Robot Pot

Things I didn't know I needed until just now: A robotic self-propelled flowerpot.

Think of it as a prosthetic for a brown thumb.

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When R2D2 goes rogue...

An internet connected appliance is a hackable appliance.

Robot vacuums manufactured by Ecovacs have gone rogue, with some customers reporting the tiny tech tools chased them around their homes and barraged them with profanities after being hacked.

Minnesota lawyer Daniel Swenson is one of those people. He told Australia Broadcast Network about an experience in May with his Deebot X2. the uniquely problematic model from the Chinese manufacturer.

Instead of Skynet infiltrating our fortified bunkers with T-800 Terminator killbots, it's 4chan infiltrating our living rooms with robot vacuum cleaners that bang into our ankles and call us names.

This future is somehow both duller and dumber and yet also more dystopian than the one I was promised.

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"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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Future stuff...

I just can't get over how the price on tech stuff has just plummeted. It wasn't that long ago that a 4K 55" TV was a science fiction movie prop. Now BezosMart is blowing the things out for $299 on Prime Day...

You can spend a ton on tablets or smartphones if you want, but you can get a pretty decent one for very reasonable dough if you don't have to have the most memory or megapixels.

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My mind has been changed... mostly.

At the TacCon presenter's dinner this year, Andy Stanford passed out SureFire Stilettos to attendees as door prizes.

When the Stiletto was introduced, it was very much the flavor of the month and all the cool kids used them for a bit before moving on to whatever the next awesome light was. I am very much an uncool kid and I stuck with my trusty EDCL2-T, which I'd been using since they were introduced back in '17.

I stuck with that 2-cell light until a few months back when I downsized to its single-cell EDCL1-T cousin as part of a general pocket clutter shrinkage project: Sabre Red Mk.6 to a POM dispenser, Spyderco Delica to a Spyderco Dragonfly, et cetera. Since doing so, I haven't found myself feeling limited by the single cell light's 500-lumen output. It's still plenty if your job doesn't include nighttime traffic stops and clearing structures.

The Stiletto is roughly the same size as the single-cell EDCL, but nice and flat and more comfortable in the pocket.

When I popped the packaging open I immediately felt stupid. See, the reason I didn't jump on it like everyone else back then is... um... I didn't realize it had a "tail cap" button that served as a momentary switch for the full 650 lumens.

For some reason I had thought the only buttons were the ones on the side (one a light control and the other used for programming the sequence of toggling between 650, 250, and 5 lumen settings) like the setup on the Guardian or Sidekick. 

That side button is fine for normie flashlight use but sucks for "tactical" applications. Further, you don't want to have to toggle through brightness settings to get to the full output in a "tactical" light, but having it immediately pop on with 650 lumens and then toggle down to 5 reduces its utility as a normal task light. That was the genius of the EDCL series, where a light press of the tailcap got you a task light, but a full press summoned up the face-melting output.

So I've been carrying and using the Stiletto for something over a week at this point and here's my rundown:

PROS:

• It really is comfortable in a pocket. It's slim and light and my fears of it turning on in a pocket seem to have been overblown.
• The dual button configuration makes it handy for both normal and "tactical" use. You can program the side button so the bright light comes on first, but why would you? Use the tailcap button for that.
• It doesn't look "tactical". Some security people have started getting squirrely about knurled metal "tactical" flashlights, even ones without scary fanged bezels. You're less likely to be told you need to leave it in the car than the EDCL1-T.
• You don't generate a steady stream of dead CR123 lithium batteries that need to be disposed of.

CONS:

• Supposedly it's plenty tough and rugged and waterproof, but I just don't get the same reassuring vibe from plastic, no matter how "high-impact" it is, that I do from knurled metal.
• When the internal batteries go flat, you have to plug it in to recharge it and that takes time. You can't just toss a fresh cell in there and be up and running immediately. Also, SureFire... Micro-USB? Really? The rest of the world is basically standardizing on USB-C. Why not step boldly into The Current Year?

On balance, though, the Stiletto is an improvement over the EDCL1-T, I think, so I reckon I'll stick with it for a while, unless some flaw I haven't noticed pops up.

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Think Different...er.

I've been using the same Early 2015 MacBook Air as my road machine since I bought it from Marko...back in February of 2018, it looks like, at the same time I bought a similar vintage Mac mini which is still serving as my desktop rig.

