Select Nintendo Labo kits are $20 today at Best Buy
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If you’re a parent and want to give your kids something creative to do the next time they play with their Switch, Best Buy is holding a well-timed sale on Nintendo Labo kits. The retailer has discounted all four Labo kits it stocks to $20. At the moment, the Variety and Vehicle kits are the best value since they’re usually $70 and they allow you to build a good selection of projects. With the Variety kit, for instance, you can make a house, piano, motorbike, fishing rod and two RC cars.
Just note that the kits are on sale for today only. Best Buy has also marked each of the products for clearance, so supplies may be limited.
Engadget Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar loved the concept of Labo when he reviewed the Variety and Robot kits in 2018. While he found some of the games you could play with your cardboard creations simplistic, he enjoyed the variety of the experiences each one offered. Building each of the projects was also a lot of fun. We were less fond of the VR kit that Nintendo released last year. While the headset itself was comfortable and studier than Nintendo’s past Labo releases, the lack of a head strap was annoying. We also didn’t find the VR updates to games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild compelling. At $20, however, all the kits are easier to recommend, especially at a time like this.
Did Boris Johnson get treated with hydroxychloroquine?
Brainwashed children and reflex thinking as adults
Shifting risk to people willing to voluntarily accept that risk
Sweden’s non-mitigating policy
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Polymer80 GLOCK Build Project: Make Your Own 9mm Ghost Gun
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Welcome to part one of a three-part series, a joint collaboration between The Truth About Guns, Ammoland, and USA Carry. We’ve started a new project that will include three articles going over the process of building your own Polymer80 GLOCK compatible 9mm pistol and getting it running.
The Polymer80 kit for this project was provided by 80-Lower.com. They sent me one of their complete GLOCK compatible pistol kits. This kit includes the Polymer80 80% frame as well as the lower parts kit, the slide and slide kit, and a small travel safe.
What is an 80% Frame?
The beginnings of a spooky “ghost gun” (Travis Pike for TTAG).
If a gun’s frame or receiver is built, but remains unfinished, it’s not considered a gun…legally speaking. These unfinished frames and receivers are known as “80%” frames or lower receivers (in the case of an AR-15). The idea is that the buyer will do the last 20% of the finish work to make it operate, in effect building his own gun.
That’s something that’s been legal in the U.S. since forever, though now a few states prohibit home builds or require a home-built firearm to be registered and serialized. Be sure you know your state’s laws.
There’s a wide variety of 80% frame and receivers available today, including kits available for AR-15s, AKs, Ruger 10/22s, Sten guns, GLOCKs, and many, many more.
Again, since these are unfinished frames in the eyes of the ATF, the are not considered firearms. That means they can be shipped directly to your home. You don’t have to pay a transfer fee or fill out a 4473 background check form.
Federally it’s perfectly legal to build a gun for your own personal use. As mentioned above, however, that freedom varies among the states, with the demonization of home-builds as “ghost guns.”
A few states have regulated 80% builds, so be sure to check your state’s laws. The only other caveat is that our glorious Federal government says I can’t make these and sell them to anyone else. That requires a manufacturer’s license, but that’s another argument for another day.
The Polymer80 GLOCK frames are known by their official nomenclature as the PF940 series. They come in full-sized, compact, and subcompact models, as well as a G43 variant.
I went with the PF940C, the GLOCK 19/23-sized variant of these frames for this project. They also come in a rather wide variety of colors including black, FDE, OD Green, Cobalt, Titanium, and Gray.
Why Build Your Own?
Because to hell with gun control. Honestly, if you order a lower or a kit over the internet with a credit card, shipped to your home address, keeping it off the books isn’t guaranteed if someone starts looking hard enough. But building your own firearm this way makes it a bit more difficult to track you than a 4473 form would.
My reason for building one, though, is that I like guns, and I like having projects to work on. I’ve built one of these before and I find it to be fun and interesting. It gives you a very excellent view of how GLOCK pistols work and just how simple they are.
Best of all, at the end of the project, you have yourself a very good 9mm handgun.
The PF940 frames also feature better ergonomics than factory GLOCKs as far as I’m concerned. Especially the models prior to the Gen5 guns. They lack finger grooves, have a more 1911-ish grip angle, and feature a more aggressive undercut in the trigger guard.
There is also a more pronounced beavertail to the rear of the grip. I’ve a frequent victim of GLOCK slide bite, but not with this particular pistol.
The Polumer80 frams also feature a normal Picatinny accessory rail as opposed to GLOCK’s weird proprietary rail. The subcompact models have rails, including the G43 variant (GLOCK doesn’t offer that).
If you don’t go the kit route, there’s also the attraction of buying your parts one piece at a time and getting the exact components you want. I can certainly see why it’s easier to do get the parts you want up front and have it done rather than swapping out parts.
