Month: March 2017

USA -(Ammoland.com)- When Ontario Knife Company (OKC) recently introduced the Carter Prime, it quickly became a top seller, and for good reason.

The Prime was designed by Robert Carter (son of longtime OKC designer Joe Pardue and grandson of legendary designer Mel Pardue) to be world class and it proved to be so.

Now, fans of the Carter Prime can look forward to the knife’s sequel: the Carter 2quared (pronounced: ‘squared’). Like its precursor, this new design by Robert Carter has been built with premium materials for uncompromised use in the field.

The design of the Carter 2quared is clearly aggressive, intended to reflect its overbuilt nature. “The vision for our collaboration with Robert Carter is to create products that engender absolute confidence,” said Deneb Pirrone, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at OKC. “This product is built to perform dependably throughout a lifetime of vigorous overuse. The Carter 2quared looks like it wants to be used and this work ethic is reflected in its ability to perform.”

The foundation of the Carter 2quared starts with its titanium handle. Titanium has the highest strength-to-density ratio of any metallic element, and includes inherent corrosion resistance, including in saltwater environments.

Plus, titanium is an ultra-lightweight material, which minimizes weight in pocket or pack. The ergonomic handle is designed for sure grip in slippery situations.

The business end of the Carter 2quared is a 3.55-inch (9.02 cm) drop-point blade constructed of D2 Steel. This metal features elevated chromium levels for superior corrosion and stain resistance while maintaining a hardness of 59-60 HRC.

Since this is a very hard tool steel, the knife is considerably abrasion resistant and durable in the face of heavy use. The titanium frame lock is designed to keep the blade in place even under considerable stress. With the blade open, the overall length spans 8.375 inches (21.31 cm).

The OKC Carter 2quared is made in Taiwan and designed and distributed in the USA.

About Ontario Knife Company:

Founded in 1889, the Ontario Knife Company is an award-winning knife, cutlery, and tool manufacturer operating out of Upstate New York for over 125 years. OKC produces a wide range of tools, including cutlery and kitchenware, hunting and fishing knives, machetes, survival and rescue equipment, science and medical tools, and tactical knives. OKC has a long tradition of building knives and tools for the U.S. military, producing high quality equipment that has seen continuous service since WWII. In addition to being a major supplier to the U.S. Armed Forces, OKC leverages a network of distributors, dealers, and major commercial retailers to sell its products nationwide and internationally to over 35 countries. OKC’s custom manufacturing division Jericho Tool, advances capabilities including a broad-spectrum of injection molding, tool and die, and machining operations to provide white label and OEM manufacturing services for consumer and industrial goods. Collectively OKC’s product lines and manufacturing services reach the house wares, sporting goods, tactical, security, law enforcement & first responders, education, science & medical, and industrial & agricultural industries.

For more information about Ontario Knife Company and its industry-leading line of advanced knives, machetes, edged products and specialty tools, contact Ontario Knife Company at P.O. Box 145-26 Empire Street · Franklinville, NY 14737 · Telephone (716) 676-5527 · Or visit their website. The Ontario Knife Company is a subsidiary of publicly traded Servotronics, Inc. (NYSE MKT – SVT).

This post Designer Robert Carter Over-Delivers Again with OKC’s Newest Utility Knife appeared first on AmmoLand.com Shooting Sports News .

via AmmoLand.com Shooting Sports News
Designer Robert Carter Over-Delivers Again with OKC’s Newest Utility Knife

In this blog post, we’ll look at how “operator error” can cause serious problems (like the one we saw last week with AWS), and how to avoid them in MySQL using

--i-am-a-dummy

.

Recently, AWS had some serious downtime in their East region, which they explained as the consequence of a bad deployment. It seems like most of the Internet was affected in one way or another. Some on Twitter dubbed it “S3 Dependency Awareness Day.”

Since the outage, many companies (especially Amazon!) are reviewing their production access and deployment procedures. It would be a lie if I claimed I’ve never made a mistake in production. In fact, I would be afraid of working with someone who claims to have never made a mistake in a production environment.

Making a mistake or two is how you learn to have a full sense of fear when you start typing:

UPDATE t1 SET c1='x' ...

I think many of us have experienced forehead sweats and hand shaking in these cases – they save us from major mistakes!

