Guns, Cars, and Tech

Author: wizardpc

  • Local police implement Boston strategy more quickly than expected

    This last Sunday, a local man murdered his wife and then ran away. Emulating Boston, they locked down the neighborhood to find one man:

    [Victim] was found dead in the couple’s home in the Governors Club neighborhood just before 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. [Suspect] was not at the scene when police arrived. An extensive overnight search for him came to and end shortly after 6:00 a.m. on Monday when [Suspect] was taken into custody without incident.

    During the search, police went door-to-door in the neighborhood and would not allow anyone in or out.

    For 12 hours, no one was allowed to enter or leave while police went door to door searching for a man who was not in the area being searched. (He returned home thinking police had left)

    No word on whether the locals used FLIR, MRAPs, or the National Guard.

  • Keep Calm and Carry One

    No, carrying a firearm would not have helped in Boston yesterday. It wouldn’t have hurt, either, but that’s another thing entirely.

    Two things that might have helped in the aftermath:

    1. A Trauma Kit
    2. The training to use it

    You can’t pick when these things happen.

  • The Economist Vs The Straw Man

    Instapundit linked to an article over the weekend originally titled The Envelope Method for Household Budgets is a Bad Idea (now titled “You’re probably doing your household budget all wrong”). Since I’ve been using that method for about 10 years now with great success, I clicked through.

    What I found was the most horrible piece of gibberish since the last time I read anything by Gail Kerr of The Tennessean.

    Take this example she lays out:

    The system works great, as long as nothing ever changes. But the minute that some price changes, you’re in trouble. Here’s an extreme example. Imagine you drive to work, and your “gas money” envelope contains enough money to get you to work for the month, and maybe a little cushion. But then gas gets more expensive. You may first react by switching to a worse grade—say, from premium to regular (research shows many people do this). But if gas prices go up even more you simply will run out of money in the gas envelope. And then you won’t be able to get to work. Strictly following the envelope system here would be much, much worse than “cheating”: It’s certainly bad for your household budget if you miss work.

    Well, it’s a good thing Ramsey has never advocated doing that. The point of the envelope system is not that you have to stop buying gas (or food in her next example) if you spend all the money in that category; the point is that you must recognize you have to cover the shortfall from some other category. You can’t just increase the amount you spend on any category because all the money is already spent.

    The writer understands this, because she covers it a couple of paragraphs later:

    It may very well be that you’d rather keep with your normal grocery purchase and cut back somewhere else—say, two fewer lattes this week.

    Yes. This is logical, and precisely what he tells you to do. There’s required category called “blow money” that you would use for things like morning lattes. You would take money from that category and use it to buy things you need to survive.

    But because the “coffee” budget is separate from the grocery budget, you end up with the same number of lattes and fewer bananas.

    Only if you were an idiot. In which case I want you to starve so you’ll get out of my gene pool.

    She then continues with an example of overspending on Christmas purchases…by two thousand dollars. I don’t think I’ve ever spend two grand on Christmas presents. There’s certainly no way I could ever overspend by that amount. And no one who’s following Dave Ramsey would ever overspend by that on a credit card, which is the example she provides.

    Bottom line: the article is a piece of crap with no bearing on reality. Dunning Kruger is in full force.

  • Public Service Announcement: Blog under attack (probably yours, too)

    I have a WordPress Plugin called Limit Login Attempts that I’ve been running for a while. It basically gives a quick and easy way to limit brute force attempts on your WordPress site by blocking IPs that have invalid logins. It’s pretty configurable for as simple as it is, and one of the things it will do is email you if an IP has been blocked.

    My email has been blowing up for the last three days.

    This happened in December and January, too. That’s about the same time as a couple pro-gun blogs were hacked and people were wondering if it was some sort of conspiracy. It’s not. It’s just script kiddies.

    So do two things today–today–if you run a WordPress site:

    1. Install Limit Login Attempts
    2. Rename the default ‘admin’ account to something else (and not to your domain name)

    I’d say 95% of my invalid login attempts use the admin account. The other 5% use “gunscarstech”, “gunscarstech.com”, “qwerty”, or “administrator” to log in. During the last attack, I added all the IPs to my global deny list at my hosting provider. You might want to do the same.

  • Help me pick an HTPC replacement

    Late last year, I built up a home theater PC to replace one that had died. It’s got a very pretty case designed to fit in with audio equipment (protip: if you’ve got young kids or large dogs, don’t hook up the power button to the motherboard. Use the reset switch instead). I put a Blu Ray drive, about 6 TB of storage, and a massive amount of RAM in it. It’s a hoss of a box, and I’m not going to be getting rid of it.

    The new house we bought has a great media room. It’s already wired for sound and has surround speakers in the ceiling. The HTPC would look great on the built-in media rack.

    Unfortunately, the media room is a converted attic space. It’s not connected to the central HVAC in any way. Instead, it’s got a 13 year old PTHP that only has “on” and “not on” as options. They’re kinda spendy to run, and spendy to replace with newer computer controlled models. What that means is that this room will only be climate-controlled when we’re using it, which probably tops out at 2 hours a day.

