Paintball Headlines

So, the owner of the site PbPixel decided to contact me about my comical post about his site. Apparently, he didn’t like it. So he asked me to remove it. I kindly didn’t remove it but tried to help him by telling him his mail server or client was sending incorrect date headers, but he wouldn’t have any of it. Anyways, here’s the whole conversation:

Screenshots 1 and 2 (apparently the second shot didn’t work the first time) of the email in Gmail. Or you can read on. And sadly, yes, I’m still using Windows. This damn wireless card just won’t work under linux and I can’t figure out why.

Hey, I am the owner of the website of PbPixel.com, and I please ask you to delete the post of PbPixel, if you don’t like it, just don’t visit it. there is no need to flame my website. I don’t flame your website even if is not the best paintball “blog”, so please don’t do mine,

Regards.

PbPixel Owner.

In Gmail, it says 12/28/07. It actually looks pretty weird.

Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:31:30 -0800

Wow, you sent this in December? I’m impressed, you managed to predict a post 17 days away. I wish I had to psychic abilities like that. I mean, I can easily predict things a week away, but anything past 2 weeks starts to get pretty fuzzy.

Sent Jan 24.

Woah. You sent this December 30th?

No man, your mail server’s or your computer’s or whatever you’re using to send this from’s date is foobar. It’s sending out of date date headers. And the time seems to be off by about 2 hours.

Who cares when I sent it, please delete that post. I have sent it 2 hours ago.

This one is hilarious. 2 hour ago since when? From now? I highly doubt that. When I read it? And to be technically correct, it was actually 1 hour and 19 minutes between the 2 sent times

It’s not a matter of when you sent it; the whole you sent it this date was a joke. It’s about the date headers being off. If I was using some other mail client, your post could’ve gone back with all the other emails from late December, and I probably would’ve never seen it.

And he never sent me anything else. I guess he got annoyed. If he said it was the mail server, and it was out of his control, it would’ve been cool and understandable.

I might have an actual good post tomorrow.

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It seems that another Stako tank blew up in the UK on Sunday. Does anyone know why it happened? Nope. Does anyone know what’s to blame? Nope. Does that prevent anyone from wildly speculating about why it happened and whose to blame? Hell no. That’s what this sport is about. And I try to follow that tradition.

If anyone doesn’t know, Stako makes the really light air tank that’s only available across the pond. It’s not DOT approved, possibly for good reason, so it’s not available here.

Speculation time. First, someone put oil in their air nipple (hehe, nipple) which then gets blow into the bottle, and the subsequent pressure makes it go boom. Right. Now I’m no chemist, my chemistry knowledge comes from high school and a semester of it a year ago, but here’s what I see would happen.

I’m not sure the amount of pressure it would take for oil to ignite, but let’s just say it will at however much the tank is being filled up at for the sake of this.

But once it reaches the amount of pressure for it to combust, it tries to explode. The amount of oil present is probably pretty low, I think something like 10-100 microliters. A very small amount. In order to combust, it needs the presence of Oxygen. If you fill up with straight up Nitrogen, which is kinda rare, it shouldn’t be able to combust or at least not to the full extent, but most fill stations use regular air (mostly Nitrogen btw).

Anyways, the amount of pressure change that the really small explosion creates shouldn’t be the one to two thousand psi in 68 ci needed to blow the tank, since most tanks are supposed to be able to hold 6000-7000 psi, just not for extended times. I also thought there should be some sort pressure disk that will go out if the pressure it too high, but whatever. I just don’t think the combustion of a really small amount of oil will cause some huge explosion.

The other explanation is that Stako tanks just blow up. They are the main difference between tanks that have exploded compared to tanks that have not exploded. They were also banned by the Millennium Series for some time. When they first were coming out, people kept thinking they would explode. They have some weird expanding tube that causes “bubbling”.

And my personal favorite, the heat from the flash fill melts the aluminum of the reg. I you’re wondering, the melting point of Aluminum is about 900 Kelvin. As in 1200 degrees Fahrenheit. If the tank’s temperature rose to that degree, I’m pretty sure there’s no way I would be holding it or even be within any sort of close distance to it. Now yes, aluminum isn’t good with heat, but I don’t think it’s going to be melting during a fill. (And note, they don’t use pure aluminum, it’s an aluminum alloy, though that might be with a metal with a lower melting point than aluminum, like zinc).

