Notes of a Crotchety Bookman: October 2010

BookThink

BookThink is the #1 ranked resource provider for online and open shop book dealers, book collectors, and serious readers. Resources include:

The BookThinker, a free twice monthly newsletter covering a wide range of bookselling and collecting topics.

BookThink's Gold Edition, a monthly newsletter supplying profit-generating insider information to booksellers.

BookThink's Quarterly Market Report of Common, Profitable Books, a market report targeting high-profit, in-demand books that are likely to surface on scouting trips.

Moderated book forums; an extensive library of active and pertinent book-related links; book reviews; interviews with authors and other notables; and intensive tutorials on practical book repair, grading, terminology, buying for resale, selling books online and off, building a personal book collection, and more.

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All Things Rimfire

Rimfire Shooting: Another good place for information on all aspects ofr .22 & .17 rimfires. While this is a Rim Fire forum any productive discussion is welcome. Some of the top shooters in the world here will give you advice and help. This and a no fee membership make RFS a "Win-Win" place to be.

As of today, there are 40,128 Posts and 3,507 Members.

Here are a few of the brand-specific forums they carry.

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Distilling How-To

http://www.homedistiller.org/image/mini_explained.jpg

Homedistiller is the go-to place for you Modern hillbillys that prefer making your own booze. This site is "A manual on distilling alcohol at home: designing and building, or buying a still, preparing the wash, understanding how distillation works, flavouring and aging the spirits."

The whole site is downloadable, and here is a stripped-down menu of the contents:

Introduction

Explaining the Theory

Distillate Strength & Temperature

Reflux Still Design Theory

Interactive Design Calculations

Unit Conversion Calculations

Types of Stills

Photos of Stills

Making a Still

Buying a Still

Other Equipment

Which Wash to Make

Sugar Based

Grains

Fruit

Fermentation

Distilling the Wash

Diluting the Distilate

Polishing Neutral Spirits

Aging Spirits

Using Wood

Essence or Flavour Stills

Gin

Making Schnapps

Flavoured Neutral Spirits

Liqueurs (sweet) - fruit & herbs

Liqueurs (sweet) - citrus, nut & spices

Essential Oils

Ukranian Alcoholic beverages

Links to Other Sites

This site contains a step-by-step guide to building a relatively sophisticated home distillation apparatus that produces a highly refined distillate. The still is made from commonly available materials, with simple hand tools, and can be built for under $100.USD.

Montana Survivor

Due to the popularity of the Survivor shows, Montana is planning to do its own, titled 'Survivor - Montana Style.'

The contestants will start in Helena , travel over to Billings and Lewistown.

Then, they will head northwest to Missoula then up to Kalispell.

From there they will proceed west to Libby and Troy.

Then final leg will be back to Helena.

Each will be driving a pink Volvo with California license plates and a HUGE bumper sticker that reads:

"I'm gay. I'm a vegetarian. Beer is harmful to your health. Republicans suck. Obama is God. Deer hunting is murder, and I'm here to confiscate your guns."

The first one that makes it back to Helena alive wins..

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Survival Preps

Survival Preps: Small, new, fast growing, pertinent. At the moment there are 1349 Posts in 289 Topics by 166 Members.

Posts cover everything from lighting to assault rifles. Pets & housekeeping are just a few of the topics I hadn't really thought of that are detailed. I think that anyone interested in the topic of preparedness should check out this site -- it looks like it is going to be one of the best ones out there.

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Canadian Gunnutz

Canadian Gunnutz, The place to go for discussions, eh?

"Canadian Guns and Firearms Discussion Forums for Shooting , Hunting and outdoor in Canada. Firearms Buy, Sell and Trade Listings. Forum de discussion Canadien sur les armes à feu et la chasse."

This is a spot for the sorely-oppressed gun owners of Canada to talk guns. Legal guns and related activities, that is.

The following topics will not be tolerated. Violation will result in immediate and permanent suspension. Some quasi legal/ grey/downright illegal examples that are specifically not tolerated are:

Shipping and driving items to Canada from the US that require US export permit.
Discharging firearms in places where firearms are not allowed to be discharged.
Manufacture or use of flammable and explosive substances or “tracer” projectiles.
Unblocking 5 rd magazines to regular capacity.
Swapping non-restricted barrel for restricted barrel at gun range.
Home made firearms with illegal or misleading markings. For example, marking a chunk of metal with "Valmet 78".
Solicitation of unregistered firearms or magazine kits.

This is a busy site: Threads: 269,728, Posts: 3,822,870, Members: 66,26. The forums are typical of those found on stateside firearm sites, though with a decidedly Canadian slant. If you have any questions about weapons north of the borderthis is the site to visit.

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Martini-Henry Rifles

http://www.martinihenry.com/images/greenercarb.gif

Martini-Henry Rifles are the focus of this site. It has links, photos and a lot of related information.

