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User Journal

Journal Journal: Ubuntu 15.10 Miscellaneous

A couple of other notes on Ubuntu 15.10 on my hacked-up HP ProBoox 6475b.

1. The fingerprint sensor is a Validity VFS491, 138a:003d. Validity Sensors was bought by Synaptec back in 2013, but regardless those sensors have never been well supported under Linux. I did get this one working by digging out the old driver patch that HP supplied for SuSE Linux 11 back in 2012. I applied that to libfprint-0.0.6 and compiled everything from source. Ugly, but it works. I forwarded the patch over to the fingerprint-gui guys to see if they are interested in adding it in. Every little bit helps.

2. Playing with my Yubikey Neo I found that the pam-u2f package in the PPA (v1.0.2) segfaults on the pamu2fcfg command. I filed a bug report, provided debug and core data, and the developers patched the git HEAD source in a few hours. I rebuilt the utility and supporting libraries from scratch to test and all is working! Score one for open source software! Expect it to be released on the PPA next week.

That was really the last little nit. Everything went much smoother than I expected, and I'm quite happy with the setup. Every last feature on the machine works without a hiccup -- except the WiFI scanner, but that isn't part of the machine.

I'm actually fairly impressed with the open source AMD video drivers (Radeon 7660G, which comes with the A-10 processor), but don't play games on the machine other than WarZone 2100 so I don't really stress it.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Ubuntu 15.10 and Epson / Seiko Scanner Driver

I've tried everything, but can't connect to the scanner over WiFi. I can connect over USB, but the scanner is on the other side of the room and that defeats the purpose of the WiFi.

I have installed Epson's iscan, iscan-data and iscan-network-nt packages -- the latter being the one supposed to allow Epkowa devices connect over the network. Yes, I modified the epkowa.conf file in /etc/sane.d/ using both IP address and DNS name, but to no avail.

The printer works, the scanning port (1865) is active, but no joy on using simplescan, xsane, or iscan. Drat!

User Journal

Journal Journal: Ubuntu 15.10 and Epson / Seiko Printer Driver

Ubuntu 15.10 automatically found my Epson XP-610 wireless printer / scanner and tried to install the proper printer driver, but failed miserably.

By "miserably" I mean it got stuck halfway through installing the package file and gummed up their software installation utility. I had to "kill -9" the appropriate, defunct dpkg instance. A reboot will do it as well.

The problem seems to be the proprietary Epson driver relies on LSB (Linux Standard Base), which is no longer installed by default in Ubuntu. The fix is to download the appropriate .deb package from the Epson site. Install the driver with sudo dpkg -i epson-inkjet-printer-201308w_1.0.0-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb, which will install but not configure because of missing LSB as a dependency. Finally, do a sudo apt-get install -f to handle the missing dependencies and you can go into the Printers app and add the printer, as the drivers will now be available.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Brother P-Touch QL-500 on Linux 1

Just a quick entry because I couldn't find a fix for this issue anywhere online.

Under Linux, using Ubuntu 15.04 and 15.10, my USB-connected Brother QL-500 label printer is detected automatically and available out-of-the-box, no driver install necessary. Very nice.

I tried printing under Glabels and all I got was a flashing LED on the printer. The Brother website has a similar error under Windows, claiming this is caused by a mismatch between the label actually loaded in the printer and the setting in the driver. This was not the issue. I have DK-1201 address labels loaded, and the driver is set to 29 x 90 mm, which is also the template I'm using in Glabels.

In the driver (Printers app, Properties, Printer Options), there is a button labeled "Label Preamble". This is on by default and is the culprit. Un-check that box and the printer should now print properly.

User Journal

Journal Journal: CuBox Wifi Streaming Solved

I believe I have mentioned before that every bit of media I purchase I digitize and store the files on a central server. That includes over 300 movies and over 100 television episodes, plush a few hundred audio tracks. Everything is available anywhere in my home via wireless streaming, however I had been having problems with reliably streaming 1080p HD video over WiFi to my main television units.

My back end device is simply a Buffalo AirStation AC 1750 running DD-WRT build 27456. It is configured for WiFi AC-only in the 5.8 GHz band, and G/N/AC in the 2.4 GHz band to accommodate some older devices.

A Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 Tb USB 3.0 drive is plugged into the back of the wireless router, which acts as a NAS and makes media available via SAMBA shares.

