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January 3, 2020 at 08:45AM
[Review+Video] Glock 44: First Legendary .22LR?
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The Glock 44 is Glock’s first .22LR since its founding in 1963.
Is it worth the wait?
We’ll cover it’s fun factor, reliability, accuracy, ergonomics, stats, target audience, and more.
We’ve got a full video review from Johnny too!
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Glock has been busy touting the G44 as “Legendary” and I was super excited to be one of the few media outlets to be invited to its unveiling.
Thoughts of a Glock carbine and maybe something crazy like a polymer lever action were going through my head.
When I found out it was a .22LR pistol…I thought “cool.”
Makes sense.
Glock never had a .22LR and they will sell a metric buttload for training and plinking once it’s on sale January 20.
People on the internet were less than enthusiastic…I think due to some overhyping.
And maybe some stats on the gun…we’ll get to that soon.
If I had to choose one word for the Glock 44…it would be fun.
Softest recoil ever. Affordable ammo. Easy to plink a few hundred rounds at the range.
Plus it’s almost identical in dimensions to the Glock 19.
Who were the happiest folks at the event?
The TRAINERS.
They knew Glock hit a homerun with a G19-sized .22LR handgun.
Now you can start young, new, old shooters on a lighter recoiling gun that’s almost the same as the most popular Glock model.
Full review of the Gen 5 Glock 19 from us.
And how about another huge audience? Plinkers who like saving money.
At release the MSRP is $430 but street price at the January 20, 2020 release date will likely be around $360.
Plus did I mention it takes affordable .22LR?
And because of its weight…some backpackers might like it as well.
Now let’s dive a little deeper…
First thing…this thing is light.
About 3/4 pound empty and 1 pound fully loaded. A G19 is almost 2 lb loaded.
The weight reduction is due to a 5-section hybrid polymer steel slide which is needed so that the blowback action of the .22LR has enough oomph to cycle.
But have no fear…the important bits are all metal on metal.
Weight aside…if you handed the G44 to me blindfolded I wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t a G19.
And because of that…it fits in all G19 holsters. There’s some ever-so-slight differences so you might need to adjust retention.
Check out some of our favorite G19 holsters here.
How about other stuff?
Trigger is the same.
You get backstraps to choose the right fit for your handsize.
Plus the same sights (for better or for worse) but with adjustable rear ones.
Breakdown is also the same.
If you can break down a normal Glock…you can breakdown the G44.
Magazines…this is where people flipped out.
Yup…that’s a 10 round magazine.
Glock chose the 10 round capacity for reliability since it’s nearly impossible to double-stack rimfire rounds.
No one seems to complain about other .22LR pistols being only 10 rounds…but I can understand the frustration of it living in a double-stack body.
It does come with a super-helpful load assist mechanism that will help out new shooters’ thumbs.
Hopefully a Glock 15-rounder comes out…or some other manufacturer steps up to the plate.
Now let’s back to the pew pew!
Recoil? What recoil?
My first shot brought amazement.
First because of the lack of recoil. And second because it really highlighted how much I was pushing the front muzzle down to compensate for rise.
Johnny had no problems with 50 yard targets.
And I was able to consistently bring it out to 100+ yards at the Glock event.
A Glock rep came up and congratulated me on hearing some different *ting* sounds from the far target.
I’m moving reliability into its own category.
At the Glock event…the test pistols have been through almost 10,000 rounds.
However, we started to see some misfeeds and stovepipes at the end.
The frame and slide actually don’t seem that dirty for the number of rounds.
But the barrel feed ramp?
That bad boy had some stuck on carbon crud that started to break off. I think the created divots were the ones creating most of the stoppages for us.
As for ammo… we used exclusively Blazer .22LR.
But once Johnny got his hands on a test gun…
We had him running through some ancient Remington and Browning. And some Walmart Remington Thunderbolt and Winchester X.
The cheaper stuff from Walmart and the older ammo gave our test gun multiple stovepipes, misfeeds, and didn’t lock back the slide.
However, with hotter loaded new CCI Minimag (the good stuff)…the G44 ran flawlessly.
Prices accurate at time of writing
Prices accurate at time of writing
Based on our experiences…we’d recommend going with hotter ammo to make sure your G44 runs.
Check out some of our favorites in Best .22LR Ammo.
Glock said they tested over 120 brands of .22LR but maybe some of our batches were even more finicky than standard rimfire.
