Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans
Pallette-Swap Ninja is celebrating the upcoming May the Fourth holiday in the best possible way, by releasing a free album comprised entirely of Star Wars parody songs, all done to the tune of songs from the Beatles’ famed record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools are now available for free
MailChimp is probably best known for its basic email newsletter services, but it has long offered a number of more advanced marketing tools that allows its users to follow up with online shoppers, for example. Starting today, these advanced marketing automation services are available for free to all MailChimp users, including those on the company’s free plan.
With this newly free service, any online business can now easily create an automatic email that goes out a day after somebody abandons a virtual shopping cart, for example, or a day after somebody makes a first purchase. Similarly, they can set up a series of welcome emails or use the service for more transactional messages like receipts, shipping updates or invoices. MailChimp set up a number of pre-configured automations for some of these most popular use cases. The company argues that its users earned an average of $619 more thanks to abandoned cart notifications.
Given that there is obviously some clear value in this service for its users, it’s surprising to see that it is now making it available for free. Chances are, though, that the customers who were using these more advanced features were also those who already had more than the 2,000 subscriber maximum of the free plan. Adding this new capability to its free plan may just get more of those free users to reach that maximum or want to upgrade to the paid plan, which offers a number of other advanced features and analytics.
“Automation empowers our customers to create sophisticated campaigns that help them compete with bigger companies, but we know that not everyone has a large list or the budget to upgrade to a paid account when they first get started,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Small businesses look to MailChimp to help them build their brand, and we want to give everyone—no matter their account type or list size—the opportunity to use our marketing automation tools to do just that.”
via TechCrunch
Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools are now available for free
3-D Printing Is Changing Way Air Force Fixes Its Aging Planes
Three-dimensional printing is becoming more prevalent in the defense industry, as engineers explore the process to make parts for the most sophisticated U.S. weapons, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles.
But lesser-known projects have been in the works at a Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, shop that has been producing parts for Air Force aircraft for at least two years.
In February, Lt. Gen. John Cooper, deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering and force protection, asked audiences at an Air Force Association breakfast, “Can we find better ways to maintain these airplanes? Is there some new technology that can help us? Or some new repair processes?”
The 3-D printing process is one way to do that, he said.
The general cited a trip he took to Tinker where he saw members of the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex, one of the Air Force’s largest depot maintenance units, making a dashboard casing for a B-1B Lancer bomber.
“We’re responsible for all the maintenance, repair and overhaul of all components that come off the aircraft,” Col. Robert Jackson, commander 76th Commodities Maintenance Group, told Military.com in a recent interview. The CMXG is part of the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex.
Jackson said the team has a wide variety of things to maintain, including many parts that would require an expensive bulk buy when they really need only one or two. Examples include mic switch knobs, crew compartment panels, sun visor brackets, and armrests that total roughly 60 different plane parts across the B-1, B-2, B-52, E-3 and KC-135 airframes, among others.
Martin Williams, director of the 76th’s Reverse Engineering and Critical Tooling, or REACT, office, said the unit already uses 3-D printers in various sizes, but they want others with flexible technologies to support making parts that engineers haven’t necessarily thought of yet.
The Lancer dashboard — or standby compass cockpit panel, as officials called it — is something the unit is currently prototyping.
Even with larger items, which require more durable parts and aren’t suited to 3-D production, 3-D prototyping streamlines the process by experimenting with designs that will be manufactured later with metal, Jackson said.
“You’re using the 3-D printed technology in order to deliver a prototype that confirms form, fit and function … and then you can be confident of your repair solution or your new part, delivering that to the traditional, organic manufacturing [unit] that’s going to use multi-access milling machines to cut metal into that part,” he said.
Jackson said Tinker stood up the 553rd Commodities Maintenance Squadron in December 2015 for that reason, dedicated specifically to organic manufacturing.
The in-house 3-D process is much faster than going back and forth with outside suppliers for parts. “Once you get the geometry, you can print it overnight and have it the next day,” said REACT engineer Nate Pitcovich.
To identify the geometry of the part and print it takes at most two days, officials explained.
“With diminishing sources of supply, the benefit for us is the flexibility and the agility to respond to a warfighter need,” added Eric Bartlow, director of engineering for the CMXG.
“The benefit is speed,” he said.
“That’s our bottom line,” Jackson agreed.
via Defensetech
3-D Printing Is Changing Way Air Force Fixes Its Aging Planes
Competition Target Systems Now Available on Optics Planet
U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)- Competition Target Systems (CTS Targets) is now available through OpticsPlanet.com. Often copied but never duplicated, CTS Targets does more than just cut steel, they engineer superior target solutions with quality, ease of use, and longevity in mind. The feature-rich designs of CTS Targets have been available through other online retailers and conventional storefronts, and now OpticsPlanet.com has added CTS Targets to their list of over 2,800 available brands.
This expansion of availability is a major advantage to the consumer as currently some of the 54 CTS products listed on Optics Planet are available with free shipping: gongs, stands, hangers, and targets as well as the popular T-Post Pro Hanger.
“We continue providing our customers with innovative, exceptional products and CTS Targets is no exception, ” Says Alex Royzen, Supply Chain Development Manager at OpticsPlanet, Inc. “CTS gives our customers an effective, durable, AR500 steel target selection at a price point our customers will appreciate!”
“As demand for our products has increased, so has the complexity of distribution. Copycats have tried to fill gaps,” said CTS Targets President Matt Teske, “with Optics Planet consumers know they are getting an authentic CTS Target.”
CTS Targets designs and manufactures AR500 steel targets and mounting solutions for both the recreational and professional shooter. Setting CTS apart is a sharp focus on design quality and shooter safety as demonstrated with their innovative target mounting solutions.
