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Wolf the Predator dropped by Baltimore Knife and Sword Co. to commission a copy of his warrior race’s staple weapon, the wrist blades. The serrated steel blades pop out of their gauntlet, just like their movie counterparts.
via The Awesomer
Forging the Predator Wrist Blades

The weather isn’t great and the pubs close too early and the food is often better in other cities and yet London is still one of the capitals of the world and is packed with so much history. Photographer Vincent LaForet took these amazing aerial shots of London and seeing the city overhead like this reminds you why that is.

The buildings may be old and the streets may be confusing when you’re down low but boy, it looks great from above.

Click on the magnifying glass to zoom and see these images up close at full screen because the detail is absolutely phenomenal. It’s the only way to do them justice.

The full set of Vincent’s London photos can be seen here on Storehouse. You can also sign up to pre-order a book on Vincent’s Air series here. The entire Air Series in Europe is sponsored by G-Technology.”

Vincent Laforet is a director, photographer, and a pioneer in tilt-shift, aerial photography, and in HD DSLR cameras for shooting film. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his images of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s conflicts after 9/11, plus three prizes at the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, Life and many other national and international publications have commissioned his service.

Follow him on his blog, Twitter, Facebook, Storehouse, and Instagram.

You can buy his book Visual Stories: Behind the Lens with Vicent Laforet here.

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This is part of a series in which we are featuring futuristic, striking, and just beautiful photography. If you are a photographer with awesome work, please drop me a line here.

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via Gizmodo
These ridiculously detailed aerial photos of London are so stunning

The most fundamental outdoor skill is also often one of the most misunderstood. Learn these five campfires and you’ll be able to cook food, scare off wild animals, stay warm or just have a bonfire on the beach. They’re simple, but everyone can probably learn something here.

Fire Basics

A fire needs three things to work: fuel, heat and oxygen. What makes these fires different is largely in how the ratios of those three things is controlled.

If you’re outdoors and didn’t just bring a commercial fire starter and prepared firewood, then you’ll need a few basic tools to prepare your wood and light your fire. A fixed-blade knife, ferro rod and vaseline-coated cotton balls should be considered the minimum necessary. To that, you can add an axe or saw if you want to reduce the labor required significantly.

You’ll need dry wood to get a fire going. Best case scenario, you can just pick up dry crackly twigs off the ground. But, in bad weather, you’ll need to work a bit harder. Even in heavy rain or snow, you’ll still be able to find dry wood inside standing, dead trees and branches. A saw or axe will help you cut those down, then chop them into useable lengths. An axe or large knife will then help you split those logs, which is what allows you to access the dry wood inside and reduces the size of the pieces you have to work with. You can produce everything down to kindling from the dry center of dead trees and branches, but you’ll need to find or create another source of tinder to spark your fire into life.

Dry grasses are one good source of tinder, or you can whittle a feather stick from a dry sliver of wood. You can also try to find a mouse or bird’s nest, pull lint from your belly button or any number of other tricks. I just carry those vaseline coated cotton balls. The petroleum jelly keeps the insides dry, so you just pull them apart, hit that with a spark from your ferro rod, et voila, two minutes of four-inch-high flame.

When processing your wood, try to create stuff that looks like commercial firewood. You need a manageable length and for it to be split into fourths. This helps expose the dry center to the flames while creating more exposed angles from which fire can catch. Big round logs coated in wet bark will be reluctant to light and burn.

Once you’ve prepared your materials, you’re ready to build a fire. Let’s look at the various types, how to make them and what they can do.

Tipi

The simplest and most effective way to start any kind of fire. You’ll use a tipi made from kindling to start most of the rest of these styles. We’re over-simplifying with large pieces of wood here to make it easy to follow. If you want to use a tipi to get a fire going, build one with the smallest, driest, most exposed pieces of wood possible. Then, either put your tinder in its center and light it or light it first, then scoot it in. Don’t forget to leave a “door” through which to do that!