Apple hardware tends to stay viable for a while, but they're finally old enough that the latest versions of Photoshop won't work on them 100%. Some features need a newer OS and Apple silicon for full functionality.

It'll be a while before I can afford to upgrade both, but a refurb MacBook Air with the M1 CPU should be doable between now and Christmas, and then maybe in January I can swing an M1 mini for the desktop.  

Let There Be Light

I'd dissed the Streamlight Microstream in the past. Lots of friends liked them for their small size and readily-available AAA batteries, but I didn't think that their 28-lumen output was worth putting another pocket wart in my mom jeans.

I'm fine with the EDCL1-T, but even a single-cell CR123 light is kind of a chonk for some folks. It's less noticeable in a pocket than the bigger two-cell lights, but you still know it's there.

500 lumen EDCL1-T vs. original gangsta 28 lumen Microstream

Apparently the latest iteration of the Microstream is just as small as the old one, still powered by the single AAA cell, and now outputs 45 lumens, which may not be a "tactical" output but is more than bright enough for almost any normie flashlight chore. Plus the new pocket clip has a double curve to it so you can also slip it on a hat brim for a task light. And like the good stuff from Surefire and Streamlight, it has the solid, waterproof construction that so many... other ...flashlight companies haven't quite mastered.

Best of all, BezosMart is running an early Black Friday sale, sixty percent off. For $12.54, these things would make hella good stocking stuffers.

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Gauging the Pull

Back when I got asked to do my first for-pay gun review I picked up an inexpensive RCBS trigger pull gauge, the spring-loaded kind that's like a fish scale. It read up to eight pounds, and so I'd occasionally have to borrow some calibrated trigger weights if I was testing a pistol or revolver with a double-action trigger...or an unusually crappy single-action one.

A...uh...recent test pistol's trigger made me think that the eight pound scale might not be enough, so I finally broke down and splurged on a modern digital Lyman trigger pull gauge from BezosMart.

It has the advantage of giving output in pounds and ounces, rather than the eighth-of-a-pound hashmarks on the RCBS unit. Further, it can do a string of ten pulls and spit out an average. Handy!

M's dead, baby.

We've known it was coming for a while, but now it's official. Canon's discontinued the EF-M line, their first stab at a mirrorless system camera.

This has been the most protracted death scene since our elementary school theater production of Romeo & Juliet.

RIP Canon M: 2012-2023

Once the full-frame RF mount cameras debuted in 2019 the writing was on the wall. Canon hasn't introduced a really new EF-M camera in years...the M50 Mark II of 2020 was just a feature update of the earlier camera, so the M has been de facto discontinued for years, you just don't want to make that announcement until you've moved all the product you have in inventory lest you scare off buyers. (The M200 and M50 II boxed sets on the shelves at Mart-mart are likely already a couple years old.)

I sold my M bodies and lenses off a year or so ago, but if you wanted to get into the stuff and don't mind using an unsupported system, now might be a good time to go shopping...

So if you are still using the EOS-M system, I suggest looking around and buying that lens or two that you had your eye on. Because we all know, it's not as if your existing camera is going to stop working once Canon discontinues it. Good deals can be had for both new and used cameras. Just be aware that you are buying into a system with no future. Used lens prices on popular reselling sites should also be fairly cheap as people will be selling off their kits and moving to, well, somewhere.

BezosMart has refurb M50 II's for not crazy money, and lenses are inexpensive. Get an adaptor and you can use the whole library of Canon EF and EF-S DSLR lenses with native functionality.

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Game Changer?

Holy cow, Garmin has released a highly-portable radar chronograph with a $599 MSRP.

That would be such a game changer for me. I've had articles run right against the ragged edge of a deadline due to needing to wait for a break in the weather so I could set up my old Shooting Chrony Beta in one of the pistol bays at Marion County Fish & Game. 

When the pistol bays were down for maintenance earlier this summer, I had to set up my chrono on a tripod on the main firing line...and hope nobody else got there that early in the morning to turn the process of shooting and recording three ten-round strings into an all-morning festival of tedium of calling the range cold, scuttling down with my notebook, scuttling back, calling the range hot again, et bloody cetera.

With a radar-based chrono, I could use the indoor range at Indy Arms Co. right down the street, weather be damned.

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Pocket Popper

Although there are definitely more pocketable options these days...

