December 2008 Archives
Sillysmart is proud and happy to announce yet another successful website launch. This site, a construction firm based out of Miami, will provide a nice base for the company to begin growing their web presence. Initially, the site would be a basic brochure-ware situation with minimal content, and as time goes by and the content becomes available (including images, of course), the site would expand and grow, and (ideally) so will the traffic.
The construction company is By His Grace Construction, and they, along with Riverside Electric, provide some of the best and most reliable construction services in South Florida. From permits to laying down foundations, By His Grace Construction will do it all. Visit their site, take a look at their projects, give them a call - you won't regret it.
The construction company is By His Grace Construction, and they, along with Riverside Electric, provide some of the best and most reliable construction services in South Florida. From permits to laying down foundations, By His Grace Construction will do it all. Visit their site, take a look at their projects, give them a call - you won't regret it.
G&P makes some of the sweetest-looking airsoft products out there, and that's a fact. Pretty much all of their airsoft guns are full-metal freakin' works of art. The best part is that they have some pretty original pieces, and they have some nicely futuretastic pieces too. I like their products.
I've been holding out for an M4 that fit the bill for a few months now, especially since Players 1st Airsoft announced that I could preorder the new G&P Defender that was coming out at the beginning of November. I checked out the specs and thought "Hello, nurse!" Everything but the kitchen sink was included, all for about $325USD. Can't beat it with a spoon. 8mm bearing mechbox, full Daniel Defense replica rail system, G&P's replica of the Aimpoint CompM2, even a front grip included. That's a lot of bang for the buck.
So I nabbed it. And it looked great. It even performed great. For about an hour, before I stripped the first piston. Several pistons later, and the fine folks at PFA finally reached a solution. Granted, it was a bit radical and involved extending and drilling into the piston to lighten it, but it's finally rock-solid. Turns out the piston was literally unable to keep up with the speed of the gears in their 8mm bearings and thus getting chewed all to hell. Yeah, pretty nasty stuff, but you can only imagine how fast this thing actually is.
Thing is, this isn't the only G&P this is happening to. Be aware of this if you're looking at a G&P airsoft product, and you don't have talent like PFA to turn to when you're literally going through a piston every week. The high-speed frictionless mechboxes are just crazy fast.
Fast forward about a month, and we've changed quite a bit internally, and even a few things externally. Internally, we've swapped out for a King Arms hop-up chamber and Element V-hop, pushing bb's through a PDI barrel. The gears are stock (and decent quality), but the piston has been modified significantly to keep up and the spring downgraded to keep to our local 350fps limits. I've installed a Cheetah MOSFET unit to get 3-round burst and just increase the overall performance of the carbine, and it's been an extremely effective upgrade.
Externally I've changed the RIS to the shorter Daniel Defense Omega 7 rail system. The full-size SOPMOD Block 2 rail system was just too long and heavy for my tastes - switching to the Omega really lightened the load a significant amount. Plus I really just had no reason to have that much rail... it felt awkward and a bit wierd. The crane stock has given way to a stubby 416 fixed stock (more room for the MOSFET and battery, plus it just feels more solid). I also replaced the G&P red-dot for a replica Aimpoint T1 Micro - significant improvements both in weight *and* in effectiveness. The T1 is fast to acquire and extremely compact. Very acceptable. The overall weight of the weapon was reduced by whole pounds... and that feels great after 4 or 5 hours of lugging it around the jungles of South Florida.
All this is just personal preference, of course - and there's not much left that makes the "Defender" what it is. But it's a great platform to start on and after some modification is rock solid with ultra high performance. Definitely a "high-potential" platform. At this point, I think I'm shooting (accurate 3 rnd bursts) out to about 120 feet, at 30rps and 345fps. All this on a low-output (1100 mAH) 9.6v battery. It's a great and extremely reliable gun once it's been tended to, albeit a touch high-maintenance in terms of how much work was required to get it to where it is. Thanks definitely go to Players First Airsoft for their help and expertise in making it fly.
I've been holding out for an M4 that fit the bill for a few months now, especially since Players 1st Airsoft announced that I could preorder the new G&P Defender that was coming out at the beginning of November. I checked out the specs and thought "Hello, nurse!" Everything but the kitchen sink was included, all for about $325USD. Can't beat it with a spoon. 8mm bearing mechbox, full Daniel Defense replica rail system, G&P's replica of the Aimpoint CompM2, even a front grip included. That's a lot of bang for the buck.