The basic idea is to create a structure that concentrates the flame while allowing plenty of air to enter. Start with enough wood on your tipi to get going, then just add more slowly as the fire builds. Start small and work up to larger pieces as appropriate; you’ll develop a feel for when and how large with practice.

Sticking a forked branch in the ground as a center pole for your tipi makes building one easier. And you can scale a tipi all the way from the very first pile of kindling on up to a massive bonfire. You can even build the entire thing before lighting, just remember that door and remember the necessary progression of wood sizes as you work outwards and upwards.

Log Cabin

Want a fire that requires very little maintenance? Building a log cabin creates a structure that will progressively burn for a long time, while lighting quickly and easily from a tipi or other kindling structure built inside it. These are great for getting bonfires going quickly or just building a campfire you can then ignore while you prep food or perform other chores. Use the thickest logs for the base, then go a bit smaller as you work up. You can also reduce the circumference into sort of a pyramid for something that will catch a bit quicker.

Platform

Want a nice bed of coals to cook on? You build a pyramid like a solid log cabin, with the largest logs at the base and something about the size of your wrist on the top. Then, you just light a fire on the top and let it burn down through the logs, creating a big, thick bed of hot coals. And you don’t need to wait for it to burn down all the way to start cooking. If you have cast iron cookware, you can place that directly on the hot coals as soon as that first layer of logs is burning solidly.

Using more and bigger logs, this style is also known as the “upside down” fire, popular for its ability to burn for a long time, untended. Again, put the biggest logs on the bottom and scale up to smaller stuff, then light a fire on the top. With practice, you’ll figure out the right size wood to use to create a fire capable of burning on its own, all night.

These can be a little difficult to get going. The trick is to build a large enough tipi on top to create a bed of coals that will be capable of burning down through the first layer, igniting that, creating a larger bed of coals and so on.

Star

You see this style in cowboy movies for a reason. It uses minimal wood and effort to burn for a very long time. That makes the star best for all-night fires or use in a fire pit.

Get going with a solid tipi fire in the middle, then place logs around the fire in 3 or 5 points. Slowly push the logs in further as they burn down.

Want to create a maintenance free fire? Simply dig a hole and build the star in it so the logs slide down as they burn on their own. Works equally well in the fire pit you have in your yard or on your deck.

Lean To

Need to protect your fledgling fire from wind and rain as you get it going? Build a lean to does just that. There’s two main methods for doing this. The first, and easiest, is to simply lay a big log down as a windbreak, then lean your progressively larger firewood on that. Demonstrated here is the cantilevered branch approach, which allows you to build something larger. To do it this way, find a green branch to serve as a ridge pole and either prop it up with a forked stick or weight it as we did here. Then, just build that lean to starting with small kindling and working your way up to larger pieces of wood. Build a little tipi way inside the lean to, where it’s protected from the wind and rain and, by the time the whole thing collapses, it’ll be going strong enough to be impervious to weather.

Fire Tips

There’s a bunch of ways to build these basic types of campfires, none of which are wrong. The real key here is to practice, find a method your’e most comfortable with, then build the style appropriate for your unique needs on a given night.

Practicing the hard way, with a knife, ferro rod and tinder and learning to find and process your own wood with limited tools helps develop a key skill not only for survival, but just generally being comfortable and confident outdoors.

And there’s more you can do with fire beyond just build one. Want to keep warm? Find a natural reflector like a boulder, shelf or the back of a shallow cave and build the fire so you sit between the reflector and it. Build another reflector from stacked logs and place it on the opposite side of the fire if you want to be even warmer.

High wind? Dig a hole with a shallow side facing towards the wind and steep side on the downwind, that’ll funnel air to your fire without blowing it out.

Want to cook over a fire? Build it in a narrow trench able to support your cookware or position two green logs to do the same.

Want to hang a pot? Lash a tripod of green wood together and stand it over the fire.

