Live 365. We all need to prepare ourselves. You might have the food, water, gold and silver, but ask yourself, are you truly prepared? That's why you need to visit mainmilitary.com. Mainmilitary.com carries everything you need. Gas masks, fire starter kits, high capacity magazines, chemical suits, military surplus items, and much more. Do you own a firearm? Mainmilitary.com has a large selection of pistols and rifles suited for your needs. Are your local stores sold out of ammunition? Call or visit them today for prices on hard to find ammo and bulk ammo orders. You don't need to worry about having a military surplus store in your area because mainmilitary.com is the only store you'll ever need, all from the comfort of your computer. Visit them online today at mainmilitary.com. That's main, like the state, military.com. He took off his three cornered hat and speaking low to me said, we've fought a revolution to secure our liberty. We wrote the Constitution as a shield from tyranny. For future generations, this legacy we gave. In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. The freedoms we secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep. But tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep. Your freedom's gone, your courage lost, you're no more than a slave. Invist the land of the free, the brave. You buy permits to travel and permits to own a gun. Permits to start a business or to build a place for one. On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent. Although you have no voice in saying how the money's spent. Your children must attend a school that doesn't educate. And your Christian values can't be taught. according to the state. You read about the current news in a regulated press, and you pay a tax you do not owe to please the IRS. Your money is no longer made of silver nor of gold. You trade your wealth for paper so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our nation turn from God and shame. You've taken Satan's number and you've traded in your name. You've given government control to those who do you harm so they could burn down churches and seize the family farm and keep our country deep in debt. Put men of God in jail. Harash your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail. Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oaths they've sworn. And your daughters visit doctors so their children will be born. Your leaders send artillery and guns to foreign shores and send your sons to slaughter fighting other people's wars. Can you regain the freedoms for which we fought and died? Or don't you have the courage or the faith to stand with pride? And are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be a slave? Those sons of the Republic, arise. Take a stand. Defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the land. Preserve our great Republic and eat God given right. And pray to God to torture freedom as Iowoki vanished in the mist for whence he came. His words were true. We are free, but we have ourselves to blame. For even now as tyrants trample each God-given right, we only watch him tremble, too afraid to stand and fight. If he stood by your bedside in a dream while you were asleep, and wondered what remains of the freedoms he'd fought to keep, what would be your answer if he called out from the grave? Dill the land of the free. It shifts real quick, but so far, holding around three degrees. Just enough to melt things? Not enough to make it. What's it like in your neck of the woods? What's the day today? Let's jump off the wall, sir, please. It is 15 January 2016. It is Friday evening. It is the last hour of the day and the week for the intelligence report. And that makes this quarter investors corner. And we had our warm up a couple of days ago, March 15th, and we're heading back down again. They are predicting 16 degrees for Sunday. We had our little taste of thaw back down and we were going to be on the roller coaster for a little while. So, okay, that's just the way it goes. This is January after all. They cut us an awful lot of slack on the temperature for a while there and now they're catching up. On the other hand, we had some pretty bizarre weather recently. It has ended, but for a while there we had a couple of inches of rain a day for a couple of week period. It was just extremely seasonal and very, very weird that made the national news. There were flood warnings and all this kind of good stuff. So, unfortunately, that's over. I got a little bit of interesting side effect from that. The weather had been warm, so I had not seen the normal seasonal effect. But when the rains came, I got the mouse invasion. In the fall, we usually get the mouse invasion where they're coming in from the cold and saying, oh, I like a better in here than out there. And old BKS to deal with the uninvited guests. Fortunately, they're not as well armed. as the Mexicans and so on who are coming up across the border, but it's the same sort of effect. So I had to declare BK's annual mouse G-HOD, and so far the score is Butternife 6, mice 0. Of course, if the mice ever score even 1, kill, then you won't be hearing me on Friday evenings, but I have major advantages over them. I not only outweigh them by a considerable margin, but I have the hominid secret weapon, the opposable thumb. In fact, I have two of them. So, I predict ongoing success in the Mouse Jihad and the usual way these things happen is eventually I get to the point where the mouse traps go unmolested and I declare victory whether that's actually successful or not, nobody knows, but if you clean them out to the point that you're not catching any more, you probably