Here’s the official blurb…
The Glock 44 is designed to work with a variety of quality 22 l.r. ammunition that is manufactured to SAMMI and/or CIP specifications. GLOCK recognizes that some 22 l.r. ammunition offerings may not produce sufficient energy to fully cycle the slide. GLOCK also recognizes that the quality of 22 l.r. ammunition varies greatly between different types and brands. Therefore, it is recommended that you test fire several fully loaded magazines using your preferred ammunition to ensure optimum performance.
G44 Owner’s Manual
Here’s some of the important bits…
And the specs compared to a G19.
Reliability: 3.75/5
With the cheap or under-powered stuff it’s a 3/5. With Mini-Mag or Blazer it’s a 4.5/5. Let’s split it in the middle.
Ergonomics: 4/5
Glocks have grown on me over the years. Controls are easy to index and the grip angle is solid.
Accuracy: 4.5/5
It’s not a match-grade pistol but it will put rounds where you want them. We’re pretty impressed with it hitting 100+ yards consistently with a non-fixed barrel like other .22LR pistols.
Customization: 4/5
There’s lots of stuff you can change on a Glock…especially when it’s nearly identical to a G19. Get ready for some Gucci G44s to hit Instagram.
Plus there’s also the option of a threaded barrel for around $150. It’s metric so you’ll need an adapter for your normal 1/2×28 threads.
But, it has a different locking block so you can’t alternate stuff with a G19…sorry!
Value: 4.5/5
There’s a lot of value if it’s near the rumored street price of $360. Although I would have liked to see 3 magazines and a threaded barrel standard.
Overall: 4/5
The .22LR Glock 44 does what it is supposed to do. Shots on target, reliable with specific ammo, and comes in at a great value. Plus it’s nearly identical to the Glock 19 which makes it the perfect training and plinking gun.
What do you think of the G44? Is it Legendary? Check out our master list of Best Glocks and also Best .22LR Pistols.
The post [Review+Video] Glock 44: First Legendary .22LR? appeared first on Pew Pew Tactical.
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December 31, 2019 at 05:25PM
8 websites every Laravel developer should bookmark
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A curated list of excellent Laravel related websites for any Laravel developer, from novice to experienced.
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December 31, 2019 at 11:51AM
Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it
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picture alliance/Getty Images
A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they’ve infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.
But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.
Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by a remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.
This is one of those ideas that seems nuts but had so many earlier results pointing toward it working that it was really just a matter of time before someone tried it. To understand it, you have to overcome the idea that the immune system is always diffuse, composed of cells that wander the blood stream. Instead, immune cells organize at the sites of infections (or tumors), where they communicate with each other to both organize an attack and limit that attack so that healthy tissue isn’t also targeted.
From this perspective, the immune system’s inability to eliminate tumor cells isn’t only the product of their similarities to healthy cells. It’s also the product of the signaling networks that help restrain the immune system to prevent it from attacking normal cells. A number of recently developed drugs help release this self-imposed limit, winning their developers Nobel Prizes in the process. These drugs convert a “cold” immune response, dominated by signaling that shuts things down, into a “hot” one that is able to attack a tumor.
But not everyone has a response to these drugs, raising the question of whether there are other ways to activate the immune system at the site of a tumor. One potential option is simply the things that normally rev up the immune system: infectious agents. The immune response to cancer-targeting viruses mentioned above would provide an indication that this does occur. Others have targeted a variety of pathogens to the sites of tumors and found that this increases the immune response to the tumor as well.
To check whether something similar might be happening in humans, the researchers identified over 30,000 people being treated for lung cancer and found those who also received an influenza diagnosis. You might expect that the combination of the flu and cancer would be very difficult for those patients, but instead, they had lower mortality than the patients who didn’t get the flu.
For more detailed tests, the researchers moved to mice, using melanoma cells that can form tumors when transplanted into the lungs of the mice. These model systems often respond to treatments that don’t end up working in humans, so the results have to be treated with appropriate caution. Still, they can be a valuable way of understanding the biology of the immune response here.
The use of melanoma cells is informative, as these cells cannot be infected by the influenza virus. So this system also provides a test of whether the tumor cells themselves have to be infected in order to increase the immune response to them. Apparently they do not. Having an active influenza virus infection reduced the ability of the melanoma cells to establish themselves in the lung. The effect isn’t limited to the location of the infection, though, as tumors in the lung that wasn’t infected were also inhibited. The effects were similar when breast cancer cells were placed into the lung, as well.