So I nabbed it. And it looked great. It even performed great. For about an hour, before I stripped the first piston. Several pistons later, and the fine folks at PFA finally reached a solution. Granted, it was a bit radical and involved extending and drilling into the piston to lighten it, but it's finally rock-solid. Turns out the piston was literally unable to keep up with the speed of the gears in their 8mm bearings and thus getting chewed all to hell. Yeah, pretty nasty stuff, but you can only imagine how fast this thing actually is.
Thing is, this isn't the only G&P this is happening to. Be aware of this if you're looking at a G&P airsoft product, and you don't have talent like PFA to turn to when you're literally going through a piston every week. The high-speed frictionless mechboxes are just crazy fast.
Fast forward about a month, and we've changed quite a bit internally, and even a few things externally. Internally, we've swapped out for a King Arms hop-up chamber and Element V-hop, pushing bb's through a PDI barrel. The gears are stock (and decent quality), but the piston has been modified significantly to keep up and the spring downgraded to keep to our local 350fps limits. I've installed a Cheetah MOSFET unit to get 3-round burst and just increase the overall performance of the carbine, and it's been an extremely effective upgrade.
Externally I've changed the RIS to the shorter Daniel Defense Omega 7 rail system. The full-size SOPMOD Block 2 rail system was just too long and heavy for my tastes - switching to the Omega really lightened the load a significant amount. Plus I really just had no reason to have that much rail... it felt awkward and a bit wierd. The crane stock has given way to a stubby 416 fixed stock (more room for the MOSFET and battery, plus it just feels more solid). I also replaced the G&P red-dot for a replica Aimpoint T1 Micro - significant improvements both in weight *and* in effectiveness. The T1 is fast to acquire and extremely compact. Very acceptable. The overall weight of the weapon was reduced by whole pounds... and that feels great after 4 or 5 hours of lugging it around the jungles of South Florida.
All this is just personal preference, of course - and there's not much left that makes the "Defender" what it is. But it's a great platform to start on and after some modification is rock solid with ultra high performance. Definitely a "high-potential" platform. At this point, I think I'm shooting (accurate 3 rnd bursts) out to about 120 feet, at 30rps and 345fps. All this on a low-output (1100 mAH) 9.6v battery. It's a great and extremely reliable gun once it's been tended to, albeit a touch high-maintenance in terms of how much work was required to get it to where it is. Thanks definitely go to Players First Airsoft for their help and expertise in making it fly.
The short answer? Entertainment. Making your TV look like it's tuned
to MTV... from 20 years ago (i.e. before MTV stopped playing music
videos, which most of you probably don't even remember, LOL.) Pushing
music all over the damned place. Keeping your movie collection from
bascially taking over an entire wall (or more).
I'm watching the Daft Punk video for "One More Time"... and space ninjas have just massacred the poor idiots listening to the sweet music. The Apple TV really is quite entertaining. Is it worth the $200? Mmmmm. Yeah, maybe, if you're a member of the technogeek clan. If not, it has a pretty high convenience-factor, but its utility may not be immediately obvious. Your friends will, however, be extremely jealous (even if they don't know what the hell that cool looking apple box on your TV stand actually does.)
The way I figure (and the biggest reason I got one) is to eliminate the boxes (literally two crates, a bookshelf, and a footlocker) full of movies. In theory, I could convert all my movies to a format that iTunes (or the Apple TV, or whatever) could read, and that would make my collection significantly more portable (not to mention accessible.) What movie to watch? Flip through 'em and pick away. All very cool, in theory.
The problem is, there's just not a lot of documentation on how the Apple TV actually works. Most people seem to just get one based on hype and speculation (I did.) Fortunately it does do most of what you imagine it does. Unfortunately it doesn't do them in the unimaginably cool ways you imagine it would do these things. Even the Apple people at the store were like "yeah, it does this and that, but we're not really sure how." That doesn't answer any questions, so rather than rely on "little ninjas from Apple magically carry your music and videos back and forth between your hard drive and your TV", I'm gonna - briefly - go over it. Maybe it'll help people "get it" a little better, and maybe then you'll run right out and get one. 'Cuz they're cool.
