The Missing Box

I have a Love/Hate relationship with UPS. I get a lot of packages, so delivery services are an important part of my life. Back in the old days, without a doubt, UPS was the best. It wasn't even a close contest. Then, the strike happened, and it's never been the same since. Around here, in today's world, I'd rank them tied for 2nd with Fedex behind USPS. DHL is definitely last. The reason they're low? The distribution center for the Dallas area is terrible. Now, I have another reason to rank them lower.....

If you'll indulge me by turning back the calendar to late spring, you might remember that I got a Lenovo 4K monitor that wasn't working and RMA'd it back to them since it was under warranty. At this point, the whole thing turned into a comedy of errors. 

We'll start this with Lenovo, mishandling this by having me return it to Best Buy, then sending it back saying that they don't repair monitors. That was followed by me contacting them and receiving a promise that they'd "look into it". This was followed by a company I never heard of sending me an email stating that I was to receive a package. No mention what the package was or why. Tracking then indicated that this mystery package was delivered, but there was no package at my house.

As you might imagine; this led to contact with UPS, and ultimately Lenovo who told me that the mystery company was a distributor and the box was my replacement monitor! Furthermore, UPS showed that the package was delivered successfully!!! This then led to a 4 month back-and-forth between myself and Lenovo with me getting progressively more agitated and them convinced that I was trying to get another free monitor. 

Then this happened. Out-of-the-blue, the doorbell rings yesterday afternoon when no one was expected. At the door was an older woman with 3 young kids that I figured, must be trying to sell something. What she had to say was that she lives at 102 Redwood (we live at 120) and that there was a package addressed to me that they've "had for a while"...... Would I like to come down and get it. Up the street at their house in the entryway where apparently it's been since MAY 28th, was my monitor!!! They've had it for over 4 months!!! It hadn't been opened, nor indeed, moved. They just hadn't felt the need to get it to the addressee. I'm not sure who to be angry at!?! Lenovo for it's abysmal communications, UPS for the dyslexic driver, or the strangely unmotivated neighbor? I guess, in the end, I'm just glad I got my monitor.

A Bigger Bang for The Frugal Propellerhead Buck!

I'm sure some of you could see where all this BB/Pellet gun stuff was leading, right? Yup, after lots of not so subtle hints and months of gun magazines laying around the house, I finally dropped the bomb on my wife this weekend. What happened was that we were doing the family birthdays early since my in-laws are going on an extended "fall foliage" trip to the Northeast starting this week. Mine, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's birthdays all fall within a couple of week of the end of September and beginning of October. So, my wife has been harrassing me about what I wanted for my birthday, which has always been a bit of a chore anyway since my interest tends toward the esoteric. 

I finally decided to shoot straight (I know, terrible), and tell her I wanted a handgun. No, not the PPK with a suppressor. My love of all things James Bond only goes so far; not that I don't love the PPK! More on this later. Over the course of the whole pellet gun adventure, she had been quizzing me about my interest in guns anyway. And I had filled her in on my long-standing interest in the things going back to when I actually owned a number of them in my younger years before we ever met. I had subsequently sold them when I was working in higher education and living "on campus" where I couldn't have them.  But I've always had an abiding interest in them both from a historical (collecting) standpoint as well as to shoot them....

..... at one point owning a couple of different Ruger Mk II semi-automatics in .22LR and a Ruger Security Six along with a Marlin 995 Semi-auto .22LR and Rossi Model 62 copy of the old Winchester pump .22 design.

Do I wish I would have kept them all those years ago? Probably, but that's water under the bridge now. My interests are less in revolvers and 19th century designs anyway, so on to what's going on now!