Over all I like this set-up, though after several months of use I can't really recommend the Buffalo AirStation for the simple reason that it doesn't have any external antennas. It really suffers in coverage area because of this. DD-WRT is great, as is the little 2 Tb WD drive, but I'll never again get a wireless gizmo that doesn't use an external antenna.

The front end to my televisions scattered throughout the house is a CuBox i4-Pro running OpenELEC. This is a fantastic combination that has been almost -- but not quite -- perfect for me. It is also easy to use for my non-technical wife and future geek 7-year old child.

The one issue has been reliably streaming 1080p HD videos to a CuBox. Even with the unit less than 10 meters away from the access point, with no obstructions, it would routinely have such a poor connection as to not be able to keep up with the playback. Watching the dashboard of DD-WRT showed me it had less than 30% signal strength and constantly would drop to 5.5 Mbps connection rates.

To eliminate interference I got up in the middle of the night and shut off everything that used wifi except the CuBox and it still performed poorly.

The short answer is the built-in wireless on the CuBox is abysmal. Again, no external antenna and 2.4 GHz only. Further investigation showed it would not work with channel bonding, thus not use 40 MHz channels in 802.11n. I don't know if it is a chipset limitation or a driver issue. Either way, it sucks.

My answer was to buy a USB wifi adapter with an external antenna. This one is tiny, totally plug-and-play, and absolutely does the trick. And for $12.99, including Prime shipping, a bargain. It is marketed towards the Raspberry Pi, which is what I bought it for. It uses the Realtek RT5370 chipset and is supported at the kernel level (no extra drivers needed) in Android, OpenELEC, Raspbian and lots of other Linux flavors.

It support 802.11n and bonded, 40 MHz channels and, more importantly, handles HD streams without breaking a sweat. I just ordered 2 more to outfit my 2 other CuBox devices so I can stream everything to the TVs in bedrooms without running wires.

(Note: I'm in a fairly low-population subdivision and not a lot of 2.4 GHz wireless around. I'm not stepping on any of my neighbors with my signal.)

User Journal

Journal Journal: Magnetic Cell Phone Docks 6

Just a short note. I picked up an Air Dock back when their Indigogo campaign was under way. I have now had this thing for a little over a year.

In general it works fine and does exactly what it says. I use the CD-mount, which has a nice picture down on this page.

The one flaw with that mount is the bolt and nut used to tighten it are fairly large, and extend beneath the mount. On DIN I sized radios, with the CD slot on top of the unit, the nut blocks the view of the display.

The one other thing I have discovered is that after a year of use, it has magnetized my phone! The Nexus 5 comes with small metal plates built in to the back to allow for the native use of devices like this. After all this time they have become magnetized, and that totally screws up the internal compass.

Now any time I start the compass app it complains the magnetic field strength is way too strong and it doesn't give accurate readings.

To be clear, this happens when the device is undocked and I'm walking around.

My next dock will be non-magnetic, as I do sometimes use the compass.

User Journal

Journal Journal: What is this?

Soylent News is (dissenting) people.

http://soylentnews.org/

User Journal

Journal Journal: Only way to be sure

Someone needs to take off and nuke beta from orbit.

In the meantime, an AC has suggest that we boycott from the 10th to the 17th.

So, who's up for a Slashdot Valentines Day Massacre?

"Beta is Slashdot's version of Jar-Jar Binks, only worse."

Chrome

Journal Journal: Six Months with a Chromebook

About six months ago my main PC died and I needed a new one. Not having a lot of cash, and not really having a lot of free time to spend on the computer, I decided to get an Acer C7 Chromebook to hold me over.

Refurbished units are available on Acer's official refurb store, over on E-Bay. I paid $149 at the time. Now the base 2 Gb unit with a 320 Gb HD is available for $139.

These are Intel Celeron-based systems with 2 SO-DIMM RAM sockets and a mini-PCIe slot that holds the a/b/g/n/Bluetooth adapter. With only one RAM socket populated, it was easy to pop in a 4 Gb module for a total of 6 Gb of RAM. Adding more RAM allows the system to operate better with multiple tabs open. Other than that, you won't notice much of a difference.

Now that I've been using this as my primary machine for the last 6 months I can render an informed opinion.

I'm amazed at how much of what I do now is thru a web browser. After adding an SSH app, there is very little I couldn't do with the Chromebook. Still, there are some critical limitations that have driven me to get a "real" computer.