Do you use these types of fires or others? Which is your favorite and why?

IndefinitelyWild is a new publication about adventure travel in the outdoors, the vehicles and gear that get us there and the people we meet along the way. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

via Gizmodo
How To Build The Only Five Campfires You’ll Ever Need

I laughed out loud and rolled on the floor and laughed my butt off so much at this video that shows how Transformers ruins our favorite movies. Movies you’ve seen before carries along normally and then… BOOM a Transformer comes to destroy everyone in the scene. The editing of this video is perfect, it shows movies like Speed and Little Miss Sunshine and 50/50 among others.

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SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

via Gizmodo
Truly hilarious video shows how Transformers ruins all movies

An anonymous reader writes: Today, an Icelandic prosthetic-maker announced that two amputees have been testing brain-controlled bionic legs for over a year. The devices respond to impulses in the subjects’ residual limbs, via sensors that were implanted in simple, 15-minute-long procedures. "When the electrical impulse from his brain reaches the base of his leg, a pair of sensors embedded in his muscle tissue connect the neural dots, and wirelessly transmit that signal to the Proprio Foot. Since the command reaches the foot before the wearer’s residual muscles actually contract, there’s no unnatural lag between intention and action." This is a huge step forward (sorry) for this class of bionics. It may seem like a solved problem based on reports and videos from laboratories, but it’s never been exposed to real world use and everyday wear and tear like this.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot
After a Year of Secret Field-Testing, Brain-Controlled Bionic Legs Are Here

A NAS, or network-attached storage device, is great for storing files you can reach from any computer in the house. But when you upgrade to a new one, you’re stuck copying everything over by hand, swapping drives, and risking data loss. Here’s a much more reliable method.

Not too long ago, I picked up a brand new NAS with way more space than my old one. It’s great, but as soon as I set it up I was stuck with the task of transferring terabytes of data from to the new NAS. I didn’t want to physically move drives, since the old drives were smaller than the new ones. Since I was moving from one Synology NAS to another, I could have used their migration tool, and you’d be right, but if I were moving from a Synology to a ReadyNAS, or from FreeNAS to Synology, I wouldn’t have had that option. I wanted a platform-agnostic method. After mulling over the dozen or so ways to get the job done, I settled on one of our old command line favorites: rsync.

Why rsync Is the Best Tool for the File Transfer Job

I can hear you now: “Why use the command line for this? I could use [X METHOD] to do the same thing,” and you’d be right! There are a lot of ways to get the job done, but rsync has a few significant advantages over just opening a pair of windows on your PC and dragging files from one to the other. Here are the big ones:

• rsync is probably already on your NAS. Whether your NAS is an off-the-shelf enclosure packed with drives or a DIY model running your preferred operating system, odds are it’s running a variant of linux. That means the command line—and rsync—are already installed. Sure, if you’re moving from one brand of NAS to another of the same brand, there may be built-in apps to help, but the beauty of rsync is that it works anywhere, no matter the brand and no matter how big the drives or volumes are.
• rsync retains metadata. That means things like file ownership, original creation date, modification dates, file permissions, and all that jazz are retained when your copy lands in its new destination. Users and permissions on the new system notwithstanding, if you don’t want all of your files to get brand new creation dates, generate new thumbnails, or things like revision history are important to you, this is a good method to make sure that information is preserved.
• rsync eliminates the middleman. When you use your PC to copy files from one system to another, your computer is acting as a middleman between the two NASes. That creates another point of failure in the transfer, not to mention keeps your main computer unnecessarily busy. If you’ve ever done long, multi-file copy operations in Windows, you know this can be annoying at the least, and even the smallest thing will make that copy crap out. When it does, you’re stuck trying to figure out where the copy failed, why, and where to start again. Since rsync is a device-to-device copy, it runs whether your computer is on or not.
• rsync supports resumed transfers, diffs, and syncing. If for some reason your transfer dies, like a freak power outage, a system error, or any other problem, rsync is capable of picking up right where you left off without issue. Similarly, since rsync was designed to synchronize directories (and keep them in sync), if you have any need to keep your old NAS in sync with your new one, or you accidentally drop new files on your old NAS that should be on the new one, rsync can move them for you, and will only touch the changed or new files in the process.
• rsync minimizes network overhead. This may not matter to you if you do this overnight—and you probably should—but one of the best things about rsync is that it doesn’t carry the same kind of network load that other tools do. That means your other backups or downloads won’t slow to a crawl just because you’re using it, and other people on your network probably won’t notice anything’s going on at all.