What You’ll Need to Finish the Kit
You don’t need any fancy tools to complete the build (Travis Pike for TTAG)
The Polymer80 kits come with a simple clamp-on jig, as well as the two bits and the endmill you’ll need to finish the pistol. In terms of tools, you can finish the frames a variety of ways.
A guy on Reddit did one with no power tools at all. I used a Dremel, a hand drill, a mallet, and a few punches, tools most people will have or can pick up very affordably. I also used a vise, but in my last build, I didn’t need one. A vise does make things much simpler, though, so if you have one, I recommend you use it.
Polymer80 jig with pistol frame inside (Travis Pike for TTAG)
The vise makes the process nearly idiot-proof, although, as we’ll see in this series, I’m a bit of an idiot. Once the jig is snapped over the frame, everything you need to do is aligned and ready to mill. There are no adjustments needed, and it’s all Dremel and drill work after that.
What’s in My Kit?
My complete pistol kit is pretty simple. I used a PF940C frame with a 9mm slide kit produced by 80-Lower. It’s a simple slide with forward and rear serrations and is all black.
I like that, for the most part, the kit is all GLOCK OEM parts. Nothing against the aftermarket, but the Polymer80 PF940C kit was built for GLOCK parts, so that’s the route I wanted to take. It may not be fancy or “custom,” but it will be reliable.
The barrel and trigger assembly that’s included with the 80-lower.com kit (Travis Pike for TTAG)
So that’s the lowdown on 80% frames, why you’d want one and what a kit gun like mine includes in the next sections, we’ll go through building the gun and then making it reliable.
Easter just isn’t Easter without some Peeps. Take a 360º video tour of the Just Born candy factory with Food Network to see how these colorful marshmallow treats are born, including a part of the assembly line called the “Sugar Shower.” Did she really use the word “peepsinality” or were we just hearing things?
These Hilarious Star Trek Videos Turn Bloopers Into Canon
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Worf and Riker. Image: CBS
Boy, there sure was a lot more high-fiving on the Enterprise than I remember.
Star Trek: The Next Generationwas, for all its goofiness, played relatively straight. It was a serious sort of show, even if absurd things sometimes happened. It did not, as a rule, have a lot of gags. Star Trek INtakes by YouTuber Ryan’s Edits changes that, and in the process renders Star Trek’s vibe absolutely absurd. The idea, so far as I can tell, is a simple one: edit outtakes together with the actual episode footage.
This simple idea has incredible results, as normal Star Trek moments turn absurd, surreal, and incredibly funny. I laughed harder at these videos than I have at just about anything lately. There are a handful in a playlist on the Ryan’s Edits channel. The most recent one, featuring Worf and Riker, is one of the best.
The video is titled “Something’s Wrong With Worf”, but, really, it’s Riker I’m most concerned about here. Where’s he going? Is somebody going to stop him? All the videos have this quality, creating a sort of silly alternate universe, entirely chaotic version of the show. I don’t really think CBS should do an absurd art-house comedy version of Star Trek, but, based on this, I’m pretty confident that if they did I would watch it.
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Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact: 15,000 Rounds Later
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Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact: 15,000 Rounds Later
Five years ago I decided to purchase what would be my first true silencer host. I decided to take a friend’s advice and start small with a dedicated rimfire silencer, ultimately choosing the budget-friendly SilencerCo Warlock II. While the Warlock was in NFA jail, I was scouring the internet for a 22 pistol that could reliably run any standard velocity ammo I could find. After a lot of searching, I finally settled on the Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact.
The Right Tools
M&P 22 Compact Silencer and Tools
Over the years I’ve found that it’s all about having the right tools to routinely disassemble the M&P 22 Compact. Rather than highlight the pistol’s features I’ve put together a quick how-to guide for servicing the M&P like a pro.
M&P 22 Compact Adapter Wrench
To attach a silencer you’ll need to remove the factory barrel nut and purchase a thread adapter. This particular adapter is a Delta series that I purchased from SilencerCo. More importantly, you’re gonna need a wrench, and I mean like a REAL wrench.
M&P 22 Compact Takedown Adapter Removal
EWK Arms makes a wrench out of bar stock specifically for the factory barrel nut on the M&P 22. If you want to suppress this little pistol, it’s absolutely worth the $30.
M&P 22 Compact Takedown Removing Slide
With the adapter removed, and takedown lever pushed down, you simply slide the slide rearward and up to remove it from the frame.
M&P 22 Compact Disassembled
As you can see this little M&P is pretty filthy, and only gets cleaned roughly every 1,500 rounds. Pretty impressive when you consider that the only stoppages it’s recently had were failures to lock the slide open on an empty mag.