At the moment; this is the target. The "Wonder 9s", or more specifically..... modern, polymer-framed, high-capacity, striker-fired, 9mm handguns. There's a lot of them out there, ranging from the rather pedestrian Smith & Wesson M & P (Military & Police) for $350 to $400, to the $800-$900 H&K/Sigs or the ubiquitous Glocks at the middle price-point. features and performance tend to be fairly similar, but the build quality and country of origin. The progression on price/build-quality equation seems to go from import to American made back to import (from Germany, Austria or Switzerland) going from low to high. So, firearms from manufacturers like Taurus, Star, etc. from places like Spain and Brazil tend to be lower. Then we get American manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson in the middle, followed of course, but the Glocks, H&Ks and Sig Sauer being the most expensive. 

Then you have a few "out-lyers" in the market such as this Canik made in Turkey which is a copy of the Walther P99 and of excellent quality according to virtually all reviews as well as..

the well-known and well-thought of CZ offering such as the above CZ-75 made in the Czech Republic. So, what am I interested in?

This is the one. The Walther PPQ M1. Why not the Bond-esque P99? Yes, it's a fine pistol, but here's my reasoning. 

• The main-line Walther grips feel great in my smallish hands, whether that be the P99 or the PPQ and indeed the compact CCP as well.
• The PPQ is often referred to as the updated and improved P99 with a better double-action trigger system.
• The PPQ has the standard M1913 Picatinny rail that makes it easier to mount laser and such on to.
• The P99 has been out of production for several years and the "first version" (which I like best) tends to be difficult to find and when found tends to be at least $100 (or more), more expensive than the PPQ. This is probably the deciding factor.

However, there's a couple of other possibilities as well.

One is the Canik which of course is a Walther copy, but barring finding a PPQ/P99 at an affordable price, there's also a "dark horse"; the Magnum Research MR9 Eagle. It's a Walther P99 polymer frame, with a Magnum Research stainless slide mounted. This German-American cooperative effort came in two flavors, with the one you see here as half and inch longer than the 4" version. Most critically, they aren't well known and as a result sometimes sell for substantially less than either the P99 or PPQ. No you know. I'll update you guys when I've locked onto a target!

The "Next Level" Workstation

And so it begins...... the project to upgrade my "Blackbird" workstation. It's current configuration of Intel Z77 chipset powered by an i7-3770 of the "Ivy Bridge" generaton has just about run it's course as a front-line workstation.

My decision is to move away from the "enthusiast" route toward the true workstation hardware.  Which means choosing a processor from the Xeon line instead of the consumer oriented "Core" line. These CPUs pretty much can't be overclocked, which is something I don't engage in anyway. Of course, there are other features as well, after weighing the pluses and minus, I decided a high core count and low cost was the way to go leading me to a Xeon E5-2630L which is a low powered (55w) chip with 8 cores on board! I decided that even at a slow 1.8Ghz clock speed would be fine for 16 hyper-threaded cores. For what I do, and it's $85 cost, this would be a great LGA-2011-3 starting point.

 Of course, there's always a "fly in the ointment" in one way or another. Right now, it's the cost of DDR4 memory. So, I'm going to start with 16Gb. I know...... woe is me!!! Well, it is a downgrade for me since I'm running with 32Gb right now. I'll get 16Gb more at some point in the next year which will get me halfway to the 64Gb capacity. I can live with that. Other bugs?

 

Well..... there is this little thing..... I bought a board that was inexpensive because it has some bent pins. So, yeah.... I have got a tedious little task in front of me to get them all straightened. It isn't a trivial task, but I've done it before.

A fun weekend to look forward to, but after that....... Blackbird Mk II flies again!

The $50 Gaming PC Upgrade for My Son

A few of you might recognize my son's gaming machine. It was built around an ASRock H67 Mini-ITX LGA-1155 board which began life with a Sandy Bridge i5 CPU. It's nVidia GTX 650 got upgraded to a GTX 750ti last year. With an Intel 160Gb SSD paired with a Samsung 500Gb drive for mass storage. Over the 2 to 3 years of it's life, it's been a pretty nice machine and my son has been very happy with it. 