The good news is that MySQL can help you with this. All you have to do is admit that you are human, and use the following command (you can also set this in your user directory .my.cnf):

mysql --i-am-a-dummy

Using this command (also known as safe-updates) sets the following SQL mode when logging into the server:

SET sql_safe_updates=1, sql_select_limit=1000, max_join_size=1000000;

The safe-updates and iam-a-dummy flags were introduced together in MySQL 3.23.11, and according to some sites from around the time of release, it’s “for users that once may have done a DELETE FROM table_name but forgot the WHERE clause.”

What this does is ensure you can’t perform an UPDATE or DELETE without a WHERE clause. This is great because it forces you to think through what you are doing. If you still want to update the whole table, you need to do something like WHERE ID > 0. Interestingly, safe-updates also blocks the use of WHERE 1, which means “where true” (or basically everything).

The other safety you get with this option is that SELECT is automatically limited to 1000 rows, and JOIN is limited to examining 1 million rows. You can override these latter limits with extra flags, such as:

--select_limit=500 --max_join_size=10000

I have added this to the .my.cnf on my own servers, and definitely use this with my clients.

via Planet MySQL
MySQL, –i-am-a-dummy!

Link

(PG-13: Language) The merc with a mouth drops by to remind us of his existence with this hilarious parody of a famous superhero trope, a Stan Lee cameo, a pint of delicious ice cream, some fast moving smallprint, and more snark than you can shake a stick at.

via The Awesomer
Deadpool 2 (Teaser)

Ryan Reynolds has made our collective dreams come true by unveiling the clip that teases Deadpool 2‘s impending arrival. Freak-out time!

Slashfilm originally reported that a Deadpool teaser, called “No Good Dead,” is playing before Logan in theaters. Now it’s available to watch in all its Chimichanga glory. The clip features Reynolds, as Wade Wilson, witnessing a crime and (with much difficulty) changing in a phone booth to try and stop it. Sadly, it doesn’t quite work out, but at least he and the victim share a nice moment. There’s even a Stan Lee cameo!

Some people are reporting that this isn’t the version they saw in theaters, which didn’t have a Stan Lee appearance and the phone call joke, among other things. This either means they’ve changed it since then, or have a slightly different version for online release.

Here are some of the things we spotted!

1) Outside the phone booth, there’s graffiti for “Nathan Summers Cumming Soon” (har-har). Obviously, that’s a Cable reference. But if you look inside the phone booth, you see “Hope!”, which could mean that Hope Summers (aka the Mutant Messiah) also makes an appearance.

2) Firefly posters! Lots of Firefly posters. This could mean one of a couple of things. Either this hints Nathan Fillion will be the next Cable, which has been speculated, or it’s an homage to actress Morena Baccarin. Or hell, maybe Wade just really likes Firefly. I wouldn’t blame him.

3) Plenty of references to the Logan film, in true Deadpool fashion. Plus, the long scrolling text at the end is a Deadpool-esque version of The Old Man and the Sea, which has some thematic parallels to Logan’s journey in the film. Although I don’t think Logan’s going to open a Red Lobster franchise by the end.

4) A few other graffiti pieces I spotted but couldn’t identify: “Oggy was here,” “Victim of the Brain,” and “Alley Cats.” If anyone has an idea what these could mean, if anything, let me know in the comments!

Watch and enjoy, dear io9ers.

[YouTube]

via Gizmodo
Ryan Reynolds Releases That Deadpool Teaser

Google has a long history of introducing, then forgetting about, and finally officially killing off its products. Most recently, that included Google Spaces, a service that most of us never knew existed to begin with. Let’s take a tour of some of our favorite services Google’s killed off over the years.

10. Google Buzz

Google Buzz was introduced in 2010 and quickly discontinued in 2011. Buzz was basically a Facebook clone that also integrated with your email for some reason. You could share photos, videos, and links directly to your contacts or the public at large.

Buzz died a quick death because it was unclear exactly what you were supposed to use it for, but it planted the seed for a number of improvements with its rival, Facebook. Google+ followed suit as Google’s own replacement to Buzz a few years later, but even that’s barely hanging on at this point.

9. Picnik

Picnik was a free online photo editing tool that made it easy to make minor adjustments to photos without the need for desktop software. After uploading photos you could easily adjust brightness, color, and more, then save the edited image back to your hard drive.

This type of service is pretty abundant these days. Even when Picnik died back in 2012, the best replacement was Google’s own Google+ Photos, which Google replaced with the much better and more privacy-minded Google Photos. If mobile photo editing is more your game, you have lots of good options on both Android and iPhone.