The Silencer
SilencerCo Warlock II Front Cap Removal
Next up is the Warlock II, which is incredibly light and easy to take apart for service. Using the takedown tool supplied, you simply insert it into the grooves on the front cap, and twist counter-clockwise.
SilencerCo Warlock II End Cap Removal
From there you flip the tube over and use the large end of the takedown tool to remove the mount.
SilencerCo Warlock II Takedown
The Warlock II uses a Click Together Assembly (CTA) to connect the baffle stack. The CTA stack does a great job of keeping carbon trapped in the baffles so baffles fall freely out of the tube when disassembled.
Takeaways
Hindsight is always 20/20, and if I could go back in time I would’ve opted to spend the extra money and buy the heavier Stainless Steel SilencerCo Spectre. I’m not discounting how awesome the 3oz Warlock II is, but for a heavy use its aluminum baffles are difficult to clean.
M&P 22 Compact Slide Release Wear
As for the M&P, it just keeps on running. To this day the only real wear I’ve noticed on the gun has been on the slide release. Occasionally it’ll fail to hold the slide back on the last round, but this hasn’t been enough of an annoyance for me to want to fix it. The gun just works and shows no signs of stopping.
The Verdict
Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact and SilencerCo Warlock II
I can’t say enough nice things about the M&P 22 Compact. Its short barrel means that standard velocity ammo is rendered subsonic, and the gun is just an all-around blast to shoot. I started keeping track of how many rounds I shot through this gun just so I could remember to clean the silencer. Undoubtedly if I hadn’t, the Warlock would surely be fused together by carbon and lead at this point.
If you’re in the market for a 22 pistol that isn’t picky about ammo, is easy to clean, and performs well suppressed, you absolutely need to look at the M&P 22 compact.
Would I buy it again? Absolutely, and there isn’t another 22 pistol I’d rather own.
Note: At the time of this article, the M&P 22 Compact has 15,220 rounds through it.
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Airplane Recycling Company Employee Has to Activate Detached Emergency Slide, to the Amusement of Co-Workers
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Whatever group of people engineered self-inflating airplane emergency slides deserve many awards. It’s absurd to see something that big emerge from something that small in such a short amount of time:
As for how and why this guy is tasked with doing this in a driveway: The video is from a Dutch company called Aircraft End-of-Life Solutions, who recorded it in December of a previous year. As the name suggests, AELS dismantles and recycles decommissioned airplanes, and blowing the slide was part of their "End of the year clean up."
In this video, I have shown you how to make Laravel 7 auth scaffolding from scratch. With this video tutorial, you will learn a step by step process for making authentication & registration system for Laravel 7. To read text tutorial & code for this video please visit http://bit.ly/laravel7-auth Laravel 7 authentication Laravel 7 registration system Laravel 7 make:auth Laravel 7 login registration tutorial Social Links ——————- https://www.youtube.com/LaravelArticle https://ift.tt/2y4ytbz https://twitter.com/laravelarticle ⚠️ DISCLAIMER Do not download or copy from this channel. It’s a cybercrime. All video of this channel are copyright to laravelarticle.com
One of the most asked questions I get about Cashier is how you start testing your billing integration of your app. So let’s check out a couple of ways how you’d tackle that.
Stripe API
The best way to test Cashier and your billing integration is to actually hit the Stripe API. Doing so will give you the confidence that your billing integration is actually working as expected. In fact, we added a section to the docs yesterday that details just that.
To get started, add the testing version of your Stripe secret to your phpunit.xml file:
Now, whenever you interact with Cashier while testing, it will send actual API requests to your Stripe testing environment. For convenience, you should pre-fill your Stripe testing account with subscriptions / plans that you may then use during testing.
Hitting the Stripe API will cause your tests to run slowly but usually you wouldn’t be running these tests very often, maybe just right before you do a deploy. Therefore it’s best to separate these tests into a separate directory in your test suite.
In order to test different kinds of scenarios in your test suite you can make use of a vast range of Stripe testing tokens.
If you want to look at an example of doing these kind of tests, have a look at Cashier’s own test suite.
stripe-mock
Stripe is currently developing a library called “stripe-mock” which will allow to mock these expensive HTTP calls when testing. Unfortunately, the library currently is stateless and Cashier relies on persisted state in Stripe a lot. When this library eventually implements persistence, we’ll update Cashier’s own test suite and update these docs so you can make use of it.
Hiding Behind An Interface
A second option is to hide Cashier calls behind an interface. In fact, in one app I took this approach and it worked very well. The apps’ tests ran very fast. Let’s see how we’d tackle this.