Everything in the photo is a smaller, lighter, more pocketable alternative to something bigger. 

Obviously there's the Beretta 3032 Tomcat, the subject of an upcoming review in RECOIL: Concealment.(The photo is an outtake from the shots I did for the article.)

Then there's the Surefire Sidekick, my little rechargeable 300-lumen key fob. There's also the always-handy POM pepper spray, with probably ninety percent of the capability of my trusty Sabre Mk.6 at a fraction of the size.

Finally is the svelte little Spyderco Roadie. It's got good-looking Italian style and was designed specifically to comply with the proposed (but, alas, withdrawn) TSA rules that would have allowed small penknives on planes again. It has a 2" non-locking slipjoint type blade that also features a finger choil forward of the pivot to prevent accidental closure should you have to put it to non-penknife type uses. Between the short blade and the lack of a mechanical lock, it should be legal in most any jurisdiction that allows any kind of knives at all.

(The watch is a Bertucci field watch, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not really watch people but it's lightweight and looks cool.)

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Brand New Optics From Trijicon

As others have already breathlessly announced at 12:00:01 EDT (or whatever time the embargo technically lifted*), Trijicon has officially launched a pair of new miniature red dot optics today.

There's the RMR HD, which is an open emitter sight that looks like the result of someone leaving an RMR and an SRO next to each other in the gun safe with the lights turned down low and some Barry White tunes playing. It sports a top-loading battery compartment, a larger window, a convenient sighting rib in the between the patented "ears" atop the housing, and a forward facing light sensor that can read light splashback from the target and adjust reticle brightness (if enabled). The reticle can be toggled back and forth between the plain dot and the dot surrounded by a 55 MOA donut-with-crosshairs.

The other is the long rumored enclosed-emitter optic from Trijicon, the RCR. It has a metric butt-ton of battery life (claimed to be six years at the middle brightness setting, but we won't know if that's true until 2029) and the same ruggedness the RMR is known for.

Both optics share the same mounting footprint as the existing RMR, the RCR via the use of clever capstan screws.

I'll be doing a more detailed review of each in the immediate future.

*Other people had obviously ignored the embargo and douchily leaked, but whatevs.

Turn your targeting computer back on, Luke.

If there’s a centerfire pistol more naturally suited to a slide-mounted MRDS than the soft-recoiling and flat-shooting FN Five-SeveN, I don’t know what it would be.

While early adopters like Steve Fisher and Kelly McCann were experimenting with slide-mounted red dots as far back as the turn of the millennium, two things were necessary to get us to the widespread acceptance that the MRDS has achieved today.

First was a truly ruggedized sight with useful amounts of battery life. While a sporting sight can have fresh batteries installed before a hunt or a match, changing batteries on a carry or duty pistol (especially if doing so may involve re-zeroing) is an almost prohibitive pain if it needs doing more than once, maybe twice, a year. Also, while a CCW pistol is, by definition, protected from the environment by at least a layer of t-shirt cloth, a duty pistol is hanging out there where it can be whanged off door jambs and furniture and stuff.

Trijicon had been sticking a Docter Optic atop some higher-magnification ACOGs to give .mil dudes a backup sight that that could be used at close quarters, but in 2009 it was replaced with a new in-house optic: The Ruggedized Miniature Reflex.

The RMR had yoinks of battery life, was waterproof down to depths you don't need to worry about unless you commute to work using a Draeger rebreather, and was sturdy enough to withstand an entire loaded M4 landing red-dot-first when dropped from shoulder height.

These traits also made for a pretty darn good slide-mounted optic on a pistol, as it happened.

At the time, though, you still had to purchase the red dot and then send your pistol off to have the slide milled to fit the optic. (Or buy an aftermarket slide that was pre-milled, and caveat emptor, baby.)

The second key factor in red dot acceptance was the availability of pistols that came from the factory already set up to accept a slide mounted red dot, and FN America led the way there with the FNX-45 Tactical in 2012.

Within a few years, the Tactical FNs were followed by MOS Glocks and CORE Smith & Wessons and now you can get blasters already set up for red dots from manufacturers as diverse as Sccy and Kimber.

Also, however, there was a proliferation of sight footprints...but that's a topic for the next post.

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Buy More! Spend Now!