About Competition Target Systems:
Combining high quality AR500 steel with simple, yet innovative designs, CTS Targets has created superior quality products at an exceptional value. Every CTS product is 100% American engineered, sourced, and manufactured.
This post Competition Target Systems Now Available on Optics Planet appeared first on AmmoLand.com Shooting Sports News .
via AmmoLand.com Shooting Sports News
Competition Target Systems Now Available on Optics Planet
MySQL Online Backup with xtrabackup
My last post about backups was a while ago. Although it is still valid, it’s not advisable to use it as daily backup. For that we can use XtraBackup.
With XtraBackup, you can take online backups without interrupt the server workload(it will require a small lock to take binlog coordinates).
Today I’ll show how to take a complete backup.
Install:
To install it, I advise you to use Yum / Apt-get repos:
Centos / Redhat:
sudo yum install http://ift.tt/2jkmf2a sudo yum install percona-xtrabackup-24
Debian / Ubuntu
wget http://ift.tt/2jqiETr(lsb_release -sc)_all.deb sudo dpkg -i percona-release_0.1-4.$(lsb_release -sc)_all.deb sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install percona-xtrabackup-24
Backup:
To take the backup, we will use innobackupex script:
innobackupex --user=root --password='Passw0rd!' /backups/
The script will produce some log messages, we need to verify if it ends with :
... 170429 21:07:12 completed OK!
Parallel:
Xtrabackup allows the copy of the tables to be done in parallel, you can set the number of threads by using the –parallel option:
innobackupex --user=root --password='Passw0rd!' --parallel=8 /backups/
We can observe that each threads receives a number which is displayed within []:
170429 21:12:27 [05] Copying ./ibdata1 to /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27/ibdata1 170429 21:12:27 [06] Copying ./mysql/plugin.ibd to /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27/mysql/plugin.ibd 170429 21:12:27 [06] ...done 170429 21:12:27 [02] Copying ./mysql/servers.ibd to /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27/mysql/servers.ibd 170429 21:12:27 [02] ...done 170429 21:12:27 [03] Copying ./mysql/help_topic.ibd to /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27/mysql/help_topic.ibd 170429 21:12:27 [07] Copying ./mysql/help_category.ibd to /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27/mysql/help_category.ibd 170429 21:12:27 [07] ...done
Compress:
Xtrabackup also allows you to compress your backup using –compress and –compress-threads (normally set to the same number of –parallel threads):
innobackupex --user=root --password='Passw0rd!' --parallel=8 --compress --compress-threads=8 /backups/
For example, a backup that takes 702M of disk space, now takes only 387M:
702M /backups/2017-04-29_21-12-27 387M /backups/2017-04-29_21-15-53
Restoring:
To restore the backup, we need to (1) decompress it with –decompress option in case we have compressed it before (we will require qpress for that) and (2) apply the log of transactions that happened while the backup was been taken (Basically a crash recovery that InnoDB does when MySQL starts):
innobackupex --decompress /backups/2017-04-29_21-18-04/ innobackupex --apply-log --use-memory=4G /backups/2017-04-29_21-18-04
To speed up the –apply-log process, we can configure –use-memory, which will behave like InnoDB Buffer Pool.
All .qp files will remain on the directory, we need to manually remove then. We can do it using below command:
find /backups/2017-04-29_21-18-04 -name "*.qp" -exec rm -f {} \;
Now we only need to copy the restored backup to the MySQL datadir and configure mysql as owner and group owner of all files in the folder.
That is it for today. Remember, if you don’t test your backups, YOU DON’T HAVE A BACKUP!
Ohio Teachers, Faculty Can Now Conceal Carry on Campus
Last week, the Georgetown Village School District in Georgetown, Ohio voted unanimously to allow teachers and staff to carry concealed handguns beginning in the fall. According to the board’s superintendent, parents asked the board to take up the issue.
“When does help come? Every 30 seconds 2 people die. That’s not acceptable. I don’t know when the 911 call gets made. I don’t know when law enforcement arrives,” he asked. “It’s not that they don’t want to help but when do they help and I want to keep my kids safe.”
In order to carry on district campuses, teachers and faculty must be trained and certified. They must also be concealed carry permit holders.
During the training, staff will learn how to de-escalate situations before having to utilize their firearm. They will also receive first responder and first aid training.
From WKRC Cincinnati:
The Superintendent says the training that staff will have to go through goes far beyond staff and teachers carrying guns in school and he says the school district is partnering with Georgetown’s police department for the training.
The training will be conducted by Tactical Defense Institute over a three day period and cost $1,500 per person. In order to carry on campuses, faculty must receive a certification of completion from Tactical Defense Institute.
The school board’s decision is part of a yearly upgrade and update to the school’s safety plan.
Ohio now has around 40 school districts that allow faculty and staff to carry firearms on school campuses.
Watch Local 12‘s coverage of the story:
The post Ohio Teachers, Faculty Can Now Conceal Carry on Campus appeared first on Bearing Arms.
via Bearing Arms
Ohio Teachers, Faculty Can Now Conceal Carry on Campus
Columbus rated No. 1 in Ohio for starting a business (but if you want cheap rent, head to Toledo)
Columbus is the best city in Ohio to start a business, according to a new ranking, but that doesn’t amount to much nationally.
The city ranked No. 1 in Ohio in WalletHub’s Best Large Cities to Start a Business, but only No. 88 in the country, according to the financial website’s number-crunching.
WalletHub looked at 18 factors in three categories and Columbus got its worst score for business environment, which looked at things such as startups per capita, the growth in small businesses, the five-year…
via Columbus Business News – Local Columbus News | Business First of Columbus
Columbus rated No. 1 in Ohio for starting a business (but if you want cheap rent, head to Toledo)