Those mini-ICBM rounds in the pics?

I've had more than a few people ask me what kind of rifle takes those 535gr beauties I blogged about earlier.

An 1874 Sharps Business Rifle replica, of course.



That's a 32" octagon barrel, double set triggers, Creedmoor rear sight, globe front sight, black walnut and color case-hardening galore. I must confess that my centerfire smokeless rifles have been quite neglected in their safes since I got the Sharps.

Older is better, revisited.

As some of my closer friends know, I'm a big fan of decent audio equipment. More often than not, I'll turn off the 42" Hitachi plasma HDTV and put on some Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. I don't profess to have golden ears - not even close. But I do know when something sounds downright wonderful inside my brainpan via my eardrums. Pratt & Whitney's TF-33 engine may have made a nifty little notch in my hearing response over a couple thousand hours' worth of jet flying time, but I still love good audio.

In my living room, I have a $1,300 JoLida 502A pentode integrated audio amp, being driven directly by the CD/DVD player. It sends the signal directly to the ESS/Heil speakers, no equalizer, tone controls, nothing. Just a straight shot, very clean and minimalistic.

For a long time, in my office/spare bedroom I was using an older Nikko NR-750 receiver to pipe my MP3 collection to a pair of floor-standing speakers. That was all well and good, but it never had the warm sound of my big JoLida. I agonized over getting another JoLida, building a compact tube amp, or finding a cheap one elsewhere.

Cheap tube amps are few and far between, particularly those worth a tinker's damn. So I started designing and breadboarding a small tube amp that would drive an iPod or computer's sound output into a decent set of desktop or bookshelf speakers (think along the lines of the venerable Radio Shack Minimus-7 and Minimus-77 series). I had the prototype nearly completely assembled when I saw an ad in my VA Canteen catalog which made my eyes pop out. There was a smallish, hybrid tube amp and docking station for the iPod, along with a small set of 2-way speakers! The price was equally eye-popping, and they sell for between $500-$700, depending on who's distributing them.

So, being curious, I dug a wee bit, and found out the system was made by HCT Electronics of Korea. From there it goes to different distributors, who put their own silkscreen logos on them, then add several hundreds of dollars to the price tag.

I found mine for all of $195.00, having a simple HCT label and nothing else. Without further ado, I give you the HCT HMS-100 Vacuum Tube Amplifier Speaker System with Dock and Remote:



And to bring it into a vintage frame of reference, a gratuitous B&W photo:



Now, to be perfectly honest, this is a hybrid tube amp, meaning it has a vacuum tube pre-amp stage, and a standard silicon transistor output stage hidden inside the chassis. That's why there are only two tubes in the front and one transformer - they're little 12AX7/12AT7 style tubes to boost the signal prior to going to the MOSFET final output transistors. The tall tube in the rear is a reproduction of the old tuning eye visual indicator, and serves only as a power or level meter, dancing with the signal.

Being a hybrid, it sports a nice 15 watts/channel, but has considerably more warmth and smoothness with the tube pre-amp stage than a comparable solid-state amp. It is still quite simplistic and elegant, having only a power switch, input selector toggle, and volume control. That's it! No tone or balance controls, no bass boost, nothing extra.

How does it sound? Quite nice, actually. I had to let the tubes burn in for a week or so before they settled down, but it's definitely a kick in the pants now. 15w/channel is more than enough to drive the included speakers, and actually drive my floor standing towers comfortably, too.

This will make a great Christmas present for the hard-to-shop-for guy or gal who enjoys audio and a minimalistic touch. I'm ordering a couple more for this Christmas, myself. I've got family members who will love it.

Alton Brown gets a case of ass, and grows man-boobs, too!

I confess - I used to really enjoy watching Good Eats. It was fun to watch, informative, and I even tried some of his recipes.

However, not too long ago, I saw an episode or three of The Next Food Network Star. Alton got a case of ass, and asked the judging panel if he could send the contestants home and start over. Yeah, sure. Like you were a big name on the Food TV circuit for a long time, and not an upstart yourself there, Alton, baby. Think about where you came from before you get snarky foot-in-mouth disease. You're not even close to Anthony Bourdain in that category, and your attempts at it really suck compared to Bourdain's polished delivery.