One of the big ones is the lack of network file system support. There is no way to access SMB/CIFS or NFS shares on the Chromebook. It also doesn't have FTP support, though there is a commercial app available for FTP. It is only $1.99, but needs to phone home to make sure you've paid, so requires connectivity to function.

If you can live with accessing files only through Google Drive, everything is fine. But, if you have -- like me -- a few terabytes of data on local shares, you're stuck. No, uploading every movie, television show, educational video and audio file I've every ripped to Google Drive is not an option.

Speaking of uploading music, that is another limitation. If you use Google Music, you can play everything fine, but will need a "real" computer to upload any files.

Printing, too. There is no direct printing support. The system only supports "Google Cloud Print", which means you either buy a new printer that supports GCP or leave a PC running with the printer driver configured, and logged in to Chrome (browser). You also have to be comfortable with everything you print going up to Google and back down. Meh.

It is impressive what can be accomplished through the Chrome browser, an SSH app and an FTP app. There are numerous web IDEs such as Shift Edit that are actually very good for development of HTML, CSS, Javascript and other script-based languages.

Of course, Chrome doesn't do Java. There are still some things on the web that require Java.

The lack of network file system support is a show stopper for me. I'm also taking some online classes including a couple in Java development, which means I can't use the Chromebook.

Not that I'm getting rid of it. I have given it to my wife. My young son also has one.

For $139 plus $20 or so for extra RAM it makes a wonderful backup system. Or one to grab and take with if you aren't going to be doing heavy development.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Anti-parochial

I just modded up a foe for presenting a point I don't like well. Nietzsche's got my back.

Wireless Networking

Journal Journal: Wireless Video Streaming - Update

Some while back I posted a journal entry about streaming video to my television from a central server in my basement. My conclusion at the time was wireless B/G/N couldn't really cut it when streaming via SMB over TCP.

I've experimented with a couple things and finally got it working where I can stream 1080p video (ripped BluRay) to my television via wifi. The difference was switching to the 5.0 GHz band (802.11 a/n) and changing the file share from SMB over TCP (Samba shares) to NFSv4.

NFS has less overhead than SMB over TCP and the wireless channels in the 5 GHz range are wider than those in the 2.4 GHz range.

So this setup now works for me without issues:

Small PC w/Via C7 chip acting as a server. Runs NFS and has copies (h.264 encoded as MKV) of all my movies, television shows and music (Ogg-FLAC). Connects to 10/100 wired switch in basement.

Zotac ZBox HD-11 running w/o a hard drive and booting OpenELEC off a 2 Gb SD card. Connects to home network via Cisco/Linksys WUSB600N USB wireless dongle on 5 GHz band (802.11 n).

I still have Samba running on the server so the couple of gaming PCs my kids have can reach the movie shares and perform automatic backups to private shares. I need to find a nice (free) NFS client for Windows 7. Suggestions?

Robotics

Journal Journal: Manna From San Francisco 1

Back in 2003 Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works, wrote a short novel titled Manna . It is an exploration at what increasingly looks to be the logical conclusion of the Industrial Revolution. If you haven't had the opportunity to read it before, I highly recommend it. It isn't long or difficult, but it raises some very interesting notions.

I mention it now because of the news out of San Francisco.

While not the same angle as Manna, it essentially is a big step down the same path. In 2012 there were over 4 million people employed in the fast food industry in the United States. What is going to happen to the country when they're almost all replaced by automation?

Thinking about the different jobs that can be done better, faster and cheaper by robots today is an interesting exercise. Contemplating which jobs will be better handled by automated systems in 20, 50 and 100 years...is scary. Scary, that is, unless we fundamentally change the way we think about work, employment and the economy. I'm having a very hard time thinking of any jobs that can't be better done by robots than humans, including the so called "creative" ones, in 50 - 100 years.

Government

Journal Journal: Lies of Omission 6

This is a duplicate of a post I made in one of the recent topics. I'm copying it here for easier reference as I send it to a couple friends.

* * *

So what exactly is metadata?

Many years ago I was a telecommunications engineer for a large company and worked CALEA. For the uninitiated, that is law-enforcement wiretapping.

My job was to make sure CALEA functioned properly on the new cellular network. We tested on an internal, micro-cell network that was isolated from the real world. The end result was to make sure targeted devices sent CDR (call data records, or metadata) and voice to the destination. This was all piped thru IPSec tunnels to the appropriate destination law-enforcement agency.

In the event of a tunnel failure, CDRs were required to buffer but voice was not. Saving voice during an outage required too much storage space, but the text nature of CDRs meant they were small and largely compressible.

