" shooting in addition to the monotonous pew-pew-pew of trying to build up the round count on a test gun. And few things are as "just for fun" as the little Vz.61 Skorpion in 7.65 Browning, aka .32ACP.

Had a couple of interesting malfunctions before it was noticed that somehow some 9mm Browning (aka .380) ball had found its way into my .32 Auto ammo can. The two rounds have identical case head dimensions, with the semi-rimmed .32 having a smaller diameter case, and so are easier to confuse than most.

I need to make some time to weed it all out.
.

Oops.

Corporal Somebody-or-Other apparently never heard that it's rarely a career-enhancing move to do something that causes the governor have to start his day off by making apologetic phone calls to cable news CEOs. #cnnarrest https://t.co/Yo25wiRtwK

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 29, 2020

That was unexpected...

I'd been idly thinking that maybe I shouldn't have the window open so far while I wasn't there to supervise; the screen is kinda flimsy and it didn't take a lot of imagination to envision Huck or Holden shredding their way through it to try and reach a bird or squirrel.

What I didn't envision was a bounding cat having the inertia to pop the thing right out of its moorings.

Fortunately there was a happy ending, but given the speed of events, it's not ever getting opened that wide again even if I'm sitting right there.
.

Too many containers...

>be me

>go digging through S&W boxes to find the one for the 2" 64 you're taking to the gun shop today for extra SHOT Show shekels

>find box for 3" Model 610 you sold years ago and realize you could have made an extra hundred bucks

>dammit

Also, um... Hey, Shootin' Buddy? I found the box for that nickel Model 38 no-dash I sold you back in two-thousand-aught-nine or whenever.
.

Serious Gear Fail

Remember a couple years ago when an IMPD officer had his Glock discharge in the holster when the officer sitting next to him got some bit of gear inside the light-bearing Safariland and then stood up?

Well, just this past week another IMPD officer was tussling with a shoplifting suspect who got on top of him in the ground fight and attempted to pull the officer's pistol out of the holster. The holster's retention worked, but the dude managed to get a finger into the mouth of the holster and fire the still-holstered weapon, hitting the officer in the leg.

Not all light-bearing holsters are created equal, and some obviously have way too much clearance around the trigger guard. This kinda defeats one of the main purposes of a holster.
.

Fabricating...

So, once upon a time, I bought a Frommer Stop. This is an intriguing little historical footnote of a pistol whose main purpose in existing is to serve as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit: Firearms Edition question:

"The two major pistols to operate on the long recoil operating principle are the Webley Mars and the ____________."

Thing is, when I finally got around to test-firing it, it didn't extract the spent shell.

On closer examination, most of the extractor was gone.

Now, on a blowback operated pistol the extractor isn't, strictly speaking, what you'd call necessary. On a gun like a PPK or Hi Point or Colt 1903, the extractor is only really needed to extract unfired rounds from the chamber. Tip-up barrel blowback autos like those from Beretta or their Taurus clones don't even have extractors. During firing, the spent shell is blown backward out of the chamber by the equal and opposite reaction to the same gasses that push the bullet out the front.

On a short recoil operated pistol, i.e. one where the barrel and breech travel backward locked together for a length of travel shorter than the length of the cartridge, you might still get some functionality with a broken extractor. There might be enough residual chamber pressure at the moment of unlocking to kick the spent case out of the chamber, although without the extractor claw to hold it in position to meet the ejector correctly, there could still be issues.

On a long recoil operated arm like the Frommer Stop, however, the barrel and breech remain locked together all the way to the rear, and the extractor is needed to hold the shell in place against the breechface as the barrel returns forward. Without the extractor, the round will likely just stay in the chamber.



No problem. Just buy a new extractor, right? Ha ha ha.

So, maybe make a new extractor? I worked at Coal Creek Armory at the time, and we had a full machine shop and gunsmiths on the premises who could build a gun from scratch with a lathe and a mill and a block of steel.

Okay, first, it wasn't like just the claw was gone. That would be easy enough to weld up and re-cut. This would require fabricating an entirely new part, and it's not like machinist's drawings were available for the piece.

So just get another Frommer Stop extractor and duplicate it! Except that I could count the number of Frommer Stops I've seen in the wild in my 25 years of manning gun store counters and attending gun shows without taking off both mittens.

Eventually, after a couple years of trying to find one locally that we could borrow to copy, the acquisition of a second gun was required to duplicate the part.

(This memory was brought up by a discussion on old cameras on the internet last night. And an extractor is a lot simpler part than anything you're liable to find in, say, a Ducati Sogno.)
.

I was a little cranky this morning.

I just accidentally saved my ENTIRE Lightroom catalog to my "Gun School Pictures" directory. Twice.
How's your morning going?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 3, 2018