But my hypothesis is Smart Parts did it. It’s always their fault somehow.

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Filed under: Gear by James
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Warning: Complicated computer speak following

I guess Worr released a new site. Don’t remember their old one, but I’ll just follow along and say it’s new. I hope for their sake that it is brand new.

They dislike proof reading as much as I do, though the Synergy is totally “Lorem ipsum” like. (they now have at least fixed it)

Though they really need to bone up on their coding practices. We can get a nice little XSS on their form pages, like here, here, or here. Just enter something like:
"/><script>alert("I did it for the lulz")</script>
And you get this:

Way to sanitize your input there guys. Here’s a hint, convert ",<,> to their HTML equivalents. Another hint, jsut ask me and I’ll tell you exactly what to do.

So we can break their site and maybe cause some of their users some trouble, but what if we want to do more.

According to their headers, they’re running Windows using IIS as their httpd and running both ASP.NET and a very out of date PHP (over 2 years old).

But, wait, what are they really running? According to this error, PHP. At least with ASP, you have some slight non-valid input protection.

So they’re running of Windows and ASP.NET really just seems pointless. According to nmap, only port 80 is open, so they don’t have a mail server or anything of that nature (that’s at least accepts connections) running. Why not a LAMP server? I’m sure it would be cheaper and better, but whatever.

I think I’ve found enough fail to call it a failure. Plus this is boring me.

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It seems that Hybrid is going the way of the Dodo and closing up their shop or something to which I say, “Oh, okay”.

His post basically states that it’s tough times for everybody and that everyone loses or something like that. It was pretty much a lot pointing the finger and no answers or really any information of any kind. I would link to it, but it’s done in horrible flash.

They do keep with “We’re the little guys trying to take down the big guys”. Guess what, you aren’t the little guys. A guy building pretty much everything himself here, little. You, sending most thing to an overseas manufacturer resulting in mass produced shit, not little, medium at least.

But Hybrid’s always been on brink of failure always managing to get into or causing trouble. First, though I’m sure there’s stuff before that I can’t remember, they copied the Hitman logo with hilarious results. Thousands of people threatened the little kid that alerted Eidos though to my knowledge Hybrid just had to stop producing and selling the gear with that logo on it.

Their next foible was their Suicide shell warranty. They found out that people were intentionally breaking their shells to get Hybrid to replace them under warranty. Oh Noes!!! People abusing the warranty system, who could’ve seen that one coming? It’s only fucking obvious that it would happen. That just something you account for at the beginning, especially when you’re selling it to 15 year olds that are told to ‘Fuck tha man’ by you guys no less. Are you just that oblivious? I guess you got a taste of what you’ve been promoting the past years.

Next up, we have the manufacturer dispute, which could actually be a big reason in all of this. First, Hybrid comes out and says about the manufacturer, “We got fucked by those guys.” Then the manufacturer is all like, “WTF? We got fucked by those guys.” And then everybody is like, “Oh no he di’int” But the manufacturer is still all, “Oh yes we did, we’re coming out with our own shell bitches” Though to my knowledge, they haven’t released that. I have no idea what happened with this whole fiasco, but I’m pretty sure everyone got screwed and no one was wearing protection.

There’s also some other problem with them and what was at the time NPS, but now KEE (Yay for acronyms). Guess this happened when I wasn’t paying attention or caring about Hybrid, but KEE is/was suing them over the Hybrid name. Not sure when KEE used the Hybrid name, but KEE is just like Smart Parts and will sue over anything.

And here’s a glory quote:

From disgracing the new player to never having a good time

Yay for irony!

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Filed under: Hybrid by James
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A couple of patents came through earlier this week.

First up, we have JT’s design patent for one of their barrels. I think their Tactical barrel, not really sure. But it’s just a design patent, meaning that you can’t create a barrel that looks the same as the one in the patent. It’s nothing special.

The next one is from Avalon Advanced Products, who make some weird barrel plug thing that I’ve never seen or heard about. Anyways, they have a patent for a gun that has a threaded paintball dispenser.