Metadata consisted of EVERYTHING THAT WAS NOT VOICE.

To be clear, it included the following:

called number
calling number
time of call
duration of call
keys pressed during call
cell tower registered to
other cell towers in range
gps coordinates
signal strength
imei (cell phone serial number)
codec
and a few other bits of technical information.

Everything above "cell tower registered to" applies to traditional, POTS land line phones. This information seems to be what the disinformation campaign currently going on seems to revolve around. They never mention that there are over 327 MILLION cellular phones in the U.S., which is more than one per person. They never mention the bottom set of metadata.

Capturing all key presses makes sure things like call transfers, three-way calls and the like get captured.

It also grabs things like your voicemail PIN/password, which never seems to get explicitly mentioned.

But the cellular set is more interesting. This data come across in registration and keep-alive packets every few seconds. This is how the network knows you're still active and where to route calls to.

But by keeping all this metadata it allows whomever has it to plot of map of your phone's gross location and movements.

By "gross", I mean the location triangulated from cell tower strength and not GPS coordinates. Towers are triangular in nature and use panel antennas. They know which panel you connect thru and can triangulate your location down to a few meters just by the strength of your signal on a couple different towers.

GPS coordinates are "fine" location. For the most part the numbers sent across are either zeroed out or the last location your phone obtained a fix.

GPS isn't turned on all the time because it sucks batteries down. If you own a phone you know how long it can take to get a fix, so this feature isn't normally used.

HOWEVER, it can be turned on remotely and is a part of the E911 regulations pushed to help find incapacitated victims after 9/11.

[There is a reason the baseband radio chip in your phone has closed, binary-blob firmware -- whether or not the OS itself is FOSS. We wouldn't want the masses to be able to disable remote activation, would we? Or let them start changing frequencies and power levels.]

So, are we comfortable with the government knowing where we, thru our cell phones, are at every moment of the day? Because that is what metadata allows.

Think of what can be learned by applying modern pattern analysis to that data set.

Displays

Journal Journal: Experiments in Raspberry Pi

I've noted before that I have a media library setup. All of my media -- movies, TV shows, music, audiobooks -- are stored in digital format on a small server in my basement.

By "server" I mean a VIA-based mini-ITX box with 2 Tb of storage connected to my home network. For future reference, I wouldn't use a VIA-based motherboard again simply because they don't have USB 3.0 ports. Backing up 1+ Tb of data via USB 2.0 can take an entire day. Adding a USB 3.0 PCI card helped, but only a bit as the PCI bus is too slow to fully utilize USB 3.0 speeds.

Connected to the back of my television by a VESA mount was a Zotac Z-Box HD-ID11 acting as a playing device. The Z-Box has no hard drive and boots OpenELEC off of a 4 Gb SD card. It does have a CPU fan which hums softly, but really can't be heard except at night, when all is quiet. Setting a sleep timer on the system fixes that.

I've been scrupulous about ripping all my video using h.264 as a video codec. Everything under the sun has hardware-assisted h.264 playback, so it plays flawlessly everywhere.

In looking for a second system, I wanted something cheaper and smaller than the Z-Box and the Raspberry Pi seemed to fit the bill.

The Pi model B is $35. The VESA case is another $10, Transcend 4 Gb Class 10 SD card was $8, compact 4Gb USB stick was $10, and the HP Touchpad USB power charger was $20.

Why the HP Touchpad charger? Read this article comparing quality of various USB chargers for details.

Add it all up, throw in shipping and it was almost $100 on the nose. Oh, I reused my existing HDMI cable.

Installing OpenELEC on the Pi is trivial. Download the image, move the image to the SD card, boot. It worked the first time, no issues.

The results are where things get interesting. Thanks to the hardware-acceleration, video playback of everything from animated TV show rips to the latest 1080p BluRay rip was flawless.

Audio is a different story. The Pi doesn't have the chops to properly decode Dolby DTS/AC3 in CPU. While there is hardware-accelerated decoding on the ARM chip, it isn't licensed and thus disabled. The Pi people are working on being able to sell DTS licenses like they do for MPEG-2 and VC-1, but it will take some time.

So, for the high-definition audio streams you need to set OpenELEC to "passthru". Unfortunately my TV is one of the cheaper models and doesn't do DTS either. I need to get an AV receiver that can handle it. Until then (or the codec issue is resolved) a few of my BluRay rips are silent.