So you get an Apple TV. You pull it out of the sweet packaging and think to yourself "now what?" Plug it into your TV. Oh, but wait, your TV has to have component inputs. Awesome, that wasn't anywhere on the box. Assuming you have a TV that's modern enough to have component inputs and/or HDMI, plug that sucker in. Next, it'll connect to your network (wirelessly or wired, that's up to you and your network. The ATV handles everything equally well, in typical Apple fashion, with annoying ease.) So you connect to your network, and then... what? Here's where you have a couple of options, as long as you have *another* freakin' mac. Awesome.
Luckily I do. The ATV connects to iTunes to sync up media (kind of like a modest-sized iPod attached to your TV) or you can stream stuff to it. If you sync up, then the other Mac doesn't have to stay on. If you stream, you gotta keep it running. That isn't too big a deal, either way, I suppose... I mean, I keep my machines running pretty constantly... but most people will opt for the sync option (which is also the default method for the ATV.) The problem is, the hard-drive is freakin' tiny. 40GB or 80GB, either one is small by today's standards, and you're really not gonna be storing a ton of anything on there. Here's one place where the ATV does things kinda right.
It doesn't have to store music directly on the ATV. Technically you can stream everything from your comp, but the default behaviour, as I mentioned, is to sync up. Instead, you can stream music to it and only sync up movies. That's A Good Thing, because if you try to store both on you ATV, you're gonna run out of space pretty darned quick. Even so, you're gonna run out of space pretty quick. Which brings me to what sucks about the ATV.
The Apple TV doesn't connect to NAS (NAS = Network Attached Storage, for the non-geeky). How is this bad? Network Attached Storage is extra cool in that you plug a big enormous hard drive into your network, and voila, instant space available to every computer on the network (hence the name NAS). NAS is the pinnacle of convenience and awesomeness, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. ATV can't use it.
The Apple TV has a retardedly small hard drive. Because you can stream stuff, that's not too terrible a problem, but who wants to eat that kind of bandwidth all the time? If you're on a wired network it's also not a big deal (especially if you're one of the priveleged few to actually be on a sweet gigabit network.) Even so, the streaming thing requires another computer with iTunes on it to be on, it's a big fat hassle, blah blah blah. The solution? Easy: get a bigger hard drive!
I'm eyeballing a nice chubby 250GB hard drive, myself. It's like 80 bucks, but that much space will likely fill my needs. For now. Installation isn't bad - the instructions can be found here. Be aware of a couple of things, though: the ATV uses PATA or ATA-6, not SATA. If you don't know what those things are, you should probably reconsider going through this. Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that the method to store media on your ATV (i.e. via syncing) requires that you store a copy in your iTunes as well. That means that you will, for all intents and purposes, have two copies of any movie you've converted - one on your computer's hard drive (or external drive), and one on your ATV. In case you haven't added two and two yet, let me explain: if you get a 250GB hard drive for your ATV and plan on filling it up, be prepared to use up 250GB of space on your computer. As far as I can tell, you cannot just store media on the ATV.
I could be wrong about this, though. The iPod is capable of just storing media - it's just when you attempt to do a sync that it freakin' erases everything and causes much stress. So maybe the ATV is capable. Either way, better safe than sorry, right? Hell yeah.
That should answer at least a few questions about the Apple TV. At least, those were some of the questions I had when I was eyeballing it. I'm not even going into how to convert your movie collection - that's a whole other disaster. Suffice to say, look into Handbrake or iSquint. And be prepared for hours and hours of converting (it's not a fast process, although it is relatively painless.) Fine, fine, here's a really good article on how to convert your movies. More or less, LOL.
At the end of the day, I'm glad I got one, but it's definitely not for everyone. And it's definitely a toy. A cool, Apple-designed, whiz-bang toy. Mmmmm.
I'm watching the Daft Punk video for "One More Time"... and space ninjas have just massacred the poor idiots listening to the sweet music. The Apple TV really is quite entertaining. Is it worth the $200? Mmmmm. Yeah, maybe, if you're a member of the technogeek clan. If not, it has a pretty high convenience-factor, but its utility may not be immediately obvious. Your friends will, however, be extremely jealous (even if they don't know what the hell that cool looking apple box on your TV stand actually does.)
The way I figure (and the biggest reason I got one) is to eliminate the boxes (literally two crates, a bookshelf, and a footlocker) full of movies. In theory, I could convert all my movies to a format that iTunes (or the Apple TV, or whatever) could read, and that would make my collection significantly more portable (not to mention accessible.) What movie to watch? Flip through 'em and pick away. All very cool, in theory.