The Martini-Henry was a breech-loading lever-actuated rifle adopted by the British military, combining an action worked on by Friedrich von Martini with the rifled barrel designed by Scotsman Alexander Henry. It first entered service in 1871, replacing the Snider-Enfield, and variants were used throughout the British Empire for 30 years. The Martini was the first British service rifle that was designed from the outset as a cartridge-firing breechloader and was both faster firing and had a longer range than earlier rifles.

In other words, it surprised the heck out of the Zulus at Rorke's drift, were used with spitzer tipped incendiary bullets to shoot down German Zeppelins that were dropping bombs on London in WWI, and is still in limited service in Afghanistan.

The Martini-Henry was copied on a large scale by North-West Frontier Province gunsmiths. Their weapons were of a poorer quality than those made by Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, but accurate down to the proof markings. The main manufacturers were the Adam Khel Afridi, who lived around the Khyber Pass. Hence the British term for such weapons, "Pass made rifles". Many of those weapons which survive are now being sold to soldiers serving with International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan

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The Hillbilly Housewife

http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/wp-content/themes/hbhw/images/hdr.jpg

The Hillbilly Housewife focuses on low-cost, home-cooking from scratch. The recipes are all tested in a real kitchen with hungry children, stalking cats, begging puppies and a playful husband underfoot. The ingredients are affordable and readily available in most areas.

"We are designed to help you reduce your grocery bill as low as it can go. It won’t solve all of your financial woes, but it may give you some breathing room so you can make a significant dent in your situation. We teach you the best foods to buy on a budget and how to cook them so the family will be better fed than they’ve been in years. You’ll find tips and techniques here that you won’t find anywhere else on the web. Everything here is free, provided by God’s grace. If the information you find here helps you and your circumstances, then please share what you have learned with others, so they too can benefit from your new knowledge."

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Baen Publishing's Free eBooks

Introducing the Baen Free Library

by Eric Flint

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )
Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences! Alles in ordnung!

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors — how about you, Eric? — were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode and checking out Mother of Demons, they either had or intended to buy the book. In one or two cases, this was a "gesture of solidarity. "But in most instances, it was because people preferred to read something they liked in a print version and weren't worried about the small cost — once they saw, through sampling it online, that it was a novel they enjoyed. (Mother of Demons is a $5.99 paperback, available in most bookstores. Yes, that a plug. )

Then, after thinking the whole issue through a bit more, I realized that by posting Mother of Demons I was just making a gesture. Gestures are fine, but policies are better.

So, the next day, I discussed the matter with Jim again and it turned out he felt exactly the same way.

So I proposed turning the Mother of Demons tour-de-force into an ongoing project. Immediately,
David Drake was brought into the discussion and the three of us refined the idea and modified it here and there. And then Dave Weber heard about it, and Dave Freer, and. . . voila.

The Baen Free Library was born.

This will be a place where any author can, at their own personal discretion, put up online for free any book published by Baen that they so desire. There is absolutely no "pressure" involved. The choice is entirely up to the authors, and that is true on all levels:
— participate, or not, as they choose;
— put up whatever book they choose;
— for as long as they choose.

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Available Titles:

1632

1633

1812: The Rivers of War

Selections from By Blood We Live

Changer of Worlds

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

Excalibur Alternative

Genie Out of the Bottle

Grantville Gazette Volume 1

Great Kings' War

Gust Front

Harald

The Honor of the Queen

The Hub: Dangerous Territory

Selections from The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

In the Heart of Darkness

Inherit the Stars

The Infinite Sea

Interstellar Patrol

The Lark and the Wren

The Mountains of Mourning

Original Edition of Godwin Stories

Original Edition of Schmitz Stories

Pandora's Legions

Paying the Piper

The Philosophical Strangler

The Shadow of Saganami

The Shadow of the Lion

Sheepfarmer's Daughter

Sympathy for the Devil

The Tank Lords

Telzey Amberdon

There Will Be Dragons

This Scepter'd Isle

Time Traders

The Far Side of the Stars

The Rats, the Bats and the Ugly

The Two Faces of Tomorrow

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Blade Forums

Bladeforums.com is the world's largest knife discussion website. If you have a knife question, this is the place to look for an answer.

It has varied levels for non-members and paid levels of memberships. For example, only "Gold" members can post things for sale, but anyone can respond to a sale ad. Thankfully, the forums are free to browse. You do not have to pay to join the forums, post in the General Discussion areas, the Manufacturers Forums, or many of the Community sections. Certain areas, such as the For Sale forums or certain other forums are considered premium content, and as such are either restricted viewing, or have posting restricted to paying members.

Forums cover Knife-Specific, Knife-Related, Knife Makers, Manufacturer's Forums, and Community Forums.

Knife Specific sub-forums include:

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AR15.com

AR15.com is the home for enthusiasts of the AR15 & its variants, presenting information and links to history, manuals, ammo, manufacturers, discussion groups, mailing lists, and distributors of AR-15s. There are forums, commercial links, chat rooms, NRA/ILA updates and PDF files of related manuals and books.

