Posted 05 May 2024

My daily carry pistol is the M&P Bodyguard 380 in a ‘Sticky’ brand Holster, as shown below:

I carry this in my jeans front pocket, and it works great. I regularly practice smoothly drawing the pistol, activating the Crimson Trace laser, and getting the gun on target. Unfortunately after a year or so of use I started seeing occurrences where the laser wouldn’t activate, and investigation showed that the laser battery was dead. The first time this happened I just wrote it off to the normal battery life, but the second and third times were definitely too close together to be a battery life issue. I finally figured out that the laser was being inadvertently activated in the holster – clearly not a good solution. The good news is, it made me more determined than ever to not count on the laser. Now I practice with and without the laser (although I much prefer the ‘with’ scenario).

Thinking about the problem, I inferred that the ‘Sticky’ holster, when new, comparatively stiffer when new than after hundreds of cycles of inserting and removing it from my jeans pocket, and of course hundreds of dry-fire draw and shoot repetitions. Eventually the holster gets pliable enough so the normal inward pressure from my jeans pocket is enough to activate the laser at some point (and once is enough, as once activated it will probably stay ON until battery exhaustion). As you might imagine, replacing the battery in the laser module is a major PITA, as the pistol itself must be disassembled, and then the laser module removed to access the battery. Then the procedure must be run in reverse to re-assemble everything, and now the laser alignment must be checked and adjusted as necessary (another major PITA).

Thinking about solutions, I contemplated 3D-printing a holster insert that would replace the original holster stiffness (and I might still do this). However, I was struck by the idea that the real solution to the holster material pressing in on the laser activation button is to remove the holster material around the button; then the holster material thickness becomes an additional guard around the button. Instead of being the culprit, it now becomes the solution – cool! Here’s another photo showing the ‘Sticky’ holster with a (unfortunately crude) hold around the pistol’s laser button:

‘Sticky’ holster with material over laser activation button removed

After – once again – replacing the laser battery, I plan to run with this setup for a while and see how long the laser batteries last this time.

Stay tuned,

Frank

Posted 05 May 2024

I and my wife are crossword puzzle addicts. To feed our habits, I signed up for the NY Times crossword puzzle archives and downloaded the Friday, Saturday and Sunday puzzles (the Mon-Thurs puzzles were too easy) for each week between January 2015 and December 2022.

Originally I would print out a puzzle as required by opening/printing the puzzle file using Across Lite, but this got old in a hurry. So, I decided I would create a program to automagically print an entire folder’s worth of puzzles in ‘batch mode’ utilizing two-sided printing – yay! Looking around for the best/easiest way to accomplish this, I ran across an application called ‘AutoIt’, specifically created as a shell-script generator to run Windows (or Mac) applications and system functions.

It took a while to work my way through the command reference and examples, but eventually I was able to create an AutoIt shell script to do what I wanted; The script prompts the user for a directory containing Across Lite *.puz files, and offers to print them all in equal N-puzzle batches, thereby allowing the user to print a batch and then move the printed puzzles from the output tray to the input tray for a double-sided result.

This worked great, with the only downside being that the user’s PC cannot be used for anything else while the script is running, as it grabs the mouse cursor to launch Across Lite and print the current .puz file.

Here’s the script, as it stands now in May of 2024 (saved on my system as C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\240504 PUZ Print Script.au3):

And here is the output log for printing the contents of the ‘C:\Users\Frank\Documents\Personal\Crosswords\Print Pending\2015’ folder containing 156 puzzle files, printed in four batches of 39 files each:

After some time away from my autonomous wall-following robot, I have started spending time with it again. The first thing that happened was I tried a long-term run in my home, only to find that the ‘mirrored-surface’ feature I added some time ago caused the robot to enter an infinite loop, even when encountering a non-mirrored surface – oops! This eventuality was such a bummer that I stopped working with the robot for several months.

When I worked up the courage to address the problem, the first thing I did was to back out the ‘mirrored-surface’ code, reverting back to the state of affairs represented by the ‘WallE3_QuickSort_V5.ino’ Arduino project. This required quite a bit more work than I had anticipated; I had thought my process of incremental builds would shield me from that – NOT! Eventually I was able to use some ‘diff’ tools to work my way through the process.

After getting the code squared away without the ‘mirrored surface’ code, I decided to take my robot out for a walk – well actually it was the robot taking me for a walk ‘in’ for a walk around the house. Here’s a link to the (not-so-short) video showing the action. I have included this as a link to the video file on my Google Drive site, because it’s too long to fit on my WordPress blog page.