 

Let's be clear here: my son isn't playing heavy duty first person shooter games like Metro Last Light, or Skyrim! He's more of a Minecraft kid....

In the last year or so, he has gotten more into Steam so there is a bit of a progression. 

Although, his current favorite (Subnautica) isn't particularly challenging for the hardware either. However, me being me..... I'm always keeping an eye out for upgrades, and in my world, $50 is around the price of an "impulse buy" that doesn't require a lot of planning.

It all started with this; the EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.. I saw it on the local Craigslist for $65, offered $50 and it went into his computer knowing full-well that he didn't need it.

Then came this.....the famous "Igloo" case, or the Carbide 380t by Corsair which is it's actual name. I've always wanted to get this case and do something fun in it ever since I first saw it. However, it's a little pricey and damn hard to find. A few months after the 750ti, I saw this on CL for $50 (firm), so I gave the guy his money and it sat in the corner of my office with no particular job for most of a year. It came without screws, fans or anything else, but what self-respecting builder doesn't have tons of that stuff sitting around. 

About a month after that, I found this; an ASRock H110M-ITX/ac for..... you guessed it..... $50 on Craigslist...... The board was practically "new in the box" and now I had my first Skylake/Kabylake, DDR4 motherboard. I knew it was going into the 380t case, but had no idea what I was building it for....

To finish up with the theme here, I picked up an LGA1151 Intel Pentium G4400 for $50 on eBay. So, I'm up to $200 total, $50 at a time spread out over roughly a year. Admittedly, by this time, I knew what I was going to do with this machine which is why I went cheap on the Pentium vs. a more expensive Core i3/i5. Obviously, this thing was heading toward it's destiny of becoming my son's "new" gaming PC. Given the kind of games he plays at the moment, this CPU wouldn't be a problem.

At this point, my $50 theme breaks down, but hey; I did pretty good up till now, right!?! You're probably aware that DDR4 is pricey right now, and I'm kind of a "RAM guy". I refuse to use cheap and/or what I consider an inadequate amount. So, here are the issues:

• In the current computing world, 8Gb is pretty much the de-facto standard
• DDR4 is expensive- roughly $150 for 16Gb in 8Gb module pairs
• Mini-ITX boards routinely have 2 sockets for memory
• Individual 8Gb modules run $70 or more 

Which leaves me with the following scenario: Buy 1 stick of 8Gb at around $70 per,..... or buy a pair of 4Gb modules at around the same outlay, then at some point in the future when I want to upgrade, having to pull out what I have, to put in more. You can imagine what I ended up doing, right? I bit the bullet and bought a pair of Crucial Ballistix Tactical for $108. More than what I wanted to spend, but not terrible in the big pciture, as you'll see.

The last thing I needed to buy was a power supply. I found one of those Newegg sales that also had a "mail-in rebate". It was $37 on sale and the rebate will be $20 more, so yeah.... it's $17 dollars! That's more like it! Not fancy, but solid and will provide plenty enough power for anything that might go into this case, now or in the future. So, that's it. That's all I bought. There's more things that go into a computer, right?

Of course there is. It needed storage and some fans, along with a few cables. It got the 600Gb Intel 3500 from my workstation (it getting a rebuild soon, shhhhhh), the 2.5", 500Gb Samsung mechanical drive that was in his old machine for "mass storage", and a pair of NZXT FN V2, 140mm case fans that was left over from previoius projects. Of course, these didn't cost anything. These fans are so quiet, that my son commented on it. You might also be wondering if I have upgrades planned.

 

If pushed, I'd say that, over the life of this machine, at some point, it'll probably get the above upgrades. More powerful GPUs such as a GTX x60, x70, or a "10 Series" card appear on Craigslist inexpensively all the time, so that will most likely happen first. During it's mid-cycle time-frame, it'll probably get an Intel Core i5 along with a water cooler; not because it needs it, but because, he'll think it's "cool"! At this point, I've spent $325 spread out over a year to year and a half. I just sold his old machine (with the 750ti replaced with a 650, and 160Gb Intel SSD replaced with a 500Gb mechanical HDD) for $350, so I'm upgrade with a net $25 gain!