The problem is, there's just not a lot of documentation on how the Apple TV actually works. Most people seem to just get one based on hype and speculation (I did.) Fortunately it does do most of what you imagine it does. Unfortunately it doesn't do them in the unimaginably cool ways you imagine it would do these things. Even the Apple people at the store were like "yeah, it does this and that, but we're not really sure how." That doesn't answer any questions, so rather than rely on "little ninjas from Apple magically carry your music and videos back and forth between your hard drive and your TV", I'm gonna - briefly - go over it. Maybe it'll help people "get it" a little better, and maybe then you'll run right out and get one. 'Cuz they're cool.
So you get an Apple TV. You pull it out of the sweet packaging and think to yourself "now what?" Plug it into your TV. Oh, but wait, your TV has to have component inputs. Awesome, that wasn't anywhere on the box. Assuming you have a TV that's modern enough to have component inputs and/or HDMI, plug that sucker in. Next, it'll connect to your network (wirelessly or wired, that's up to you and your network. The ATV handles everything equally well, in typical Apple fashion, with annoying ease.) So you connect to your network, and then... what? Here's where you have a couple of options, as long as you have *another* freakin' mac. Awesome.
Luckily I do. The ATV connects to iTunes to sync up media (kind of like a modest-sized iPod attached to your TV) or you can stream stuff to it. If you sync up, then the other Mac doesn't have to stay on. If you stream, you gotta keep it running. That isn't too big a deal, either way, I suppose... I mean, I keep my machines running pretty constantly... but most people will opt for the sync option (which is also the default method for the ATV.) The problem is, the hard-drive is freakin' tiny. 40GB or 80GB, either one is small by today's standards, and you're really not gonna be storing a ton of anything on there. Here's one place where the ATV does things kinda right.
It doesn't have to store music directly on the ATV. Technically you can stream everything from your comp, but the default behaviour, as I mentioned, is to sync up. Instead, you can stream music to it and only sync up movies. That's A Good Thing, because if you try to store both on you ATV, you're gonna run out of space pretty darned quick. Even so, you're gonna run out of space pretty quick. Which brings me to what sucks about the ATV.
The Apple TV doesn't connect to NAS (NAS = Network Attached Storage, for the non-geeky). How is this bad? Network Attached Storage is extra cool in that you plug a big enormous hard drive into your network, and voila, instant space available to every computer on the network (hence the name NAS). NAS is the pinnacle of convenience and awesomeness, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. ATV can't use it.
The Apple TV has a retardedly small hard drive. Because you can stream stuff, that's not too terrible a problem, but who wants to eat that kind of bandwidth all the time? If you're on a wired network it's also not a big deal (especially if you're one of the priveleged few to actually be on a sweet gigabit network.) Even so, the streaming thing requires another computer with iTunes on it to be on, it's a big fat hassle, blah blah blah. The solution? Easy: get a bigger hard drive!
I'm eyeballing a nice chubby 250GB hard drive, myself. It's like 80 bucks, but that much space will likely fill my needs. For now. Installation isn't bad - the instructions can be found here. Be aware of a couple of things, though: the ATV uses PATA or ATA-6, not SATA. If you don't know what those things are, you should probably reconsider going through this. Also, I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that the method to store media on your ATV (i.e. via syncing) requires that you store a copy in your iTunes as well. That means that you will, for all intents and purposes, have two copies of any movie you've converted - one on your computer's hard drive (or external drive), and one on your ATV. In case you haven't added two and two yet, let me explain: if you get a 250GB hard drive for your ATV and plan on filling it up, be prepared to use up 250GB of space on your computer. As far as I can tell, you cannot just store media on the ATV.
I could be wrong about this, though. The iPod is capable of just storing media - it's just when you attempt to do a sync that it freakin' erases everything and causes much stress. So maybe the ATV is capable. Either way, better safe than sorry, right? Hell yeah.
That should answer at least a few questions about the Apple TV. At least, those were some of the questions I had when I was eyeballing it. I'm not even going into how to convert your movie collection - that's a whole other disaster. Suffice to say, look into Handbrake or iSquint. And be prepared for hours and hours of converting (it's not a fast process, although it is relatively painless.) Fine, fine, here's a really good article on how to convert your movies. More or less, LOL.
At the end of the day, I'm glad I got one, but it's definitely not for everyone. And it's definitely a toy. A cool, Apple-designed, whiz-bang toy. Mmmmm.