8. Picasa

Speaking of photo management, Picasa, Google’s desktop photo library tool, was one of our favorite ways to organize your digital photos until Google decided to kill it off in 2016. The good news is that most of Picasa’s features made it into Google Photos.

While Google Photos lacks the desktop management tools that Picasa had, the online version is plenty robust as a replacement. Which is good, because except for Apple Photos, there really aren’t many desktop photo management apps left.

7. Google Answers

Google killed Google Answers way back in 2006. Unlike current competitors like Stack Exchange, Quora, and the always-insightful Yahoo Answers, Google Answers incentivized good answers by offering up cash payments.

When a user asked a question on Google Answers they could also post a bounty between $2-$200. If you liked a well-researched answer, you’d pay out and could add a tip on top of that. Before Google Answers, Google had a similar service, called Google Questions and Answers, where you’d email Google staffer a question and they’d answer it for $3. While Quora is the best replacement, there’s no money involved there, but services like Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk take a similar approach if you’re looking for someone to do your research for you.

6. Google Wave

Google Wave existed between 2010 and 2012 and was one of the company’s most ambitious failures. Wave was too ambitious though, as nobody was quite sure how to use the email-instant messenger-document collaborating-wiki-forum-blogging tool. Once Google laid Wave to rest, Apache took over some of the protocols, but little came of it.

As baffling as Wave was for most users, it laid the groundwork for a number of now-popular services, including Slack and Discord, which are the closest modern equivalents when it comes to Wave’s chat systems. If you miss the document collaboration features in Wave, you have plenty of alternatives in Google Drive, Dropbox, or Office.

5. Google Helpouts

Google Helpouts was a service that connected you to live experts for video chats. Helpouts managed to last almost two years. It was essentially the video version of a something like Quora, but with a live Q&A.

The general idea of Helpouts was connecting you, a normal human Google user, with an expert so you can ask questions live. Some of these Helpouts channels cost money, but most were free, which is why it failed in the long run. Still, it was useful in theory and the ability to ask experts questions on everything from home repair to Photoshop was appealing.

There aren’t a ton of alternatives that work the same way as Helpouts, but Clarity.fm is similar if you need help with a startup and our own Ask an Expert series is great provided the topic of the week is useful for you.

4. Google Notebook

Google discontinued Google Notebook in 2012, but it lived a long and full life by Google standards. As the name suggests, Google Notebook was an online notes platform where you could store notes and even add web clippings provided you were using Firefox or Internet Explorer. If that all sounds familiar it’s because it’s basically Evernote.

The good news is that replacements are a dime a dozen. Google Notebook might have been one of the first online notes apps, but nowadays Evernote, OneNote, Simplenote, and Google Keep all fill the void. While all of the modern options have far surpassed Google Notebook, it still holds a special place in our hearts for being one of the first good options around.

3. Google Labs

Writing about weird Google Labs experimental features was Lifehacker’s bread and butter for a very long time. Google Labs made it possible for the general public to test all kinds of weird new Google features and apps in a variety of its services, from Google Calendar to Google Chrome.

While the main landing page for Google Labs is gone, the spirit lives on in one way or another. Chrome has its experimental flags and Gmail still has a slew of experimental options built into it. Google Labs might be technically dead, but that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t still release weird, random new apps before quickly forgetting about them.

2. iGoogle

iGoogle, which initially launched as Google Personalized Homepage, had a good run from 2005-2013, and the internet mourned its death with surprising despair. iGoogle was a totally personalized startup page that you could customize with whatever you wanted, which, in the age of algorithms, is a long lost feature.

You do still have some options though. For now, myYahoo still exists, igHome looks almost identical to iGoogle, and Netvibes is the most modern option of them all.

1. Google Reader

On July 1, 2013, the internet lost one of its most faithful companions: Google Reader. The RSS Reader that millions counted on since 2005 was gone and in its place was a radio wave shaped hole in all our hearts.

Well, that and a few dozen replacement services. Feedly is still going strong and easily the best alternative to Reader, though plenty of other alternative like Feeder, The Old Reader, and Digg Reader are all worth a look.

via Lifehacker
Top 10 Services Google Killed Off

via TechCrunch
NASA released a ton of software for free and here’s some you should try

Douglas Crockford famously declared browsers to be "the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable," and that wasn’t hyperbole. Ensuring that our websites work across a myriad of different devices, screen sizes and browsers our users depend on to access the web is a tall order, but it’s necessary.

If our websites don’t enable users to accomplish the key tasks they come to do, we’ve failed them. We should do everything in our power to ensure our websites function under even the harshest of scenarios, but at the same, we can’t expect our users to have the exact same experience in every browser, on every device.