All of this is consistent with the immune stimulation provided by a pathogen. The stimulation causes a general activation of the immune system that releases it from limits on its activity that prevent it from attacking tumor cells. But does it require an actual infection? To find out, the researchers used a flu virus that had been inactivated by heat treatment. Normally, heat treating a virus is used to create a control for an effect that needs an active virus. But here, it turned out to be another experiment, as the heat-treated virus was also able to work just as effectively as the live virus.
This isn’t entirely surprising, given that inactive viruses are often used as vaccines and thus clearly can stimulate the immune system. But that, in turn, suggested another experiment: would vaccines actually work? To find out, the researchers obtained this year’s flu vaccine and injected it into the sites of tumors. Not only was tumor growth slowed, but the mice ended up immune to the flu virus.
Oddly, this wasn’t true for every flu vaccine. Some vaccines contain chemicals that enhance the immune system’s memory, promoting the formation of a long-term response to pathogens (called adjuvants). When a vaccine containing one of these chemicals was used, the immune system wasn’t stimulated to limit the tumors’ growth.
This suggests that it’s less a matter of stimulating the immune system and more an issue of triggering it to attack immediately. But this is one of the things that will need to be sorted out with further study. The location of the stimulation will also need to be sorted out, too. Here, stimulation in one lung increases activity in both. But injection into muscles didn’t work at all, and earlier work by some of the same team had indicated a heavy infection outside the lungs enhanced tumor growth by diverting immune cells elsewhere.
But the story does fit in well with the general consensus that the immune system can be a powerful tool against cancer, provided it can be mobilized properly. And, in at least some cases, a flu vaccine just might do the trick.
PNAS, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904022116 (About DOIs).
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via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com
December 30, 2019 at 07:10PM
The one video game my kids played all year long
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I was cooking this weekend when my eight-year-old son looked up from the couch, where he was listening to the Stardew Valley game soundtrack on Apple Music.
“Dad,” he announced, “I’m going to read you the name of every song on this album.”
“Cool,” I said as I minced the garlic.
“Stardew Valley Overture,” he began. “Cloud Country. Grandpa’s Theme. Settling In. Spring (It’s a Big World Outside). Spring (The Valley Comes Alive). Spring (Wild Horseradish Jam). Ha ha!”
He liked the phrase “Wild Horseradish Jam” so much that he read it again before going on.
“Pelican Town…”
As a parent, I have acquired the finely honed ability to tune out my beloved offspring, and I put it to use now. This was a good decision, because the Stardew Valley soundtrack has a whopping 70 different tracks. Minutes passed before he finally made it to track 70: “Load Game.”
He then lay still, listening to the “Dance of the Moonlight Jellies,” and I listened to it, too. The music in Stardew Valley can feel buoyant, melancholy, or numinous—sometimes all three at once. Underlying its many moods are feelings of stillness and calm; even “Mines (Danger!)” lacks the frenetic element found in so much video game music.
The “night market.” Stardew Valley features a day/night cycle that is linked to your character’s energy meter.
A recent update added multiplayer co-op capabilities.
A multiplayer farm in action. Look at all the pumpkins!
You can eventually acquire animals. My kids cannot get enough of this feature…
Like its music, Stardew Valley does not agitate or arouse, but neither is it boring, sappy, or simple. It is, nominally, a farming simulator, in which you inherit a patch of land from grandpa and head out to the country to clear trees and grow pole beans. But then you find the nearby town, and the mines, and the locals, and a strange tower, and a branch of the evil JoJoMart corporation, and you pick up a fishing pole and some geodes and a strange key… Indeed, the game turns out to be surprisingly complex, and my kids have become experts at using the Stardew Valley Wiki to figure out how the game works and what you can do within its world.
Because our kids get enough screen time during the week—the two oldest kids use Chromebooks constantly at school and for homework—we limit their time on the PlayStation 4 to weekends. Which has meant that every Saturday morning of 2019 in Casa Anderson has been permeated by the sounds of the Stardew Valley soundtrack as the kids build, explore, unlock, and interact within the game.
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via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com
December 30, 2019 at 12:06PM
Comic for December 30, 2019
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December 30, 2019 at 02:19AM
Darktable 3.0 released with new features, bug fixes and major GUI update
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Darktable 3.0, the latest version of the open source photo editing software DPR reported on early last month, has officially been released. As revealed when the first release candidate was made available for public testing, Darktable 3.0 brings a number of large changes and improvements to the software, including a reworked GUI that makes it possible to apply full themes to the software.