The real problem came not from video playback, but from the OpenELEC interface itself. No hardware-assist for X-Window to it is slower than molasses. Unusable in my opinion. Unusable without tweaking, that is.

Tweak 1: Update firmware on Raspberry Pi. A few changes were made and it helped speed things up a tad.

Tweak 2: Overclock the system. The Pi normally runs at 700 MHz. There is a simple text config file you can change that is read on boot. I've successfully overclocked to 900 MHz (ARM) / 333 MHz (Core) without issues. This made a noticeable difference.

Tweak 3: USB cache the data partition. While OpenELEC runs in RAM, the database of shows, thumbnails, cover art and all the rest reside on the SD card. And no matter how fast they claim to be, SD cards are slow compared to everything else. By creating an EXT4 partition on a small USB thumb drive and pointing OpenELEC at that, speed was greatly improved. Now the system boots off of the SD card (a limitation of the Pi) but runs off a USB stick.

Tweak 4: Turn off the per movie, full-screen background art. This just saves the lag of loading a full-screen art image for each movie title you scroll across. I never really noticed it before, so I'm not missing anything.

Tweak 5: The Pi has unified memory, meaning the CPU and GPU share the same RAM. Memory dedicated to the GPU is specified at boot in the cmdline.txt file. I upped it from the default of 128 Mb GPU (384 Mb CPU) to 192 Mb GPU (320 Mb CPU). I do not know if this did anything or not. I need to figure out a way to test it.

Fix 1: In the same config file where you overclock, I set "force_hdmi=1". The Pi has both an HDMI and composite video out. If it detects an HDMI connection, it will output to that. If not, it defaults to composite. So, if you use HDMI and reboot the Pi with the TV off, it'll default to composite and you'll need to reboot again. This way it just assumes HDMI always and I never have to worry about it. Of course, once I stop fiddling with it there will hardly ever be a reason to reboot. If it ain't broke...

Final tweak: Patience of a Zen Master. My media collection consists of well over a thousand pieces -- movies, TV episodes, cartoons, etc. OpenELEC goes through and updates the library, downloading what information it can from TheTVDB and TheMovieDB including various cover art. It caches it in the storage partition (thus the USB tweak above), but doesn't resize the downloaded artwork until display. As a result, when scrolling through a big library there are noticeable delays and missing artwork. Once cached it works fine. Until then, it is frustratingly sluggish. However, this took me an entire weekend of off and on attention to accomplish.

The end result of my experiment is that the Pi is usable for a large media library running OpenELEC. There can be a little lag of a second or so when switching screens from Home to, say, Weather or Movies, but not so much I'm bothered.

Before the tweaks it was unusable and I was looking for something else to use the Pi on. Now I'm happy.

One final note. I've always found streaming HD video over WiFi a waste of time. It never really worked for me. Right now my server is on a GigE switch and I have CAT-6A running to everywhere in the house. Still, I want options.

I use Samba to share stuff from the server and that has excessive overhead from what I've read. I just added NFS sharing and swapped the Pi over to that. My next step is to unplug the wire and see if I can now successfully stream via wireless.

User Journal

Journal Journal: New Gun, New Ammo 18

One of my hobbies is pistol shooting. I punch various sized holes in paper targets at a distances of up to 25 yards. One day I hope to have enough free time to try actual bullseye competition and not look like a total noob.

As good guns are not cheap, for now I only keep one at a time. Since I also want the gun to be available for self-defense, if needed, it has to be practical for concealed-carry as well.

So, for the last several months I've been shooting a Springfield XD-S. That is a single-stack, small-frame, .45 ACP and a marvel of modern gunsmithing. I love the gun and was loathe to part with it, but sell it I did.

The XD-S has basically two flaws, depending on how you look at things. The first is the grip safety.

The grip safety is a small lever on the back of the grip that must be depressed for the gun to fire. Combined with the trigger safety, you must grip the gun just right or it won't fire. Once you get used to it, it works fine. But if you have to draw in a hurry, such as in a defense situation, it can present problems.

Also, if you have soft webbing between your thumb and forefinger, it won't always depress the safety -- as my daughter found out. Her hands are soft and she had no end of problems getting a tight enough grip to depress the safety. Nothing that a little duct tape can't fix, but I don't like disabling safety mechanisms.

As an aside, the safety configuration makes the gun physically impossible to fire for a small child. This is, of course, a benefit. I'm of the opinion that there should be almost no circumstance EVER that a small child should be trying, but in the case of the worst there is an extra layer of safety.