The post When Your Code Has To Work: Complying With Legal Mandates appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

via Smashing Magazine
When Your Code Has To Work: Complying With Legal Mandates

A knife is only as good as its edge: The sharper, the better.

A sharp edge not only makes your cutting tasks easier, it also makes them safer. With a sharp edge, you use less force and have more control resulting in fewer accidents. 

Sharpening a knife, in theory, is a very simple task. But with new steels and complex grinds, it can get difficult very quickly.  Here are a few pointers.

Sharpen Anytime, Anywhere

You can sharpen a knife with almost anything — a fancy sharpening system, the bottom of a coffee cup, your belt, or even a piece of sandstone. But the key to sharpening is understanding the angle you need and using a progressively finer material.

Eventually you will acquire muscle memory, allowing you to hold an angle relatively steady.  One way to train yourself is the “Sharpie trick”: Coat the cutting edge with a Sharpie marker and sharpen until the ink is gone.

As an experiment, for a year I sharpened my Kabar Becker BK9 with nothing other than a piece of sandstone and my belt. The sandstone acted as the coarse treatment and the belt the finer treatment. And, much to my surprise, it worked quite well. The blade didn’t look pretty (and really your big chopper never should) but it was quite sharp. 

Eventually, the unevenness produced by common materials was enough to necessitate a trip to a professional. However, it worked for a year and I am sure in a survival situation, it would work even longer.

Start Stropping

Every steel can benefit from the use of a strop. A strop is usually a piece of leather “charged” with some kind of compound, but it doesn’t have to be. In talking to folks at Triple Aught Design on my podcast, TAD’s former knife guy, Gianni Donati, swore by the use of a cardboard edge. Anything can work.

The idea behind the strop is that by passing the blade over the charged leather, the microscopic edge performing the actual cutting is realigned. The result is a sharper and easier to use knife.  A few swipes on each side of the blade is all that is needed to strop an edge.

The key is stropping regularly. With older steels, 1095 for example, the benefits are quickly seen. With something like ZDP-189, which is much harder, the benefits aren’t as shocking. Stropping is particularly helpful for convex-ground knives. The gentling curving grind is hard to match up to a perfectly flat sharpening stone, but it mates well with the give found in most stropping substrates. 

A regular stropping routine and a modern high-hardness steel can help you all but avoid full re-sharpenings, which, with some high-end powder steels, can take more than an hour.

It’s been two years since I purchased my latest Dragonfly. It is still hair-popping sharp, even though it has not seen the sharpening stone.  Stropping alone did the trick.

Maintain Consistent Angle

More than anything, the important part of both stropping and sharpening is consistency. And consistency is all about practice.

Skilled sharpeners need no guides of any kind and can get razor edges from any abrasive material.  Practice on a cheap knife with soft steel, like a Buck with 420HC or a Victorinox.  Over time you will get a feel for the angle of the knife.  Once you have the “touch,” sharpening harder steels is just a matter of more repetition. 

Some knife sharpeners help users maintain a proper angle. These systems are great for beginners or people that need to batch out edges.  However, as sharpeners get more expensive, all they do is help hold a consistent angle with guides, braces, and rulers.  

Something like the Apex Pro or the Wicked Edge is nothing more than a series of braces and rigid arms designed to hold an angle to the edge that is exactly the same over and over again.

Choose A Sharpener

Prior to diving into high-end systems, I would recommend something like the Sharp Maker from Spyderco or the Lanksy system. They may not tune the blade to a thousandth of an inch, but they have enough consistency to get good results.

If you absolutely need that high-end edge, one capable of reflecting newsprint, then you probably need to upgrade beyond these two systems. But that gleaming edge adds more appearance than performance.

In the end, the best grinders don’t use a system at all. Jesse Jarosz and Murray Carter, two custom makers, put the final edge on their knives by hand. I’ve seen an expert shave with an axe and fillet a piece of paper, both after freehand sharpening.

For mere mortals like us, the best treatment is a pair of strops with two different grits of compound and either a Sharp Maker or Lansky. With those tools, a good routine, and some practice, you will have sharp blades forever.

Eventually, with experience, you will come to learn a great deal. Nothing shows you the soul of a steel like sharpening it.