It's Prime Day, the big sale day at BezosMart, which is generally more hype than anything else. For many things, like appliances or electronics, you're better off waiting for more traditional sales, like Labor Day or  Black Friday.

But if you want the products actually made or marketed by Amazon, this really is the best day. They've got 7" Kindle Fire tablets for forty bucks and the Kindle Oasis is, like, a hundred bucks off.

It's the Kindle Fire that gets me. A high-res touchscreen tablet with sixteen gigabytes of memory, a thing that would have been absolutely nothing more than a prop in a cyberpunk scifi movie twenty years ago, is going for the price of dinner for two at Applebee's. Add drinks and dessert and you can get the 32GB 8" HD version.

I mean, I remember when the the 3.2" 160x144 screen on the Sega Game Gear was pretty frickin' magic. It's color! Backlit! You can play Mortal Kombat on it! Now my wristwatch has better than double that resolution. 

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That Nineties Show

I was setting up a photo shoot for a magazine article yesterday and snapped some phone pics to test the layout...

Thanks to a reader for hooking me up with that very Nineties box of Black Talon, complete with the period-correct twelve buck price tag. (Of course, sixty cents a pop was pretty premium stuff back in 1992 or so.)

The 3913LS was released in 1990, a couple years after that Nikon F4 and 35-70mm f/2.8D. The Motorola MicroTAC is a later model, probably mid '90s.

The Nikon and the Smith are still useful tools, but the phone is something I picked up off the 'Bay for ten bucks to use purely for a photo prop.

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Unsolicited Product Endorsement

I've gone on before about how much I dig Peak Design's stuff, and they've yet again sold me on a little gadget. This time it's their Packable Tote.

It collapses into this little pouch about six inches long, secured with a snap. When you open it, you get a pretty fair-sized tote bag and the integral stuff sack is now an interior pocket that can be snapped closed.

The zipper closure appears to be pretty quality hardware. The bag itself is sewn from a single piece of water-resistant ripstop nylon and the carrying strap has a microfiber pad that is textured to keep it from sliding off your shoulder if you carry it slung.

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On newsstands near you...

...in the latest issue of RECOIL: Concealment*, is a feature-length writeup on this gizmo.

*If you don't want to go to a newsstand, digital subscriptions are cheap, although they only work on tablets and phones, not my desktop app for some reason.

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I did not know this...

From an article on the demise of Toys 'Я' Us:

To sum up, then: A pioneering regional brick-and-mortar retailer acquires an American manufacturer. The manufacturing is subsequently offshored, and eventually the overall company, while still profitable, is sold for parts and morphed into a commercial landlord. The Vornado name lives on as a brand, under license, printed on mostly Chinese-manufactured fans (although they are designed and engineered, and in some cases assembled, in the United States). And then, the real-estate firm plays a part in the death of another struggling retailer in Toys ‘R’ Us—a company much in the same position as its own previous incarnation as Two Guys.

"Zombie" brands have always been of interest to me. 

I recently had Amazon suggest that I might be interested in a "Minolta"-branded camera. I found this odd, since Konica-Minolta sold its whole camera business to Sony back in the early '00s.

Turns out the Minolta name is currently licensed by a company called "Elite Brands" in NYC which licenses the names of moribund companies like Bell + Howell (or even still-thriving ones like Coleman) here in the U.S. to slap on chintzy consumer electronica like cheap cameras and Bluetooth speakers.

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Better than Expected

So it was April of 2016 that I picked up that Apple Watch on a trip to New Hamster. It was the least expensive model, an original First Generation that was, at the time, only about five months away from being discontinued and replaced with the new "Series 1" second generation watches.

It's soldiered on ever since, despite being completely unsupported since September of 2018. I was getting a full day's use still on the battery, and just throwing it on the charger for about an hour every morning.

As it got longer in the tooth, it would occasionally get that weird fault where the battery would drain unexpectedly quickly, but doing a forced reset would fix things. It wasn't much of a problem since it only happened once in a blue moon, maybe a couple-three times a year.

Here lately it started doing that and no matter how many times I gave it a forced reset, nothing seemed to fix the drain.

Oh, well. Six and a half years is a really good run. It outlasted the iPhone 6S that I got at the same time and then the 7 Plus that replaced it. It was on its third phone when it finally went wonky.

I hope I get as good a run out of this Apple Watch SE 2nd Generation that I got to replace it. It was on sale, so...

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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.

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