Hill People Gear - Recon Kit Bag Review - First Impressions

For some time now I have been very intrigued by the Hill People Gear line of Kit Bags. If you have never heard of HPG, go familiarize yourself pronto. They are as of this writing a smallish company creating some extremely innovative and high quality products.

BCM Jack Carbine and why ALL rifles should be ambidextrous

Switch Hitting 

Recently, Bravo Company in partnership with Haley Strategic  released a new rifle called the "Jack Carbine". Essentially if you took the attention to detail that produces the highest quality AR-15 parts on the market and built an AR-15 from the ground up you get the Jack Carbine. They missed something though.

Reaching out

Last weekend I ran to the hills with a group of friends to do some long range shooting. We got another guy hooked on it and he will be purchasing a rifle of his own within a week or two.

The weather was still and crystal clear so we were able to push the .308 out to 1100 yards. That was a new personal record and we were making hits much easier that I normally would have expected.

This also really reinforced the fact that while high magnification is a bonus, it is not necessary to make hits. I can now better understand why a fixed 10x was chosen for some military sniper rifles for a long time. That really is all you NEED to hit a man sized target out to a grand. A few years ago I would have skeptical that a 3-9x would be adequate for shots out to that range.

Afterwards was steaks and beer. An excellent day overall.

762Tactical.com - Kudos

The other day SoldierSystems.net ran an article on the Partisian LBV (which is a really cool looking piece of kit) made by 762Tactical.com and that got me cruising around that site. When doing so I stumbled across the QRF Rig which I really like the looks of as well. The integrated hydration carrier along with a simple no frills design is very appealing.

The only problem is that it is clearly configured for a right handed shooter. The medical pouch would inhibit access to the magazines for a lefty. On a whim I emailed the company and asked if they would be willing to do a left handed configuration and switch around the mag pouches and the IFAK, and if there would be an additional charge for doing so.

To my surprise I got an email back within a few minutes saying that doing a left handed config would be no problem and with no additional charge. In addition he said he would add that option to his website. Within an hour it was done! How is that for customer service?

The 762Tactical site is sporting some unique designs for very reasonable prices. They also cater equally to both the M4 and Kalashnikov platforms. Typically you can request which style mag pouches you want for each product; so AK guys take notice. This site is worth a look.

CamDesk

Watch your six

One of the guys I work with discovered this cool little open source program called CamDesk. What it enables you to do is set up a video feed from a USB camera plugged into your workstation. It has a little window that hovers on your desktop that you can move around and will show you whatever the camera is looking at.

Several of our desks face away from the entrance to our department and we started using this program so we could just glance down and see who is walking into the department.

It takes up hardly any resources on your computer and you can also make the window semi transparent so you can see stuff that you are working on behind it. I believe you can also plug in multiple cameras for multiple feeds as well. It also has some recording options that I have not yet explored. It supports multiple OS's (not sure if the Linux version will run on OS X or not).

I ran into some compatibility problems with cameras on my computer (which to be fair, is long over due for a rebuild). I couldn't get the Microsoft LifeCam camera to work but we have several old Cisco ball cameras laying around and that works fine.

You could probably get pretty creative with uses for this program, just keep in mind it isn't meant to be a full blown security system. Just a widget for displaying a camera feed.

MosquitoHammock.com Jungle Hammock - Review

"Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage." -- William Shakespeare 

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take my Jungle Hammock from MosquitoHammock.com for a test drive. In short I am extremely pleased with it and slept very well in it. Rather than put the money towards a hotel room for two nights, I opted to purchase a Jungle Hammock and have a more adventurous weekend.

Keeping Perspective - The Flatline Ops Scout Level

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ” -- Archimedes

In an earlier post I made a comment about the Flat Line Ops Scout level that is attached to my SWFA scope. Today I discovered that having your rifle level absolutely makes a difference down range. In theory I already knew this, but today I got to experience it for myself.