The post A Quick Guide To Knife Sharpening appeared first on GearJunkie.

via GearJunkie
A Quick Guide To Knife Sharpening

Source: Entrepreneur.com

The business world seems like it caters to extroverts. And that makes sense: As a business owner, you need charisma to lead a team, negotiate with partners and engage with them regularly. In addition, you need to network with new people and improve your client relationships.

Related: 5 Mega-Successful Entrepreneurs Who Are Introverts

For an introvert, therefore, these responsibilities may seem intimidating, or even overwhelming, to deal with. Introverts tend to prefer quieter, solitary environments; but does that mean it’s impossible for them to be successful entrepreneurs?

Of course not. If you’re an introvert, you have your own strengths and weaknesses; and while you may have some extra challenges to overcome in business ownership, you’ll also have some extra advantages — if you know how to use them.

1. Choose your business category wisely.

Your first step is to choose your business carefully. Before you write up a business plan, think carefully about your idea and how it will relate to your personality and mental and emotional needs:

• Play to your strengths. Not always, but often, introverts like to bury themselves in specific, individual tasks. For example, you might like to code applications at work, or, as a hobbyist, you might be an expert woodworker. In either case, you need to build a business that caters to your particular strengths. There’s almost certainly something you can do or something you know that extroverts won’t be able to match. So pinpoint it and exploit it.
• Minimize interaction demand. When you start planning your business, opt for a model that doesn’t require much personal interaction. For example, you might want to avoid one-on-one consulting or training if you don’t enjoy socializing. You might also want to rely more on helpful tools to build your business than do other people.
• Start small. Whatever your business is, start small. Hire only the people you need; that way, you can get used to your role gradually and avoid overloading yourself with new people and situations.

2. Find partners who’ll complement you.

If you’re strongly introverted, you’ll be better off finding business partners and employees who complement your personality and skill set. For example, if you hate the idea of making a sales pitch to a stranger and don’t like talking to people in general, team up with someone who’s strongly extroverted and straightforward, who likes having conversations.

Introversion is a collection of strengths and weaknesses, and extroversion is, too; so you’ll need a blend of both if you want your business to perform its best.

Related: An Introvert’s Guide to Communicating With Results

3. Create the environment you want.

This is your company. This is your brand. You get to define it and build it in any way you choose. Obviously, you have to consider the limits of practicality and what will work best for your business, but consider adopting policies and values that cater to your introverted nature. For example, if you prefer written communication to spoken communication, consider making your business fully remote, with all your employees working from home.

If you don’t like the idea of one-on-one sales meetings, opt for more inbound marketing strategies, to reach your revenue goals.

4. Use online networking and interaction.

If you don’t like to engage with people in the real world, maybe you can find your stride in online interactions. Instead of going out to networking events, for example, you can do the majority of your networking over social media. You can rely on emails and instant messages for the bulk of your interactions, and reserve in-person meetings for when you really need them.

There are some benefits to talking to people in person, so don’t be exclusive with online interactions.

5. Practice socializing.

While it’s definitely possible to be a solo entrepreneur, I don’t recommend it. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to socialize with other people, whether it’s partners, clients, employees or mentors. If you aren’t good at socializing, or prefer to avoid it, you’ll need to practice, to get your social game up. Conversation and interactions are skills, like anything else, and you can refine them if you spend time working on your abilities.

Start by attending more networking events, and talking to other attendees there. Also, develop new tactics for guiding conversations the way you want them to go. This may seem intimidating at first, but you’ll get the hang of it.

6. Learn to be uncomfortable.

There are a couple of important things to remember here. First, your introversion isn’t a curse — it’s a strength, if you know how to use it, and you need to be able to play to that strength. Second, no matter what, you’re going to face situations that make you uncomfortable as an introvert. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to become more comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable.

Related: Why Introverts May Be Better at Business Than Extroverts.

It’s only through discomfort that we challenge ourselves to grow, learn new things and earn successes that only people dream of.

JAYSON DEMERS

 Jayson DeMers is founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based SEO agency. He’s the author of the ebook, “The Definitive Guide to Marketing Your Business Online.”

Read more

via Business Opportunities Weblog
How to Start a Business When You’re an Introvert

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 premiered a brand new trailer tonight. It’s got space battles, dancing, and more Rocket gadgets. Plus, we finally see Peter (Chris Pratt) meet his dad. Just try to be upset that the galaxy is in danger while watching this.

We’ll have a closer look at everything new this reveals later, but for now learn how yelling at someone is the difference between being friends and being family.\

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 comes out May 5.

via Gizmodo
In the Latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Trailer, Star-Lord Meets His Dad