Via Mr. Free Market:
Okay, that made me snigger.
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Progress Report
I thought I’d just give y’all an update on the new laptop, which came preloaded with all sorts of shit from Microsquish that I neither wanted nor needed, and most of which has been banished to That Great Trash Dump In The Ether.
Sadly, one of the preloads was Windoze 11, which is a pestilence on the face of the Earth and whose creators deserve to be flayed alive and dunked in boiling oil. Fucking hell, talk about “counterintuitive operations”. It’s like learning a whole new program, and the easy functionality of #10 (which took me almost no time to learn lo those 8 years ago) has turned into a nightmare of different buttons to push and strange, inscrutable ways to see what’s actually on my system.
And WTF is “OneDrive”? If I wanted to store stuff on the Cloud or whatever it’s called, I’m perfectly capable of doing so by myself and by my own choice, thank you, instead of having it forced upon me. Needless to say, it’s been uninstalled (I think) but every so often I get to see yet another of its multitude of folders, which needs deleting each and every time.
Thankfully, the meme- and smutty pics files (i.e. the important stuff) are intact, which is more than I can say for my bookmarks, may the developers of Firefox join those of #11 in the boiling-oil cauldron. (I followed the “Save All Bookmarks” routine — as explained in Mozilla’s [no-]HELP section — to the letter, and yet only a few bookmarks made it over to this machine. Which means I have to re-create a shit ton of them by hand. Don’t get me started.)
Then there are the MS programs which I use constantly, like Paint and the snipping tool, which have changed for no good reason I can ascertain (and not for the better, let me tell you). I also like to have my Active / Open Programs tool bar running vertically on the right hand side of the screen rather than strung along the bottom of the screen, but apparently #11 doesn’t have that facility, FFS. Why is this important? Because my nice new wide screen has room to house said RHS toolbar, which would leave more visible vertical space to hold text articles; but as it can’t, I find myself having to scroll up and down more often. Fortunately, I could afford to buy a brand new Logitech ERGO mouse so that, at least, is less onerous a task.
On the other hand, it’s rather nice to have an “o” key which responds to a light finger touch, and the battery which lasts 6 hours instead of 30 minutes. And yes, at last I could permanently disable the horrible touchpad (unlike on the old HP laptop), and I no longer have to duct-tape the power cord to the system to keep it from falling out like some post-coital limp penis. And I can actually close the screen without all those dreadful creaking and snapping noises from the chassis and hinges. And the keys are backlit so I don’t have to have the light on whilst I type.
All good stuff, that last paragraph. Although I do miss having a DVD player in my laptop… but I have a spare multi-format DVD player which I can hook up to the system when New Wife is watching Great British Bake-Off and I feel like (re-)watching Casablanca or Foyle’s War instead of plucking my eyeballs out.
Anyway, the migration process continues apace, and should be more or less completed in a week or so. Next up: installing Thunderbird for my email. This should be fun…
There are (a very few) times when I enjoy using new technology. This, however, is not one of those times. It’s like having to buy a new car because the old one conked out, only to find that the pedals have been switched around and the steering is now performed by some new-style gaming controller instead of the familiar old steering wheel. I know that in time one gets accustomed to the New Way Of Doing Things, but why the fucking fucking fucking hell should I when the Old Way worked perfectly, for nearly a decade withal?
I’m just hoping that this is the last laptop I’ll ever have to buy before I Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil; but then again, I thought that about the last laptop I bought, and look how that turned out.
Rude good health, it seems, does have its drawbacks sometimes.
Brrrrr
Fucking hell, it’s cold out there. In Texas.
Ammo Carriers
When I were a lad, whenever I went out into the bush to do a little impromptu shooting, my method of carrying ammo in the field was simple: the carriers were called “trouser pockets”, and I would just fill them up with loose rounds of ammo (whether .177 pellets or .22 cartridges).
But le temps se marche, if you’ll pardon my French, and now I need to carry my plinking ammo in some kind of carrier.
Of course, if I’m carrying a gun that shoots from a magazine, carrying spare ammo is not an issue: just MOAR magazines. And indeed that’s what I do, in that I have multiple spare magazines for all my semi-auto guns.
But what, I ask myself, do I do when I’m carrying a single-action revolver or a tube-fed rifle?
Sure, I could just keep the boolets in the box they came in, or jam ’em loose in my pocket as in times gone by.
But that means fumbling around, and getting them to line up to be reloaded and all that.