I say "almost" because in order to test the safety of the gun around my bigger-than-average, soon-to-be 5 year-old child, I unloaded it and had him try a couple of things.

Strong as he is for his age, he was physically unable to rack the slide and thus not load a round into the chamber. Once racked by me (but NOT loaded, duh), he was physically unable to grip it properly to get it to fire. Nothing he did could make it go "click". The wife was appeased.

The second drawback is really a matter of perspective. It is a .45, which is a damn hand cannon. It has a fairly large bullet, will make a very loud bang, and punch a damn big hole in whatever you're aiming at.

And if you run 250+ rounds through it at the range your wrist will need iced and feel like you were punching cement blocks for fun.

What most non-shooters don't understand is that it really isn't so much the size of the round that causes recoil, but the size of the gun. Physical size, that is.

So, while a .45 ACP has a kick, it is much lessened in the traditional 1911-format big pistol. The mass of the gun absorbs a great deal of the recoil and your wrist bears less of the brunt of it.

With the XD-S, that mass isn't there, as 609 grams empty. A stock 1911 is closer to 1,100 grams. As a result, unless you have wrists like Popeye, or are a duty officer who puts several hundred rounds a month through a big-bore pistol, you'll feel it.

This really comes into play with women looking for purse pistols. They gravitate straight to the little .380 ACP pocket guns because of the size, not realizing that even though the .380 is a smaller round that smaller gun (260 grams) is going to kick more than the same round in a full-sized model.

To make a long story short (too late!), it isn't a fun gun to shoot. If you're looking for a backup pistol where you don't have to worry about pesky things like windshields, car doors, or drywall deflecting your shots, this baby is it. If you're looking for something to squeeze off a few hundred at the range, it isn't.

So, off to my local FFL dealer to consign the gun. It lasted less than 24 hours. :-)

In choosing a replacement, besides everything above, I also considered the possibility of over-penetration. If, God forbid, I have to use the thing in a self-defense situation, I don't want the bullet blowing through my target and into some hapless bystander.

So, back down the caliber ladder to 9 mm I went, ending up with a Ruger LC9. The astute among you will notice I picked another single-stack. My hands are a little small and I don't feel comfortable with double-stack grips, which means I don't consider anything by Glock.

At about 500 grams, it is still a bit small, but with 9 mm ammo ranging in mass from 68 - 125 grains (4.5 - 8 grams) it is much more in the "fun" category to shoot. I just stay away from +P ammo, as I never saw the need for the extra kick.

So, new gun in hand, I wanted to go to the range and put it through its paces. Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a nationwide shortage of pistol ammunition and after TWO WEEKS of not being able to buy a single round, I was able to pick up a couple of boxes of TulAmmo at my local Walmart.

TulAmmo is as cheap (cost) as it gets. A box of 50 rounds is about $10. The main difference is the bullet casings are steel instead of brass. Oh, and it is made in Russia. Yes, all I could find were Russian-made bullets. Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave. :-)

Google that stuff and all you get is warnings about how dirty, corrosive and prone to misfire it is. Nothing but complains.

Well, it was all I could find and I wanted to play with my new toy, dammit! So, 150 rounds in hand, I went to my local range to see what would happen. I picked up an extra 100 rounds of Winchester USA 9 mm 115 gr FMJ at the range itself to compare.

Short answer, it performed flawlessly. In 150 rounds I had no misfires, jams or failures to eject. The brass-cased Winchester had 1 failure to eject and one jam loading, which is actually pretty good. I've had some other brands that have exceeded 15% misfire rates, which is totally unacceptable.

As soon as I can get it in, I'm going to try some various defense rounds to see what I like the feel of. I have both frangible and high-expansion JHPs from a variety of manufacturers on order. I'm really wanting to see the difference in kick between the 68 grain frangible and the 125 grain JHP.

Once done and home, I disassembled the pistol for cleaning. I did not find it any dirtier than my XD-S was after the same number of "Made in USA, brass-cased, name-brand, factory new" rounds. In fact, I think it was a little cleaner, but that may be because of the smaller load of the 9 mm vs the .45 ACP.

So, I'm off to Walmart to see if they have any more in stock. I want to run 1,000+ through the gun to break it in and get a feel for it and at $10 a box (half of most competitors), TulAmmo is what I'll be shooting. I re-evaluate after the first 1,000 rounds.

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