If you watch Iron Chef America, he snipes at Kevin Brauch on occasion, and his "Just walk away" schtick is tiresome at best. I'm sure the chefs have a pretty good idea of when their time's up, Alton, really.

So then there's the Alton-on-the-road series, named Feasting on Asphalt - The River Run. Yes he was a doofus, categorizing a stuffed porcupine as a nutria. I can forgive a city boy that gaffe. But my Gawd, watch the episode where he's wearing a tight-fitting black t-shirt! He definitely needs to spend time with Stacey and Clinton in What Not to Wear, because Alton has some serious man boobs. I mean, they'd make my high-school girlfriend jealous. Dude! He's also blimped up a goodly amount. No doubt about it, Alton has found himself on the receiving end of too much Good Eats, and it appears he needs to hire himself a personal fitness trainer.

So on a whim, I just google the terms Alton and man-boobs. Voila'! Funny he should post about people losing weight, when his definitely-bigger physique and impressive pecs aren't really from doing benchpresses: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=43847 And now there's the upcoming Next Iron Chef, which already displays Alton's newfound snark. Joy.

Here's a vidcap of him with Minnesota Smorgasbord Lady, (his) mammaries still quite evident:

Sometimes, even the good ones mess up...

Marko posted a stinker here:

"The spirit and intent of the Second Amendment protects AR-15s and HK91s before Marlin .30-30s and bolt-cranked aught-sixes. The ability to go and shoot deer and such is just a fringe benefit of the ability to be a counterbalance to an armed government. Next time some Fudd mouths off about how 'you don't need an assault rifle to hunt', remind them of the fact that they're just hanging on the coat tails of the rest of us. If the Supremes ever uphold Miller in all its implications, it would mean that the government can ban deer guns, but not military weaponry."

Yeah, sure. And the next time some ARFCOM groupie mouths off about "your bolt-cranked Remington 700 being an adjunct to the Second Amendment", ask him why you cannot use said rifle to become a long-range hero of the upcoming revolution...

Fudds are one thing, but elitism stinks from the other end, too. Nor does it help deliver the RKBA message. I apologize for Marko's posting - I honestly think he knows better.

The quality goes in, before the name goes on...

So I sat there for the better part of a rainy afternoon, carefully weighing 70gr of Goex Cartridge BP, seating a fiberboard wad, kissing the charge with a powder compression die, and then seating the 535gr Postell bullets. In the end, I was rewarded by 20 little soldiers, reminiscent of Emperor Qin's buried terracotta army standing aligned and at attention.



They were almost too pretty to shoot!

Since I won't be using a Mac for desktop publishing and web design...

I tore apart my IBM Intellistation M-Pro 6850 earlier last week. There was method to my madness, because I ripped out the two 1.7Ghz Xeon DP processors, and installed two 2.2Ghz Xeon DP processors as replacements. I then added four more RIMMs of 256mb 800/45 memory, for a grand total of 2.0Gb. I also put in my old ATI TV-Wonder PCI tuner card, to use as a DVR and video input device for editing. So far, so good, so it was time to turn the big black Monolith (Stanley Kubrick would probably agree) back on and watch the show:



No problem getting to the BIOS screen, so I enabled hyperthreading and let it reboot again. Voila'! XP Pro reported that it could make good use of the two hyperthreaded processors:




That's right, boys and girls, 4, count 'em, 4 each Xeon 2.2Ghz processors in the task manager! The bank consists of two hyperthreaded Xeon processors, so Windoze XP Pro sees 4 processors, two real and two virtual.

Now, you'll often hear that hyperthreading doesn't really offer an advantage for non-multithreaded apps. That's true, up to a point. If you have applications that hog a processor or do a lot of multi-tasking on your machine, multi-cpu and/or hyperthreaded processors offer a lot of extra headroom to allow those resource hogs to do their thing at 100% while shuffling background tasks to the additional processors. I learned that a long time ago with my first Tyan dual Pentium 166 running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation.

