Archive for the ‘Arn's Blog’ Category

I’ve made it – I’m out here in Vegas and will be covering the Shot Show as well as posting our usual daily updates from other companies and websites. Just use the Show Show news tag to see our relevant updates.

Now to pop out and grab a pre-pay sim card for the week!

Update: prepay sorted, mobile email now working. Feel free to drop me an email if you’re around and attending.

Here are just as few items I’ve spotted that have appeared on the market recently.

First up is the Swiss Eye Mask Pro (by Swiss Eye), a full neoprene mask with integrated goggles. This new mask conforms to various safety specs which is nice to see and whilst nothing that’s flexible can provide 100% protection from BBs it’d be interesting to see this model torture tested by Dr Airsoft.

Having smashed my own favourite duty watch strap in a high collision I was keeping an eye out for a decent replacement. The Watch Band from SORD appears to fit the bill and at 10USD you can’t complain:

Tired of your watches rubber band breaking all the time?
Upgrade your old watch band for a SORD Watch Band. Band is made from US Mil-Spec materials and is non magnetic.

This band will last longer than most others currently on the market and should it blow out in the field, all you need is a needle and thread and you will be back up and running in next to no time.

Band is suitable for the larger dive style watches on the market, but can be trimmed down to suit narrower watch bodies if required. (SORD)

When it comes to bail out bags you can’t do much better than the LA Police Gear BOGB at 19.99USD. I have one in OD that’s served me well for years. There’s a good review over at Shooting Illustrated at the moment of three different bags.

This bag packs a heap in it, the zips last ages and the hook and look parts have just kept on going. The only upgrade I made for my own bag was to replace the side pocket elastic drawstring with more durable 550 paracord. This took a few minutes and kept a well worn bag going for another few years.

If you’re in the market for a not-so-cheap smock that’ll last you for years (and can justify the 300USD price tag) why not give the FirstSpear Squadron Smock a try? There’s a review of the jacket over at Soldier Systems.

This is just a random post but as I spend a whole heap of time in front of laptops, desktops and on a smartphone running the website technology does play it’s role.

DropBox is a simple online service that allows you to sync and store data online between several computers. It’s free, but you can pay for more space. Frome their own website:

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

So why am I mentioning a free online backup service like DropBox on here? Simple, we use it for random stuff occasionally and if someone gets referred by us we get a bit more online backup space.

Feel free to ignore, but if it’s a something you’re interested in please do use our referral link.

Do androids dream of electric sheep? Are long brown jackets cool? Do you get tired of film directors that continually revise their movies and release several versions of it? Do you wish you were Adam Savage?

…but more to the point Deckard Blasters are somewhat akin to the defecations of wooden play horses and Monsters in Motion have one in stock. This looks to be a one off handcrafted kit built upon a Maruzen revolver. As usual with one off works, expect to trade a spare spleen or around 1.3k USD.

Me? I’d have HR Giger’s Alien statue in the hallway if I could as well as one of these:

Own this limited imported Deckard Blade Runner Blaster imported from Japan. Finely crafted by Marusan [sic] for the discreet collector in mine.

We have only one each for any item listed in our One-of-a-Kind section unless otherwise specified. Early placement of your order increases your opportunity to secure these items. Being a 24-hour operation worldwide, some items are sold quicker than we can remove them from our website. If pre-sold, your order will not be processed nor charged. Thank you, Monsters In Motion Staff

• Catalog#: 031DW01
• Theme(s): Blade Runner
• [RRP 1,300USD]

(Monsters in Motion)

As I look out my office window into the damp wet weather this morning, a barbeque is not really on the agenda. If it was however how would I grill my meat whilst remaining tactical and wearing modular kit? The answer is Tactical Grilling and possibly more importantly, the beer shingle:

Since 2005, Tactical Grilling products have been made in the USA using the same materials, from the same shop, as tactical gear in use by elite law enforcement and military units around the world. Our mission is to provide the most capable, comfortable, and kick-ass grilling and barbecue accessories available. Starting with our Tactical Grilling Apron, Tactical Beer Shingle, and Tactical Spatula Sheath. All three are available in the Tactical Grilling Kit, plus, Tactical Grilling Patches personalize the whole package!

The perfect gift for Father’s Day or your next cookout, the Tactical Grilling Kit has everything you need AND saves you money!

Constructed of 1000D Cordura in Universal Digital Camo, MultiCam, Coyote, Woodland Camo, Fire, or Law Enforcement color combinations, the Tactical Grilling Apron features three rows of modular attachment across the waist and two rows across the chest. These PALS/MOLLE compatible attachment points allow your Tactical Grilling Apron to accept any of your current kit, whether it be a holster, mag pouches, general purpose pouches, or a med kit, the Tactical Grilling Apron can fit your mission requirement: Steak or Stakeout.