Like we mentioned, rsync is designed for synchronizing files, not just copying them. We’ve shown you how to mirror systems with it before, and how to sync iTunes with any USB device, but it’s also useful just for straight machine-to-machine copies because it’s so flexible. It can even give you a handy progress bar so you can make sure everything goes smoothly.

Step One: Enable Remote Access and Choose Your Transfer Method

The other nice thing about rsync is that it’s just a command line away. You can’t just fire up a terminal window and start copying though—you’ll need to do a little initial setup.

First, you’ll need to make sure that SSH access is enabled on both your old NASes. SSH allows you to log in to your NAS from the command line, using a secure shell. On my Synology NAS, this was right under Control Panel, labeled “Terminal & SNMP.” You’ll likely find it in a similar place on your NAS, but it’s usually under System, Remote Access, or any other synonym for “remote management.”

Once you have remote access enabled on both NASes, and you have the admin (or root) credentials for both systems, you’re ready to go. Now we’re ready to log in to our old NAS and push our files to the new one.

How to Use rsync to Transfer Files

Now it’s time to get down to business. Use your favorite SSH tool (in Linux or OS X, you can just open a terminal window, in Windows I like PuTTY for this) to log in to your old NAS. In OS X or Linux, just open a terminal window and type this:

slogin admin@[IP ADDRESS OF YOUR OLD NAS]

You’ll be prompted to log in, and once you do, you’ll get dumped into a new command line representing your NAS. In Windows, open PuTTY. In the host name field, type in the IP address of your old NAS, make sure SSH is selected, and click Open. You’ll be prompted for a username (admin or root) and a password. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be dropped at the command line for your NAS.

Now it’s time to run rsync. The syntax is pretty simple. You’ll need to tell rsync how to log in to the remote device, and where to put the files, all in one command. Here’s how:

rsync -azP [SOURCE DIRECTORY] admin@[IP ADDRESS OF YOUR NEW NAS]:[SOURCE DIRECTORY]

So, let’s say I have a folder on my old NAS called “old_movies,” and a folder on the new one called “new_movies.” To copy everything inside “old_movies” to “new_movies,” the command would look like this:

rsync -azP old_movies/ admin@192.168.1.X:new_movies

Where 192.168.1.X is the IP address of your new NAS. Once you run this, you’ll be prompted to verify that the SSH key for the new NAS is indeed correct, and that you want to store it for future use. You may get a warning about the key the first time you connect, but that’s okay. Type “yes” to continue. You’ll be prompted to log in to the new NAS with the admin password. Go ahead and do that too. If everything else was successful, as soon as you do, your file sync will begin.

Before we go on, let’s talk about those flags—the “-azP”—you see in the command above. They’re important, and here’s why:

• The “-a” flag in there stands for “archive,” and it’s important to include. It makes sure that the sync command is recursive (meaning any sub-folders and files inside of old_movies are copied too) and it’s important for preserving all of those modification dates, symbolic links, permissions, and other goodies we talked about earlier.
• The “-P” flag combines two other useful flags into one here that you’ll want to use. It combines the flags for “progress” and “partial,” and when used you’ll get a progress dialog at the command line that shows you which file is currently transferring, what percentage of that transfer is complete, and how many more files are left to check. As each file completes, you’ll see an ever-growing list of completed file transfers, which is great for making sure everything transfers successfully. It also allows you to easily resume suspended or interrupted transfers. Combined, you can see how it’ll show you which file was the last one to go, where it failed, and if it failed, give you the option to resume. It’s a pretty powerful combination.
• The “-z” flag is a handy rsync tool that compresses the files when transferred, which gives you that whole “light on bandwidth” benefit we discussed. If the files are already compressed, you won’t get much benefit here, but if they’re not, this will get the job done without slowing down the rest of your home network.