If you're like me and run multi-threaded stuff like Adobe Creative Suite, or most flavors of AutoCAD, you will definitely appreciate the extra horsepower. The same goes for the more popular applications that edit music and video - they can be quite computer intensive. So while my idea to use a PowerMac G4 for graphics and various media was a good one, my trials and tribulations with the platform simply pointed me into taking the easy route and loading more crunching power into my trusty monster of an IBM.

Just for giggles, I once again loaded BOINC and pointed it towards SETI@Home. This has been a type of benchmark I've always used to check the performance and durability of my various multi-CPU computers over the years. With the new processor and memory upgrades, each CPU can spit out one SETI Work Unit every 12 hours or so. That's not bleeding-edge fast compared to newer processors from Intel and AMD, but remember that little Task Manager graph I pictured earlier? This IBM Intellistation is relying on Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) to crank out 4 of those SETI Work Units every 12 hours, or 8 of them per day from just one computer. That ain't half bad.

You're going to see a lot more of the multi-CPU, hyperthreaded, Core 2, Dual Core, Core-Duo , Quad Core whatever processor labels in the near future. Why? Moore's Law has started to fall by the wayside as engineers struggle to shrink die sizes and cram more (Moore?) transistor junctions into a given square centimeter of silicon wafer. Barring any revolutionary breakthroughs in photolithography technology, processor speed has leveled off, pretty much reaching a plateau at the 65 nanometer circuit mask size. Efforts are underway to bring that down to 30 nanometers, but for now, CPU speeds have hit a speed bump near the 4 Ghz mark.

Nor does the clock speed of a processor really tell the whole story of how fast a given CPU will perform tasks. Cache and motherboard memory speed (in the x86 world, at least) usually lag behind the processor's internal speed, so the core is waiting precious clock cycles to retrieve data from cache and motherboard memory. Hyperthreading was a neat trick that made use of the core's down time waiting for external data to go ahead and process a second thread, timing things so that both threads wouldn't ostensibly interfere with each other as they hit the cache. As I mentioned before, having a second CPU on either the chip or the motherboard also allows multithreaded apps to keep crunching efficiently, or at least give some extra headroom to the first processor's task so it can run at 100%.

Since processor, cache, and memory speed have hit a temporary roadblock, Intel and AMD have thrown their eggs into the SMP basket, offering dual-core and quad-core CPUs to the general public, vs. being the exclusive domain of high-end workstations and servers. It would certainly be a bit of overkill, but could you imagine somebody buying a dual processor quad-core system with Hyperthreading enabled, just to browse the Web and send e-mails? Of course, they'd have to run Windows 2003 Server, the Vista equivalent, or a Linux distribution to make use of the mix of 16 real and virtual processors, but my goodness!

As a footnote, my wife, who has the same type of IBM workstation of her own, has been using my machine a bit more lately, and is quite vocal about how zippy it runs. It appears I will have to duplicate the CPU/memory upgrade for her as well. I guess that's only fair.

Tam's muse is back in full stride.

The erudite Ms. Tamara has written a concise entry here regarding something that's very near and dear to my heart.

That would be the Czech VZ-52 SHE rifle, in 7.62x45 Czech M-52 flavor, see the big chunk of wood and metal above and to the right.

For several years now, I've had something of an informational web page describing the rifle, its history, and the care and feeding thereof.

Of course, she has Oleg Volk's excellent photography to liven up her expose' of the obscure little rifle. How can I compete with that? (Yes, I'm jealous)

But I can't be too jealous. Here's the secret: I've been making and selling good reloadable 7.62x45 Czech brass for a while, pretty much about as long as my VZ-52 web page has been running. Most of the sales have been via word-of-mouth, but thanks to my recent military retirement and a few new techniques and tools, I've made a quality product even better and more available at the same time. Tam has helped me by letting the cat further out of the bag with her linky goodness. And for that, I am quite grateful.