We’ll start off by defining an interface for our subscriptions:
<?php namespace App\Billing\Subscriptions; use App\User; use Laravel\Cashier\Subscription; interface SubscriptionRepository { public function subscribe(User $customer, string $plan, string $paymentMethod): Subscription; }
Then implement the actual Stripe calls which we’ll use in our app:
<?php namespace App\Billing\Subscriptions; use App\User; use Laravel\Cashier\Subscription; final class StripeSubscriptionRepository implements SubscriptionRepository { public function subscribe(User $customer, string $plan, string $paymentMethod): Subscription { return $customer->newSubscription('main', $plan)->create($paymentMethod); } }
And the TestSubscriptionRepository which contains our testing implementation:
<?php namespace App\Billing\Subscriptions; use App\User; use Illuminate\Support\Str; use Laravel\Cashier\Subscription; final class TestingSubscriptionRepository implements SubscriptionRepository { public function subscribe(User $customer, string $plan, string $paymentMethod): Subscription { return $customer->subscriptions()->create([ 'name' => 'main', 'stripe_id' => Str::random(), 'stripe_status' => 'active', 'stripe_plan' => $plan, 'quantity' => 1, ]); } }
After this you can register the implementations in the register method of your AppServiceProvider:
$this->app->singleton(SubscriptionRepository::class, function ($app) { if ($app->environment('testing')) { return new TestingSubscriptionRepository; } return new StripeSubscriptionRepository; });
And now your Stripe calls will be replaced during your tests and they’ll run much faster.
There are a couple of downsides to this approach. First of all, you’re trading part of the confidence you get when actually hitting the Stripe API. The other downside is that you’ll have to partially re-implement Cashier’s behavior. And depending on how much functionality you use from Cashier that could potentially be a lot. Of course, you’d only replace the parts which make Stripe calls.
Mocking
The third one is an obvious one when unit testing. You could use a library like Mockery to mock those expensive API calls. Let’s see how that works.
Imagine we have the following job:
<?php namespace App\Jobs; use App\User; final class SubscribeCustomer { private User $customer; private string $plan; private string $paymentMethod; public function __construct(User $customer, string $plan, string $paymentMethod) { $this->customer = $customer; $this->plan = $plan; $this->paymentMethod = $paymentMethod; } public function handle(): void { $this->customer->newSubscription('main', $this->plan) ->create($this->paymentMethod); } }
We could write the following test where we mock the actual Cashier calls:
<?php namespace Tests\Unit\Jobs; use App\User; use App\Jobs\SubscribeCustomer; use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase; use Laravel\Cashier\SubscriptionBuilder; use Mockery; use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase; class SubscribeCustomerTest extends TestCase { public function tearDown(): void { parent::tearDown(); Mockery::close(); } /** @test */ public function it_can_process_a_new_subscription() { $subscriptionBuilder = Mockery::mock(SubscriptionBuilder::class); $subscriptionBuilder->shouldReceive('create') ->with('foo-method'); $customer = Mockery::mock(User::class); $customer->expects('newSubscription') ->with('main', 'plan-1') ->andReturn($subscriptionBuilder); (new SubscribeCustomer($customer, 'plan-1', 'foo-method'))->handle(); } }
And thus no Stripe API calls are made. Of course this only mocks the calls but doesn’t re-implements the behavior like our interface example. The above technique is ideal for unit tests but not so much for feature tests.
Conclusion
We’ve seen three different techniques when it comes to testing Cashier and while each one holds a benefit and a downside I’d still recommend making actual Stripe HTTP calls if you want to be entirely sure your billing integration works as expected. If stripe-mock ever gets persistency we can solve the speed issue that way. But definitely don’t be afraid to use the other two techniques. Use what works best for your situation.
Where You Can Buy Used Airplane Windows, Lights, Seats, Coffeemakers, Bathrooms and Other Parts
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In 2005, Derk-Jan van Heerden was an aerospace engineering student at TU Delft. That year he wrote his Master’s thesis on the subject of "What happens to decommissioned airplanes?"
After graduating, van Heerden got a job with KLM’s Engineering and Maintenance division, where he managed the disassembly of a Boeing 747. He didn’t last long; after just five months, van Heerden had learned enough to start his own company, Aircraft End-of-Life Solutions.
While their main business is reselling operational parts to the aircraft industry, "We receive many requests from people who want to buy aircraft parts for decoration," the company writes. As a result, they’ve begun holding periodic sales and auctions open to anyone. You can buy wheels, lights, landing gear, ovens, coffeemakers, business class seats, the bathrooms, you name it.
"We love to see how creative people can be with aircraft components," they write. "Did you ever try to make a photo frame out of an airplane window? Or a bar from an engine inlet? What is the coolest thing you have ever made of aircraft parts? Ours is this coffee table."
To stay abreast of the sales, you can sign up for their Alternative Re-use Mailing List. And if you’d just like to browse what parts they’ve got available to industry, they keep a downloadable stock sheet here [XLS download].
