Amazing New PC Back Up Solution!

'Nough said......

Ever Wonder What's Inside A Silencer?

Well....you can go here and see!

Fascinating!

OpenSUSE 12.3

Seeing as I was off work yesterday (hint: I bought a lot of Immodium...), I decided to upgrade this PC to the latest version of the Linux distribution I prefer, OpenSUSE.

The download went fast, as we have FiOS here (35 meg service, up and down), and the download, 4.4GB, took about 25 minutes.

I backed up my /home directory to another hard disk, and began the installation.

30 minutes later I was done, and updating the packages. Even though I had a downloaded the latest complete distribution, there are times when the updates don't get folded in to the complete distro that's on the servers. I'm not sure how often they update the served version, but as with any Operating System, you should always do the updates after you finish installing it.

Then I spent some time customizing it, and turning off the eye-candy I don't care for, adding the repositories that have the multimedia and Amateur Radio programs I use, and transferring the things I needed from my backed-up /home directory, and I was off and running.

All told, I spent a couple of hours downloading, installing, and tweaking the new version.

I haven't noticed any huge differences between this version, 12.3, and the previous version, 12.1, I was running, but it's nice to be able to upgrade your OS for free.

I've been running Linux since about 1995, and SuSE/OpenSUSE since shortly after that. I started with Red Hat (aka "Head Rat"), tried several other distributions, and one day when I was at CompUSA looking to see if the new version of Red Hat was out, I spotted one I hadn't seen before, SuSE, which stood for " Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development).

Since it listed numerous Amateur Radio packages on the "What's In The Box" side panel, I bought it. It installed easily, and with the included configuration tools, I was online in a short time.

Keep in mind this was back when if you wanted to use Linux, you had to get a couple of books, READ THEM, and tinker with the software to get your hardware working.

And not all hardware was supported!

You had to be careful what video card you bought, and you had to get a real "hardware" modem. "Soft" modems and "Win" modems simply would not work as the hardware was dependent on Windows doing a lot of the processing to extract the data stream from the audio.

The first time I installed a proper modem, it took me the better part of a week to get it running, and connected to my ISP.

And if configured your video card improperly, it would happily send the wrong signals to your monitor, resulting in garbled video at best, and blown monitor at worst!

Ethernet cards were another matter entirely, and 90+% of the Ethernet cards were supported, as Linux has always been a networking friendly OS. Buy a 3Com card, and you were golden!

It really paid off to have a dedicated machine for Linux, as it could be a bit, uhhh, "interesting" to get it running properly, and I finally built another PC just to run/learn Linux on.

Things have gotten much more refined since the early days of Linux, and installing and using Linux has never been easier. Most modern hardware, and almost all vintage hardware, is supported, and Linux is a great way to revive an older PC that doesn't have the horsepower to run newer (XP and newer) versions of Windows.




Long live the lizard!

Not Guilty

I'm staying home and listening to my scanner.

So far it's quiet in in SoCal, other than the usual Saturday night nuttiness.

Let's just hope it stays that way.......


**UPDATE**

Pretty quiet in El Ay last night.

Nothing happened in The LBC.

Let's hope it stays that way.....

Ladies and Gentlemen....The "Duke" has Arrived!

And boy, is it nice!

Duke came in a nice travel case:

And he's a very handsome fellow.

He must have to some strange foreign place, as the local custom caused him to be branded with a "cartouche".

Hes a very late model, with a serial number in the high 5 millions (57xxxxx). According to one of my books, that would place him in the second-to-the-last batch made by Springfield Armory.

I had hoped for a WWII model, but seeing as I'm a child of the Cold War, I guess its more fitting that I received a rifle from the Korean War era.

When I opened it up today, My buddy who runs the mail box store I use looked at it, held it, and just about drooled over it. I looked at the serial number and realized it was a very late one, probably from the post-war production runs.

He's Korean, and I told him there was a chance that this rifle had helped defend his homeland. He lovingly patted it, and said "Thank you, Mr. Garand".

The receiver is in excellent condition, with only very, very light pitting, which you can barely see.

The tag that came with it rates the barrel as "0+", and the chamber as "1+", which goes right along with it having a new barrel.

So now I have to get the books out and study them. I'll want to carefully inspect it, and properly lube it with grease. ALL the books I've read say to use grease, and NOT oil, and all he has right now is a light coating of oil.

The wood on him is just beautiful, and looks "furniture quality" to me as far as grain patter goes.

Which brings up a question........What do I use on the stock? Linseed oil? Tung Oil? Pledge? I don't remember if my Garand books go into the proper care of a new stock, and this one looks like brand new, bare wood to me.

Besides the travel case, he came with a COA, a very nice instruction manual, a plastic thing to put in the unloaded rifle to tell you the chamber is empty, a new canvas sling, and one clip.

To borrow a line from "Casablanca", I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
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"Duke" Is On His Way

WHOO-HOO!

I received the shipping notice from the CMP this afternoon.

Since they ship FedEx overnight, I'll pick him up tomorrow on my way home from work.

Then I'll spend some time learning how to field strip and clean him, and make plans to hit the range.

8 x 8 x 8 LED Cube

I WANT ONE!



And it's available as a kit from Jameco, a company I've bought many, many things from.

Meanwhile, at Long Beach Airport.....

A banner tower went down on takeoff.

Looks like he struck a power pole, sheared off a wing, and came down on an embankment of the 405 freeway.

He walked away.....

And he just barely cleared the freeway....

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Happy Independence Day!

I know you all remember what it took to get our country started, and may God be with us if we have to do it again.

And thank you to all who have served. It's a duty and an honor I wasn't allowed due to circumstances.


I'm goofing off.

ALL

DAY

LONG!


Well.....not really. The YF is recovering from minor surgery, so I'm doing laundry, swabbing out the head, and flying Mr. Kirby around today.

Be safe and sane out there.....
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Additional Proton-M Video

This is the video I first saw.

About 8~10 seconds after impact and fireball, the shockwave hits the cameraman.

Ours didn't get this bent out of shape. We went pretty much straight up, coasted after the engines shut down, and then plopped down into the water.

This sucker went BOOM in a really big way!


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Proton-M Launch Failure

Having been through something similar back in January, I feel for these guys.

Most people don't understand that while we've been launching liquid fueled rockets for over 70 years now, it's still not a 100% reliable process. Even with improved technologies like materials science, metallurgy, instrumentation, and a host of other things, sometimes rockets go BOOM.

Pretty complete coverage over at the "NasaSpaceFlight.com" website.