    Having an always-on server in that kind of situation is bad. I imagine that the room will get to probably 110F in the summer, before you add the waste heat that electronics produce.  I need some sort of set-top box that can do the following:

    • 7.1 audio out, via either optical or over HDMI
    • Handle a variety of video media in 1080p over DLNA or SMB, or run PLEX or XBMC natively.
    • Not get killed by frequent power cycling

    That last one is there because I’m probably going to put all my stuff on a switched outlet and power that guy off when we’re not using it.

    We have a Logitech Revue we’re using in the bedroom now. It’s okay, but it’s discontinued and underpowered.

    The Roku 3 looks like it meets all my criteria (PLEX has a Roku Channel or whatever it’s called)

    The VIZIO Co-Star looks like it has promise, too only does 5.1 sound, so it’s out. I can’t find anything definitive about the Sony NSZ-GS7. We won’t be getting cable at the new place, so most of Google TV’s features are wasted.

    A co-worker just got this and based on his experience, it’s probably not going to meet my needs.

    I haven’t considered any Blu-ray players with network features. Should I?

    What other boxes should I consider?

  • Maya Angelou’s Modified Joe Biden Home Defense

    Step 1: Violate Rule 4 and shoot through the door.

    I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said, “Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now!” Boom! Boom!

    Step 2: Lie to the cops about it.

    The police came by and said, “Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.” I said, “Well, I don’t know how that happened.”

    Marginally more felonious than Joe Biden’s “shoot into the air” strategy for home defense.

  • Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need “roads”!

  • It’s crazy that this even has to be considered

    Self defense bill would eliminate zero tolerance at schools

    NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) –
    The state House is voting on a bill that would allow students to fight without punishment if they are confronted at school.

    The new law would eliminate the notion of zero tolerance and allow students to fight back in self-defense or step in to defend a classmate without fear of punishment.

    Ever since Zero Tolerance reared it’s ugly head in the mid 1990s, it’s been the policy of most school systems to suspend kids for getting beaten up. The article has it slightly wrong when it says that today kids can get suspended for fighting back: they actually get suspended even if they don’t fight back.

    When I was a junior in high school (1998-ish), I found myself the target of some freshman who thought he could make a name for himself if he beat up an upper classman. In the four years I was at that school, there was ONE fight–and that involved kids from another school showing up in the parking lot. It just wasn’t the kind of school where that thing happened, and this kid saw an opportunity to “run the school” so to speak.

    He had started threatening me in front of his friends, so I went to the principal and the proto-school resource officer we had (really just a glorified custodian) and they both told me 1) they couldn’t do anything about it since he hadn’t technically violated any policy and 2) if he threw a punch both of us would be suspended for 2 days, even if I just sat there and took it.

    I directly asked both of them something along the lines of “So, the punishment for me is the same if I do nothing versus if I break the guy’s arm?” The answer was yes.

    That made it pretty easy for me. It was clear that avoiding punishment was not in my control. There was literally nothing I could to if this kid decided to escalate, so I decided to let him know it was in his best interest to back down.

    The next time the kid started puffing up at me, I calmly explained to him that if he initiated a physical confrontation, he would end up in the hospital. I outweighed him by 20 pounds. I was 4 inches taller than him. I had been in martial arts training for 8 years and spent some time on the wrestling team. He said something like “You won’t do that, you don’t want to get in trouble.” I told him about the conversations that I had, and how once the first punch was thrown, both of us were going to get punished no matter the result of the fight.

    I never had another problem out of him*.

    That’s why this policy is stupid and needs to be addressed. It defies logic that the victim should be punished at all, much less just as harshly as the assailant. If this kid had known up front that he could have had his ass kicked with no repercussions for his “victim” he probably wouldn’t have engaged in the behavior in the first place.

    Of course, if your point is to make the populace depend on other people for everything, it makes total sense.

    I’ll leave you by quoting the scariest part of the article:

    “I don’t think hitting is ever the right answer,” said Kay Dickson, a mother and grandmother. “I think the authorities need to take care of that. I don’t think I ever want to teach my children to hit back. I would want them to go tell someone to help authorities take care of it.”

    *After this confrontation, he set his sights on a girl in my class. That girl also happened to be my closest friend, a fact that he found out later. I think he transferred schools after that. Real winner, that one. These days, I’d probably have been charged with assault just for mentioning I could beat the crap out of him with my arm in a sling.

  • Great Moments in Journalism

    No bomb found at Smyrna home

    SMYRNA, TN (WSMV) –
    Emergency crews in Smyrna say there was no bomb found after investigating a home on Cheatham Drive near Old Nashville Highway.

    Officials had setup a staging area at a nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars building.

    All roads are now open in the area.

    Also not found at the home: Face Eating Monkeys, Unicorns, and the body of Jimmy Hoffa. Why the absence of those were not newsworthy is unclear.

  • Doppelganger

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