You should double-check your command before you copy, just to make sure you’re copying to the right directory and directory structure.

When it comes time to migrate your whole NAS, you can do this directory by directory, or you could do it like I did—in one swoop, overnight. Do one small directory as a test to make sure you have your syntax right, and when that works, move up to the parent directory, and copy the whole thing at once. It’ll take ages, but when you’re finished, your new NAS will be set up exactly like your old one was, all ready to go.

If you’re a stickler and prefer granular control, create your directories and shares on the new NAS, then just copy the contents of each directory from the old NAS to the new one. That way you’ve created the directories and granted them permissions using your NAS’s interface, and the files inside will retain whatever permissions they had.

Troubleshooting Issues, Updating Directories, and Additional Reading

If you run into issues with the copy, or with other odd, quirky problems, do some Googling for your error messages and the OS of your old or new NAS. You’ll be surprised what you’ll turn up, and how many people had the same problem you did. In my case, when I was migrating my Synology NAS, I ran into some quirky “rsync service is not running” errors when I tried to push or pull files, only to find out that I needed to make sure Synology’s “Network Backup Service” and “Network Destination Service” were enabled on both the source and destination NAS—two checkboxes buried deep on the Service tab of “Info Center” in the Control Panel. I also had to make sure I logged in as root—logging in as admin wouldn’t cut it. Luckily, Stefan came to my rescue with this helpful post on the error.

Similarly, Justin Ellingwood’s rsync walkthrough on DigitalOcean’s community forums is super helpful if you want to learn the ins and outs of rsync for the purpose of moving files across systems, and helped me identify the best flags to use and when to use that trailing slash and when not to. If you accidentally write to the old NAS instead of the new one, and need to run a differential sync—that is, use rsync to just copy the changed or different files since your last sync—he has instructions on how to do that, too. If you’re an old hat with rsync, this walkthrough at How-to Geek will help you take those skills to the next level.

Once you have all of your files migrated, you’re free to do whatever you want with the old NAS. Turn it into a download box, a home theater system, use it for unimportant files or backups, whatever you want. If you plan to sell or get rid of it though, make sure you wipe it properly and clean it up beforehand. With luck, you can get some cash for it.

Title photo made using Denis Dubrovin.

via Lifehacker
How to Migrate From an Old NAS to a New One Overnight with rsync

Earlier this year when I made a video about how to plan your week, several viewers commented on the terrible Quasimodo-like hunched back I displayed. As a guy who spends much of his time sitting slumped over a laptop, I was aware I had developed a terrible slouch. And I wasn’t proud of it. Not […]

via The Art of Manliness
De-Quasimodo Yourself: 6 Exercises to Counteract Slouching

TTAG Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day Hall of Famer FPSRussia has been pulling a Kirsten Joy Weiss as of late. He’s been doing things (e.g., gun reviews) for which he was justifiably not famous. I blame the double-tap to … Read More

The post FPSRussia Finds His Mojo appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
FPSRussia Finds His Mojo

If you have used MySQL for a while, you have probably used mysqldump to backup your database. In part one of this blog, I am going to show you how to create a simple full and partial backup using mysqldump. In part two, I will show you how to use MySQL Enterprise Backup (which is […]
via MySQL Server Blog
Creating and Restoring Database Backups With mysqldump and MySQL Enterprise Backup – Part 1 of 2