Over the past couple of years there has been a surge of interest in .22 Rimfire in Canada (at least from my perspective). Arguably, it could be traced to the start of Project Mapleseed back in 2017, which then spawned the Canadian Rimfire Precision Series in 2018, and now this year the Outlaw Rimfire Precision Series. My friends south of the border have Project Appleseed and the National Rimfire League. As you can see, plenty of opportunity to participate/compete with the humble .

The 8mm Mauser (7.92x57mm) round, in it’s current incarnation, has been around since 1903. It is a improvement of the original 7.92x57mm cartridge that was developed in 1888 by Peter Paul Mauser. Arguably, 8mm Mauser has been one of the world’s most popular cartridges, having seen significant military and civilian use over the past 100+ year. It also influenced the design of many of today’s cartridges, such as .30-06. Finding good 8mm Mauser ammunition (in Canada at least) is becoming harder.

After an amateur attempt at trying to calculate the BC of the Norinco 7.62x39mm ammunition, I thought I would do the same thing with Norinco’s 7.62x51mm ammo. As one would expect, this stuff is fairly inexpensive as well, running aroun $0.50/round. I don’t think this is “precision ammo”, but it works well enough in my rifle. First off, I pulled one bullet apart, and weight it. The projecticle itself weight 146.

On of the great things about 7.62x39mm rifles (like the SKS) is that (for the time being) ammo is fairly inexpensive. A fellow who keeps his eye open for a deal can find 7.62x39mm in the range of $0.16CAD (for corrosive) to $0.30CAD (for non-corrosive) ammo. Of course being surplus ammo, finding ballistics data on this ammunition can be a bit of a trick. Granted, the 7.62x39 cartridge isn’t exactly a “precision” round, but intellectual curiousity had me wondering what the ballistic coefficient (BC) of this Norinco ammo was.

I have a Samsung Gear Live. One day, all of sudden, it wouldn’t turn on after I had it charging in it’s little charging dock. I thought the problem was with the watch, and Google the symptoms led me to one of two conclusions: The watch was defective, and I should send it back under warranty. I could fix the problem by taking the watch apart, disconnecting the battery for a minute, and then reconnecting the battery.

(Note: This is an updated version of a post from June, 2015) In May, 2015 at Google announced a data binding library for Android. The data binding library is currently in beta, so things might change and make what I am saying here irrelevant/obsolete. When in doubt, consult the official documentation. It’s long overdue – developers no longer have to come up with their own schemes for displaying or retrieving data from their views.

This weekend I finally broke down and installed a Nest thermostat in my house. They have a nice compatibility wizard which does a pretty good job of showing you how to wire up your Nest based on the wires you can see in your existing thermostat. There were two gotchas that their wiring diagram didn’t cover. Here is a picture of the old thermostat (a Rodgers-White): Notice that there were two W wires.

Just recently I acquired a new quadcopter – a WL Toys 959. Total cost to me was about $75.00 and I ordered from Amazon.ca. I picked this because of the low cost and the fact that it came with camera that can do both photo and video and it was relatively inexpensive. First attempts at flying the quadcopter proved somewhat crash prone, so I ended up reading the manual and checking out some YouTube vidoes on quadcopter flight.

8mm Mauser is a great round, problem is that in North America it’s not always easy to find good 8x57mm ammunition. When you do manage to find it, it tends to bit a bit expensive, > $1.00/round. Here is where hand loading pays itself off. I used to handload my own 8x57mm, however I stopped for a few years and now I can’t seem to find my old load data. This isn’t a horrible thing as it means I get to go to the range to test out new recipes.

I spent a little bit of time since Christmas working on an Android application that will download velocities from my Shooting Chrony Beta Master. First I pair my Android phone to my Shooting Chrony via bluetooth. A couple of taps on the screen, and lo, shot data is retrieved: The app itself isn’t ready for public consumption, but as a proof of concept it is encouraging to see. I uploaded a video of this to YouTube so you can see the application in action.