Now, I didn’t read all of it, mainly just looked at the pictures, but basically you have a hopper that you screw on, instead of the whole clamp on deal. An original idea? I guess. A completely new, invented method? Not really. Hell, a lot of people put their hoppers on using a screwing in method. But, it was filed in 2002, so it was conceived

Couple of problems I see with this. First, the threading has to be done nearly perfect in order for the hopper to stay on straight. If the threading is off, then when you screw it all the way in, it could be crooked, and in order to make it straight, you would have to leave it unscrewed partially. The other problem, I’m not sure how well the hopper will stay secure. The threading design prevents it from falling off, but it doesn’t really prevent it from moving side to side. Any sort of rapid movements I would think could cause it to move back and forth.

Also, this company, that I’ve never heard of, makes 1 hopper, the spin loader, which is a gravity feed loader with a little switch thing that stops the balls from falling down that prevents you from firing accidentally. Let’s just forget the balls under the switch thing, because I’m sure a lot will. I’m not sure how old it is, but I’m guessing really. It doesn’t screw in or anything. It’s just a regular ol’ hopper. Way to use that patent, guys.

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This post is because of the horrible, and I repeat, horrible site, PbPixel.com (I’m not linking to their trash, and I would suggest that no one go to it, here’s a screenshot so you don’t have to go)

Anyways, here’s the deal. It’s a pixel selling website, you know, like that shiteous million dollar homepage crap, that makes absolutely no sense, but managed to get enough people to spam it so it got traffic (he’s also trying to do it again, but it’s a complete and utter failure). It has no use or adds any value to anything. It just exists, and it even does that poorly.

Want to make your own? Easy. Just download one of the many million dollar homepage clone scripts, add some crappy looking logo, and maybe a catch phrase, hopefully a more sensible one than ‘pixel your website’, and your done. Really, it takes at most 10 minutes. I would do a screencast of it, but I’m too lazy.

Another popularity, those thankfully it has died down now, was MySpace clones that focused on paintball, like Paintball Alliance, Mobzor, and tons of others. Pointless. But since I’m not seeing more of these, I’m not going to continue.

But another issue coming to fruition are splogs. Most are jsut taking either an RSS feed of Google News or Blog Search nad making those out to be posts. Some are actually taking content from providers (even some are using some of my posts). 68Caliber complained about people taking their content before, though they were going after members of forums doing it. Want to set one up? Just get a modified version of Wordpress with an RSS catcher in it, add a couple of feeds, and you’re done. Oh, and don’t forget to put ads everywhere, that’s a must, or else it seems like you aren’t doing it for the money, but of course you are.

I really don’t care too much if people are using my content, since I’m all for free and open information sharing, which is why all these posts are licensed under a Creative Commons license. It allows you to copy and paste the whole article as long as you cite that you got it from here and don’t use it for commercial purposes, as in, don’t sell it.

Anyways, this post was just everywhere. I wrote parts of it at different places and times, so my mind was always somewhere else. I’ll try give you a better one tomorrow.

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I thought it was official before, but not according to Keely.

The PSP has officially changed the ROF from 15 (technically 15.4) balls per second down to 13.33 BPS.

It’s actually one ball every 75 milliseconds, which does translate into 13 1/3 BPS (75 * 40 / 3 = 25 * 40 = 1000 ~ 1), but it’s actually too fast for 13.33 BPS (75 * 13.33 = 999.75 < 1000 therefore, it's too fast).

But that assumes that all the shots are consistent, which there are often possibilities where that isn't the case.

The PSP rules also state that only a maximum of 3 shots per trigger pull can be fired. Here's the time over 1 pull if the firing is consistent:

pull = fire + 75 ms + fire + 75 ms + fire + 75 ms = 225 ms (assuming the time firing takes is consistent and negligible)

Another case, let's say a ball takes a bit to load, say an extra 20 ms (don't argue, my loader is super fast, so that's not going to happen, whatever, shit happens):

pull = fire + 75 ms + 20 ms (slow ball loading) + fire + 75 ms + fire + 75 ms = 245 ms (assuming the same as above)

You just got jipped out of 20 ms. For that time period,you just shot ~12.24 BPS.