‘Darktable’ will be the default theme in Darktable 3.0, but users will also be able to use alternatives like the ‘Darktable Elegant Dark,’ a lighter version of the theme, and ‘Darktable Elegant Darker,’ which has more condensed fonts best used with the Roboto font, according to the developers.
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GUI changes aside, Darktable 3.0 adds a number of improvements and new features, including ‘many changes’ to the ‘denoise (profiled)’ module, a rewrite of the previous Picasa export module that switches it over to Google Photos, the addition of new ‘RGB Curve’ and ‘RGB Levels’ modules, a new ‘Basic Adjustments’ module, new color pickers for modules like ‘Watermark’ and ‘Split Toning,’ what the developers refer to as ‘many code optimizations’ for SSE and CPU paths and much more.
In addition to the new features and improvements, Darktable 3.0 includes several bug fixes and support for additional camera models, noise profiles and white balance presets. As expected, the latest version of the software is free to download on Windows, macOS and Linux.
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December 27, 2019 at 01:10PM
Actually, 2019’s Gadget of the Year Is My Electronic Chicken Door
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The best gadget of the year is neither phone nor laptop nor smartwatch nor headphones. It’s not even something most people need. It is, instead, an automatic chicken door, a simple piece of tech that not only changed my family’s life for the better, it may have also saved my marriage.
When all’s said and done, my legacy as a professional, among my colleagues at least, will have nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the fact that I’m the guy who lives in the woods and has a lot of pets. Fair enough. My house in New York’s Hudson Valley (“It’s about two hours up the Hudson River from Manhattan,” is how I usually explain it to baffled Brooklynites) is currently home to two dogs, four cats, 14 chickens, and a snake.
The dogs are, of course, the neediest of the bunch—our entire life is structured around their various demands, which are many. But they often travel with us, and their demands come with them. The cats are chill and can be left home alone for a few days as long as there’s a pile of food and a couple of full water bowls. Dot, my 15-year-old ball python, can go a full week without needing a thing. It’s the chickens whose fragile feathered lives became a life-altering responsibility.
As livestock go, chickens are relatively low-maintenance. Fill their food and water buckets once a week, let them out to roam, and they’re good. Sure, you have to collect the eggs during the months when they’re laying, but if you miss a day or two, it’s no biggie. The twist is that, when left in an open coop overnight, they will likely all be murdered.
Foxes, raccoons, weasels, neighbors’ dogs—everything wants to eat a chicken. So unless you enjoy coming home to a massacre, you have to make sure the chicks are all locked up tight in their coop each night. This means that, if you have a regular manual chicken door, someone has to be home every day to close it up in the evening and re-open it each morning.
That someone was usually my wife, Jennifer. And that someone was very pissed at me.
Because my office is in New York City, I was invariably home late. This meant that Jennifer, who also has a long commute, had to go home to “close up the chicks,” as we say, rather than go to the gym or yoga or go spend the night visiting her family or friends. This was fine for a while. But after several months, Jennifer had had enough.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she’d say. “I need to be able to be away from the house sometimes. We need to get the electronic chicken door.”
“Okay, yes, you’re right,” I’d say. “I’ll get it, I’ll get it.”
That conversation happened repeatedly for about six months before I finally got it. I took that long because a) I am an idiot, and b) the chicken door I wanted to buy cost hundreds of dollars. I’d purposely spent less than $300 on the entire chicken coop and the chickens themselves, and I didn’t want to double that expense on a single part. Eventually, I gave in and bought the damn thing. Turns out, pretending your partner doesn’t need something because you don’t feel like spending money on it just makes you an asshole.
After swallowing my inner Scrooge and a few evenings exploring chicken forums, I ultimately purchased the exhaustively named ChickenGuard Premium Automatic Chicken Coop Pop Door Opener & Door Kit Combo for $225.
Chickens are primarily controlled by the sun. They mostly stop laying eggs during months when there are fewer than 12 hours of sunlight. The whole crowing-at-dawn thing is true—they wake up with the sun, and the rooster likes to be a dick about it. And like magic, these little meat robots naturally put themselves to bed when the sun starts to go down.
Given that’s how chickens work, the ChickenGuard opener packs a light sensor that automatically opens the metal coop door when the sun comes up and closes at your desired time after sunset. (If you set it to close too early, any lingering chickens get stuck outside, defeating the whole purpose of an automatic door.) It has a simple digital display, a terrible three-button-controlled user interface, and a light that tells you when its batteries are almost dead. And… that’s it, that’s the gadget.