The site is quite active, with 975,000 visitors per month. Most visitors are in the 25-35 age group, with 45-55 the next biggest range. Most are male and childless, and I am not going to post any comment on that, snarky or otherwise.

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The AK-47 & Variants

http://www.akfiles.com/ads/adview.php?clientid=2&n=a8650ff5

The Ak Files Forums are THE place to go if you want to find out about or chat about AKs.

This site is an excellent source of information on all the many variants of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and some other European battle rifles. There are separate forums for Ak-47s, Ak-74s, Valmet m76, Saigas and Veprs, SkSs, Svts and other orphans, Mosin Nagants, Svds and Romak iiis, Rpks and Rpds, and full autos.

Topics range from reloading, collecting and modifying to history and a discussions of different vendors. If anything is related to the Kalashnikov system, this site is where it is posted.

Since the AK-47 & its variants are the most popular rifles in the world, there are thousands of users online all of the time. As I type this, there 6965 users online, 1183 members and 5782 guests.

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The Replica Percussion Revolver Collector's Association

http://rprca.tripod.com/images/Colorado%20Collectors%20Assoc%20Gun%20Show%20Halfsize.jpg

The Replica Percussion Revolver Collector's Association -- RPRCA -- was been established to promote the interest in collecting modern production replica black powder percussion revolvers. Information is a little scant, but there are some nice photos.

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eReplacement Parts

Link removed by request. Google for the site.

offers well over 300,000 individual machine and tool parts, with over 3.2 million separate applications for those parts, including parts and accessories for lawn and garden equipment and small engines. The website also includes over 100,000 tool breakdown diagrams and downloadable pdf schematic documents.

Every part is a genuine OEM part (original equipment manufacturer). Specific searches, detailed breakdown pages, and parts photos make finding an item on the website fast and easy.

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Simunition Training Ammo

Small Calibre Cartridges 9 mm

FX® Marking Cartridges
Designed as part of the world's safest and most realistic close-range combat training system, FX® Marking Cartridges allow the user to experience the reality of taking a duty weapon and directly firing a non-lethal FX® Marking cartridge at a human target without inflicting serious injury. These cartridges produce near-normal recoil and deliver good tactical accuracy up to 7.6 meters (25 feet). Their color projectiles leave a detergent-based, water-soluble inert color mark. With a minimum of preparation, FX® can be used virtually anywhere and at any time. For use in revolvers, pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, carbines and rifles. Intended for supervised law enforcement and military training conducted in accordance with Simunition® Safety Guidelines. Check www.simunition.com for further details.

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"Low-tech" and "No-tech" Magazines

http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833012876d4ecbc970c-pi

These two sites offer a lot of basic skills and information that just about anyone who uses tools to solve problems will find to be useful .

Low-tech Magazine: refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.

No-tech Magazine: "Access to 2 gigabytes of information about sustainable and resilient living that meets the challenges of peak energy, climate instability, economic irrationality, toxic politics, war and violence."

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FN Rifle Forums

http://www.falfiles.com/images/stg58logo.jpg

The Fusil Automatique Léger ("Light Automatic Rifle") or FAL is a self-loading, selective fire battle rifle produced by the Belgian armaments manufacturer Fabrique Nationale de Herstal (FN). During the Cold War it was adopted by many North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, with the notable exception of the United States. It is one of the most widely used rifles in history, having been used by over 90 countries.[2]

The FAL was predominantly chambered for the 7.62x51mm NATO round, and because of its prevalence and widespread use among the armed forces of many NATO countries during the Cold War it was nicknamed "the right arm of the Free World"

These two sites are the main source of internet information on these and similar battle rifles. Both are quite active, and one or the other should have an answer to any FN-related questions or information on related topics.

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http://fnforum.net/images/banner/Fn_forum_top2.jpg

The FNForum is sponsored by FN. Information on all Fabrique Nationale firearms is covered here, including sporting rifles, shotguns and handguns and not just the FAL. 11496 registered users have posted a total of 178906 articles.

http://www.falfiles.com/images/fnlogo_small.gif

The FalFiles site is independent, but boasts 46,479 members, hosting 1,962,816 posts in 189,727 articles. It has links to history, specs, manuals, variants, legalities, parts and how-tos.

Related sites are: Survival Files • AR Files • AK Files • H&K

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Notes of a Crotchety Bookman

Life & Death

Blog Archive

About Me

Search My Notes

BookThink

All Things Rimfire

Distilling How-To

Montana Survivor

Survival Preps

Canadian Gunnutz

Martini-Henry Rifles

The Hillbilly Housewife

Baen Publishing's Free eBooks

Introducing the Baen Free Library

by Eric Flint

Blade Forums

AR15.com

The AK-47 & Variants

The Replica Percussion Revolver Collector's Association

eReplacement Parts

Simunition Training Ammo

"Low-tech" and "No-tech" Magazines

FN Rifle Forums

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Life & Death

Blog Archive

About Me

Search My Notes

Introducing the Baen Free Library

by Eric Flint

Followers