Let's say the same thing happens, but the board software is able to compensate for those few milliseconds (it's totally feasible for the software to be able to do this):

pull = fire + 75 ms + 20 ms (slow ball loading) + fire + 55 ms + fire + 75 ms = 225 ms (same assumptions)

Now, you just shot 13 1/3 (about 13.33) BPS, which is what the general rules state, but you would actually receive a gross penalty for more than one shot in a 65 ms time span.

So, the rules are actually, you may shoot 1 ball every 75 ms, not 13.33 BPS.

Also, in order to truly determine if the rate of fire is 13.33 or under (actually, 13 1/3) is to measure the gun over a 3 second time span (1/3 shots take some work to measure) and see if it shoots 40 shots or less over that time period with at least 14 (or 13) trigger pulls (13 1/3 pulls technically. If it the measurement didn’t start exactly when the first trigger pull occurred but after it but the first shot was counted as time 0, it could be done in 13 since the shot(s) from the previous trigger pull would run into the time period i.e. the 1 shot from the previous trigger pull plus the 39 from the subsequent 13 pulls). Now, of course, they aren’t going to measure it that way, since it’s a waste of paint and time, and probably seems a tad complicated. They’re going to measure it using a simplistic representation of it, as in, you need 75 ms between shots, because it’s easier and can represent 13.33 BPS (really, 13 1/3), but it’s not always true, as shown in the case above.

Am I saying their 75 ms between shots is bad? No, I’m just saying that saying it’s not 13.33 BPS (again, 13 1/3). It can be, but it’s not always. The rules should only state the 75 ms rule, not 13.33 BPS.

As a side note, I’m wondering how boards calculate their shots.

Does it use multi-threading, like a thread for each function (trigger monitoring, eye monitoring, rate of fire, etc.) or is it more of a when an event occurs, check the sensors then fire. I think I’m going to write a python script to demonstrate this.

Update:
Wrote previous mentioned python scripts, get them here, http://nothingoutoftheordinary.com/2008/01/10/paintball-board-software-types/

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Err, Smart Parts.

Smart Parts was able to put another company in their pocket. This time it’s little ol’ board-maker Tadao.

Usually, they go after gun companies for all their fancy/bullshit patents they have on electronic paintball guns, like the fact that they have a switch. Going after just a board-maker was probably a fresh change for them.

It could be because of their patent on Ion boards. Yup, if you make a board that looks like that, not including all those holes, no matter what the use, you gonna get sued.

Or for their Ion eye board. Make a u-shaped board with LED’s on it, you’re screwed.

So I’m thinking it’s for their Raider Ion board.

Now, it could mean that their coming out with a gun in the near future, which would be freakin’ sweet, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

So to anyone looking to make a baord for the Ion, you might have some troubles with the big ol’ devil Smart Parts.

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This was supposed to be posted yesterday. Whoops.

Brass Eagle decides that since everyone loved the Blade, even after it blows up on you, they need to come out with a new super low end pump named the Ambush.

It can use two CO2 canisters, so you get double the explosion on your face

It also comes with it’s own paintballs, because, you know, every good paintball gun comes with it’s own paintballs.

It also has a cup with a tube sticking out of it that apparently is a low profile design to give you accuracy.

It even includes a barrel plug, which I didn’t even know still existed, let alone being used.

I’m calling it. Gun of the Year.

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It seems some people out there are out there counterfeiting little ol’ Guerrilla Air. Oh noes!

According to a thread on PbNation, then a couple more, followed by a hundred more, ANS Gear is selling a Guerrilla Air Myth tank regulator that isn’t a Guerrilla Air regulator at all.

So some people call up ANS Gear, and their all like, “Yo, this is a fake.” And ANS is all like, “No, you guys are crazy. It’s all good”. Then Guerrilla is all like, “WTF? These regs are bogus.” Then ANS is all like, “Oh no you didn’t, cosmetics don’t matter, it’s the same.” Then Guerrilla comes back and posts on their site that counterfeit regs are being sold and shows the differences. Then ANS is all like, “Oh, these aren’t Guerrilla, we got them from the same manufacturer though, so they’re basically the same.” Then everyone is all like, “You guys are idiots.”

So it seems the shady looking ansgear.com (.net and .org too) and ansxtreme.com are, in fact, shady. Who da thunk it? And to the people who bought it, when something is over half off for no good reason, there might be something up.

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