More importantly, the Tactical Grilling Kit INCLUDES accessories from Tactical Grilling! First, is the Tactical Beer Shingle. If you’re not grilling with a Tactical Beer Shingle , you may as well go home. Grilling the old way, without a Tactical Beer Shingle on your Tactical Grilling Apron, is like going to the range without ammo, bringing a knife to a gunfight, or spitting into the wind: it just doesn’t make sense. Plus, you also get a Tactical Spatula Sheath to keep your grilling utensils close at hand. Both mount securely to your Tactical Grilling Apron OR any PALS/MOLLE compatible platform. Take it a step further and personalize your grilling experience with custom laser cut Tactical Grilling Patches.

New Features:

• Tactical Grilling Apron
• Adjustable Neck Strap
• Tubular nylon sling material on Universal Digital Camo for EXTRA comfort
• Adjustable Waist Strap
• Scrub and Spray cleaning
• Tactical Beer Shingle
• Color-matched Cordura Shingles

(Tactical Grilling)

I thought I’d restart an old tradition of highlighting somewhat silly emails on their arrival at ArniesAirsoft HQ. Today Alan had an important question to ask about a noise coming from his tank:

Rather than simply hitting “delete” and ignoring emails, so long as the less than useful emails continue, I’ll turn them into something more interesting this end.

Have you got old watches hanging around that need a new battery having been replaced long ago and fancy a project for the weekend or a bored couple of hours? Why not learn how to tie paracord and make your own survival strap, or in my case a new watch strap?

I can’t take credit for the idea, I happened across a simple guide on instructables by David Hopper aka Stormdrane (you can find more project ideas on his blog here). Ironically I had an old Timex Indiglo in the cupboard. One new battery inserted and with the case greased and waterproofed we’re ready to go.

For this project you’ll need some paracord and either Faxtex style clips or some screw pin shackles (you can find cheap packs of them down your local Poundstretcher if you’re lucky). If you’re after shackles you’ll need a 5 or 6mm set.

If you’re looking for a supplier of cord and clips on eBay I’d recommend TheBushcraftStore, I ordered some kit yesterday and it all arrived here this morning first thing. You can find the buckles here, and the cord here.

You’ll need:

• a cheap lighter to melt the cord ends
• some decent scissors
• a multitool or penknife (to release the watch strap pins)
• some hemostats or.. if your other half is the crafty type a crochet hook (this is to hide the cord ends when finished)
• some cord – around 10 feet per strap
• a fastener of some form

I would advise tucking the loose ends into the band weave and wrapping around them to hide them. When you get the weaving complete, use your hemostats (if you’re a trainee paramedic), long nose pliers (if you’re a a bit more practical) or crochet hook (if your house if full of yarn and wool) to tuck the final end back into the strap.

Do remember to measure your wrist correctly first otherwise you will have to undo the lot to adjust the size when everything is complete.

With your first project complete have a look at the rest of StormDrane’s projects for some more ideas. You can also view his videos at his YouTube page.

If you’re not inclined to make your own set you can buy pre-made straps at places like SurvivalStraps.com.

If you don’t want one yourself, you can always randomly gift one to a serving soldier deployed overseas.

A bug has crept into the forums over the past 24/48hrs (see here) that has meant that the forum permissions which is what defines a user can see and not see in the forums has appeared. The net result is that at present a collection of forums are invisible to regular users.

This is now a known issue and the staff and admins are working on it. We’ve also got the software creators looking at it to fix the issue now.

I’m staying up till it’s fixed as I have to be around and awake to ensure it’s fixed/sorted.

I might fall asleep on the keyboard, but when I wake up I’ll add an update when things are fixed, or I know more.

Update@ 01:07 I’ve manually set the permissions for all forums for regular and new members in the forums by hand. With luck that’s all issues fixed for 99.9% of users. Any problems, please email report it on the board in the first instance, or email me direct at arnie@arniesairsoft.co.uk.

The issue is that we’ve now discovered a bug because of the size of our forum where we have so many forums that there’s a memory error in the code from the manufacturer that causes the permissions to blank out if we set them in bulk using their code. This means that once the bug was found we had to re-add everything manually. We are waiting on a fix for their code in the next 24/48hrs so we can again return to bulk changes in permissions to make our lives easy…

Sorry folks we did mention a bit of downtime for server work but obviously this was slightly longer than we anticipated.