It’s all very quaint, and it just works. It’s also quite obvious to me now, having lived with the automatic chicken door for nearly a year, just how dumb I was for not buying this contraption from the very beginning.
Besides the benefits to our lives, it’s also been good for the chickens. They get to go out into the run even if we sleep in. They don’t get eaten by weasels. And, because we don’t go out to the coop as much during the low-egg months, we failed to notice one of the hens sitting on some eggs for a few weeks, which resulted in a couple of surprise baby chicks.
Eleven months after buying the electronic chicken door, Jennifer is happily untethered from our house, able to stay out late, or travel, or just not worry about the chickens too much. Our flock grew by two. Our neighbors no longer have to drive to our house twice a day to open or close the coop door anytime we go out of town. And I am a better, still-married person, having realized the errors of being a cheap jerk. I got the new iPhone this year. It hasn’t offered anything close to those kinds of benefits.
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via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com
December 27, 2019 at 09:36AM
Theoretically, Yoda Wasn’t Even 30 When He Died
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There’s a big, if unintentional, consequence of Baby Yoda’s existence. Because we were told how old the little guy is (50) and we think we have a decent understanding of how old Baby Yoda is developmentally (approximately 18 months) considering what we’ve seen of his actions so far in The Mandalorian, we can infer how old Master Yoda was when he pulled his disappearing act on Luke in Return of the Jedi. If our theory is correct, Jedi Master was so young he probably didn’t even have a 401k.
According to my math, Yoda was only, developmentally speaking, 27 years old when he died.
When Yoda passes in Return of the Jedi we know he’s around 900 years old. He’s aged visibly from Revenge of the Sith set over 18 years before that. Because we see that he ages over the course of nearly 20 years, we can make one major assumption about his species (which is not named in Star Wars canon and will be referred to simply as Yoda for the purposes of this blog)—they continue to age over time and do so in clear visible ways. This means it has senescence—a term referring to creatures (including humans) that mature and age after reaching maturity. This also means Yodas likely do not possess negligible senescence—a trait shared by many turtles and lobsters. Those species age so slowly it is difficult to perceive biologically speaking.
So we know Yodas age. Given Frank Oz’s acting choices when portraying Yoda in Return of the Jedi we might infer that Yoda, while being 900 in Star Wars years, is comparable to a 70-year-old human. But that’s based on our perception of signs of advanced aging, right? Only there are plenty of humans who appear much older than they actually are.
If humans can appear older than they are, then Yodas should theoretically be capable of the same. Unfortunately for our working theory here, we only have three Yodas in our sample size. First, there is Yoda, who we have established ages over the course of 18 years at least. Then there is Yaddle, a female Yoda. Her character model, which appears in The Phantom Menace, was originally designed to be a younger Yoda. Then someone slapped a wig on the puppet and young Yoda became Yaddle.
Yaddle has no association with age apart from the Apocrypha regarding her origin. We cannot know if she is a younger version of the species or older. We can only know she looks like she took too big a hit off the bong and needs some Jack in the Box tacos stat. Baby Yoda expands our sample size of the Yoda species and allows us to better understand how old Yoda was.
Little cherubic nom-able Baby Yoda is 50 years old in The Mandalorian. No approximations needed—Werner Herzog, as the Client, says it in the first episode. Developmentally it’s a little more difficult to guess Baby Yoda’s age exactly compared to a human child. Baby Yoda can drink tea calmly out of an open container and walk and eat frogs which might suggest an age of 3 to 4. However, Baby Yoda cannot yet vocalize beyond gurgles and baby squeals and interacts with non-tea and frog objects like a much younger child. This leads me to believe that developmentally the Child is somewhere between 18 months and 24 months in human parlance.
Now, if the Child is 24 months old that means 2.08 years for a Yoda is approximately the same as one month for a human. If the child is 18 months old that’s 2.78 years per human month. That means that Yoda, at 900 years, was between 27 and 36 developmentally, when he died.
I’m sure his mother is very disappointed that he flamed out so young in his life and fucked off to a swamp before becoming a Force ghost that haunted Luke Skywalker to the end of his days.
For more, make sure you’re following us on our Instagram @io9dotcom.
geeky,Tech
via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com
December 26, 2019 at 03:30PM