The "Nighthawk" and Airgun DIY Nirvana

Sitting down at the post office right now is the Walther "Nighthawk" by Umarex. It's undoubtedly a cool and interesting product, but my story related to it is kind of interesting as well. So stay tuned.... 

As you're aware few months ago when I started becoming interested in airguns, the Nighthawk was actually one of the first ones that I found on eBay. As you can imagine, I was hooked, right from the beginning. But for a variety of reasons, I decided against spending the $140 or so that it was bidding at on eBay and went with a brand new Walther PPQ (again, by Umarex). I've certainly not regretted that decision and the PPQ has been an accurate, solid, fun gun. 

Despite, subsequently picking up a wide variety of airguns long, short, more advanced as well as less advanced, I've never gotten the Nighthawk out of my head.

Let's examine it more closely and I'll describe what I ended up doing:

The "Nighthawk" as a product actually began back when Crosman had the Walther licensing and created several products copied from the"real steel" guns of that German manufacturer. These included the PPK, the P38, as well as the P99, a variant of which that was adapted to become the "Nighthawk". I know this because I now own one marked "Crosman"!

What's the story? After I let that first one go on eBay, I kept an eye out for them and found one about a month ago. Unfortunately it didn't have all the parts that make the Nighthawk, the "Nighthawk"......just the gun. But I it was cheap..... $26. Just the "magazine" which holds the CO2 cartridge cost more than that, so it was a good deal. The version that Crosman/Umarex uses as the basis is the CPSport, which is essentially a double-action only version of the more sophisticated (and more expensive), CP99 (which I'll get to later). What makes this airgun so interesting? First, it's barrel is threaded to take a screw-on "device". There's a "Tactical" version that has a compensator/muzzle-brake, or in this case, a faux suppressor. I guess you can call it a muzzle-brake if you'd prefer since there are holes all over it, but if those holes are covered and the space filled loosely, it would in fact function as a suppressor. Although the vast majority of modern pistols whether air or gun-powder driven have a accessory rail today, this one has a cage style mount attached to that rail which then gives it four rails, one of which is a long one above the the slide on which is mounted a "red-dot" optical sight. It also comes with a rail mounted flashlight which has a momentary switch.

So yeah, when fully loaded, this thing look like something from Star Wars Very Han Solo-esque.....  "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."

But, up until today, I didn't have one...... a factory constructed one that is...... 

So I set out to make my own. One that was better than the official version..... the Frugal Propellerhead way! Here's what I did. 

1. I bought a CP99. The most sophisticated version which had single-action trigger ability. It was $60, plus $10 shipping.
2. I found and bought a cage style mount that came from a Crosman C11. It was $15 after shipping and came with a rail-mount laser aiming device that now lives on the PPQ.
3. I tracked down a company in England that made an adapter which had a 1/2" x 28 thread for the CP99 which allows me to mount a "device" on the muzzle of the gun. It was about $20 in dollars after shipping.
4. I found a TruGlo red-dot optical laser sight which a local pawn shop was happy to sell me at $20 "out-the-door" (this means, tax included).
5. On Wednesday, a $30 device came from Wisconsin. It's solid and can't be an actual suppressor, but it looks every bit like one.

So, for $155, I made my own "Nighthawk", although, in fact, it was less since part of the $15 was for a laser sight that didn't end up being part of it and it's a better package period, since the gun is the more sophisticated SA model. 

So, despite the fact that the "Nighthawk" is out of production, it can be recreated with, patience, determination and a bit of luck.It should be a fun weekend comparing the actual thing against my home-built version. Labor Day couldn't have come at a better time!