At the moment the forums are offline whilst they are worked on. We’ve sadly had a huge list of unanticipated things go wrong this week including hardware failures and software bugs so the forums have been disabled so that we can work on them and restore them. No data has been lost. At the moment there are issues keeping the server stable with the forums online due to some mysql issues which we are working on.

Several technicians are working on things and have done a  massive amount of work including swapping out our old hardware, putting in new drives and rebuilding the server hosting software from scratch.

Our server is undergoing some thorough testing at the moment to diagnose the stability issue. This will result in downtime occasionally while things are fixed and unplugged.

We’ve not had great periods of uptime since we moved due to a bug, the aim is to get this fixed now to provide us with the months/years of uptime that we should be getting without issue.

I’ll update more as and when I know more.

Update May 3rd: We have had the hardware completely rebuilt and the server is being checked by technicians today to locate the source of the problem and diagnose if it is hardware or software. As soon as there is an update I’ll post more news. Apologies for the downtime folks it is a pain for all concerned but we are currently reliant on the datacentre technicians to sort out the glitch.

May 2nd: It appears that there’s been a recent bad shipment of hard drives from a certain manufacturer and we’ve had two new models installed in our server from the start. These are due to be replaced tonight which should fix the random downtime periods we have experienced over the past few days and bring us back to the 100% uptime that we are aiming for.

The forums are now back thanks to the efforts of the upgrading technicians and the people that wrote the forum software. Things have been massively upgraded so will look completely different. There’s loads for us to do still however the gallery and forum section are live for registered users.

Please have a look and check things out for yourself. Any issues, please leave them in the usual site error section in the forums.

You are on our new server, we’re currently working on upgrading the site as we go. Things won’t work and will gradually kick in and be fixed one by one. As mentioned there’s a lot to do. I’m currently getting our news page back to a familiar look, but I have a bit to do

At present the forums are offline. The data is safe but the forum techs need to work a bit more before it goes live. They should be returning to have a look at the forums at around 0200GMT. We’re getting there gradually. Sorry it’s been slow but we will get there.

Update 04/04/2010 2107hrs GMT: The forums are upgraded and the software company are busy working out a glitch in the latest version of the forum software and the current mysql version. When there’s more news I’ll let you folks know.

Update 05/04/2010: Invision (the company that make for forum software) are now looking at things to see why the upgrade hasn’t worked.

We’re moving the domain name over this weekend. Unfortunately being Easter weekend out domain registration firm are not able to process the update until Monday (apparently UK tech support go home at weekends).

Our new engine has been upgraded and the forum are just being sorted now. I’ve pointed the old server to the new one so some people may get the new front page popping up (it is slightly different). It depends on what hosting firm etc you use.

As soon as things have pointed across the forums will be poked a couple more time and then reopened to the masses! (apologies for the delay).

I won’t give an ETA as no doubt it’ll be wrong whatever I give. It may be sooner or may be later. The Uber techs are being careful in their work as there’s a lot of data and upgrades to mess around with.

Update: If you are seeing this this is the new server. Apologies for any irregularities etc, we are working on getting the site on new software looking like the old one. As soon as the techs get the new database running on the forums we’ll reopen it.

We are now progressing to moving all our data to a new server and updating our service for everyone. So that everyone is aware this will mean some downtime while the data is copied over and the site software is all upgraded/updated.

The projected timeline is as follows:

• 30/03/2010 2200hrs GMT server forums locked.
• 30/03/2010 2200-0400hrs GMT server data copied to new system.
• 30/03/2010 0400-1200hrs GMT all services and software upgraded.
• 31/03/2010 ~2100hrs GMT new server verified and double checked as working. Nameserver/DNS records are then updated to point to new server. Old server traffic directed to new system.
• 31/03/2010 ~2200hrs GMT server forums unlocked.

There’s a whole heap to do in the new move as we are having a 3 year old software set upgraded. The server core software, the hosting software on top of that and the site code on top of that will all be upgraded and updated.

This will mean (fingers crossed) that we have a much faster and efficient setup, set to expand and support the demands of the ever increasing traffic.

News posts: News posts will be added to the server up until everything is locked for backup (the site will be viewable as normal but we won’t update anything). We will then wait for the backup to complete and afterwards continue to update news on the old server and the service posts to let you know how the update is going.

Send in your news as usual to us, we’ll work on what we can when we can at the usual fast pace.

Forums: Forums will only be unlocked once the new server is up and running. Otherwise any posts made will be lost after the move (we can copy news posts over).

Stay tuned for updates folks!