Then I read this article, and it made all sorts of sense to me:
A convenient solution I have found is the magazine for an M1911-style .22 Long Rifle pistol. The slim magazine can be conveniently carried in a pouch or pocket, with the rounds protected, and individual cartridges can be thumbed into a single-shot chamber, the magazine tube of a rifle or the loading gate of a single-action rimfire revolver.
I’m not sure about a 1911-style mag, because those tend to be spendy. But any old cheap .22 pistol mag will do, surely? Like this one:
That’s under $15 per mag, it holds 15 rounds, which means that four such mags would mean… [carry the 4] ten reloads for a Single Six revolver, or… [carry the three] five or so reloads for the Model 63. All in a handy little package, so to speak.
Definitely worth thinking about.
New Same As Old
I see that the U.S. Army’s new rifle is having some problems.
Okay, the XM7 per se isn’t having problems, but its bells-‘n-whistles sighting system is.
The fiscal 2024 report on the Army’s Next-Generation Squad Weapon program from the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test and Evaluation published last week indicates that the XM157 Fire Control smart scope that’s intended to augment the program’s XM7 Next Generation Rifle and XM250 Next Generation Automatic Rifle received negative ratings from soldiers during testing last year.
“The XM7 with mounted XM157 demonstrated a low probability of completing one 72-hour wartime mission without incurring a critical failure.”
On the positive side, the XM7 rifle itself, and its new ammo (6.8x51mm) was very much liked. That’s good. But a rifle without sights is useless (except at very close range). But why isn’t the “Fire Control” system working? I mean:
A 1-8×30 variable magnification direct view optic built by Vortex Optics subsidiary Sheltered Wings, the XM157 incorporates advanced technologies such as a laser rangefinder, aiming lasers, environmental sensors, ballistic solver, compass and a digital display overlay, all of which are designed to “increase the probability of hit and decrease the time to engage”.
The XM157 also features wireless connectivity that will purportedly allow it to integrate with heads-up displays like the Army’s current Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular, or ENVG-B, and future Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, do-it-all goggles, allowing soldiers to survey the battlefield from cover using a live video feed from their weapon optic.
I’m just amazed there isn’t a coffee-making capability included.
Ah yes, the old “advanced technologies” bugaboo. The more technologies involved, the greater the number of potential failure points.
Now I’m not suggesting that we go back to iron aperture sights (as good as they are), and by the way, I see that the XM7 has no provision for any kind of backup sights (which pleaseth me not).
I’m all for giving our boys the best gear possible to kill assholes I mean our country’s enemies. But the shit’s gotta work, FFS.
So what’s the Army doing about it?
Despite the documented issues detailed in the DOT&E report, the Army is still plowing ahead with the system’s development. Indeed, the service released a sources sought notice in late January for “novel technologies or ongoing research that would be beneficial for the XM157 system as a module and/or software that provides enhanced capability.”
Yeah, so instead of scaling back the complexity until we get something that works perfectly, and building it back up from that base, let’s make the system still more complicated than the (non-working) thing already is. That’s a proven recipe for success, of course.
We were always drilled that there are three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.
I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s happening here.
Bitch, Bitch, Bitch
It appears that liberal harpies are more likely to be unhappy with their lives than their more feminine counterparts:
According to the 2024 American Family Survey, only 12% of liberal women surveyed said they were “completely satisfied” with their lives, compared to 37% of conservative women and 28% of moderate women between the ages of 18-40.
An analysis of the results showed that liberal women are “two to three times more likely” to indicate they are “not satisfied” with their lives when compared to women who identify as conservative.
Color me unsurprised. I have known many such harridans in my lifetime, and to a (wo)man they are sour, perpetually indignant and… miserable. This is only exacerbated if they are vegans or wiccans [some overlap], and if they have a university degree in a topic with “Studies” in the title, then look out.
By and large, they see themselves as victims — buying into the current Marxist trope that there are two classes in society (victimizers and victims) — and of course eeeevil men are the former group, which means by default they are the latter.
The fact that by and large they are middle-class White women (in number) who can afford to indulge themselves in such nonsense gives the lie to their hysteria and self-inflicted unhappiness.
Conservative women, in contrast, are too busy for this foolishness because they are involved in raising happy families and doing good works (like church-y stuff) rather than wailing about (mostly-imagined) injustices, and feeling put-upon.
You may disagree with me on this point, but you’d be wrong; and it would appear that I have the facts on my side withal.