got them all. This is a good opportunity to remind people that there are simple, cheap, and effective things that we have access to now that we may not have access to or ready access to in the future if everything breaks. One of those is simple little spring driven mouse traps. You can buy a pack of these things for a dollar at your dollar store or two or three dollars at your grocery store. The design has not changed in a hundred years. We're all familiar with them. The little wooden platform with a wound, a spring wire loop and a trigger. They work absolutely beautifully. Best bait that I know of is peanut butter, real live actual goopy gloppy sticky peanut butter is ideal. I've found that it works a little bit better if you wrap some dental floss or other bits of string or thread around the trigger and get that or the peanut butter into that so that it takes a little bit of tugging and chewing to get the very last little bits because sometimes little buggers manage to lick everything off the trigger without triggering it. My attitude is, well, okay, you got the bait. We're going to try this again. Fair as fair. You get to win a few, but I'm going to win in the end. And there are also other designs that people have come up with for mouse traps. If you've got a real problem... or if you've got a problem with rats for that matter, rat traps are tougher and rats are smarter and tougher and so on. There is an interesting design. Are you familiar with the bucket and roller design of mouse trap, Mark? Have you seen that one? Yes, there's a couple of different. There's actually a seesaw model, several others where you take them to the plank and you walk them out. They go down, they don't come back. Right. The one I like is really elegant, is the roller. Basically, the way it works is you take a pail. You can find these things on YouTube and web pages and so on if you're interested. You take a regular 5 gallon pail. Take any cylinder of any sort, a plastic bottle works fine, anything that is round and cylindrical, and drill holes in the end exactly centered, and put a coat hanger wire or something through the center so that it turns freely. and drill a couple of holes in the lip of the bucket and thread that rod through there so you've got a roller that runs across the top of the bucket and turns freely. And all you really need to do is then arrange a yardstick or something so that there's a walking path up to the lip of the pail. So little critters can get on there and maybe a couple popsicle sticks or something so that they can they can reach over to the roller and you paint the roller with your bait your Maybe you want to use maple syrup or maybe you want to use peanut butter or whatever it is It doesn't have to be thick just enough to be smelly and tasty and so forth and you put some water in the bucket so that Anything that falls in the bucket cannot jump out Try jumping in a swimming pool and you will find that the water damps your motion to a degree that you know is quite remarkable. What happens is little guys will run up the ramp and they'll get onto that roller and to lick the peanut butter and since their weight is on top of a well-balanced roller, it's going to turn like log rolling. You've seen that in the old films of the lumberjacks moving logs down a river. And inevitably the mouse or the rat or whatever will fall off that roller into the bucket and if there's water in there they won't be able to jump out and they will eventually tire and drown. The thing that's neat about this is you don't have to keep resetting it. You can leave it overnight and you might get a dozen mice if you've got a horrible infestation. Whereas little spring style traps get one per load. and sometimes they may come around and see their fallen buddy and learn from it. Rats are more likely to learn than mice are. Rats are smarter. But whichever method you use, they both work. And I would certainly recommend anybody pick up several packs of the little spring wound mouse traps and just throw them on the shelf if you don't need them right now. Worst case, that's trade goods. Under Rough circumstances, people will find that they have the traditional problems like mice and so on. That they are not accustomed to having in recent times when everything's pleasant and they've got, you know, their food is all in plastic bags and cardboard boxes and cans and so on, not very attractive and the refrigerators run and everything is refrigerated or frozen or whatnot. They are not accustomed to dealing with these problems. These problems will recur. I will warn everybody that traditionally all rodents can be expected to have fleas and they can all be expected to be carrying disease. In practical terms, most of them won't. but enough of them are that you should treat them all as having that and therefore when you are collecting the little traps you should, you know, use tongs or rubber gloves or something to protect yourself from the possibility of a flea jumping off of the casualty and onto your hand. Now in practical terms if a mouse has been in the trap overnight has assumed room temperature chances are all the fleas have jumped off long ago. because they don't like anything that's at room temperature. But that means they may be in the vicinity. So same warning applies. You generally want to use rubber gloves or barbecue tongs or something to collect the casualties. The more a feat among us, simply toss out the mousetrap and use a brand new one every time. That's a luxury that I don't indulge in. I will actually just drop the guys in the waste basket. And then the mousetrap goes to the dishwasher again before I use it. I figure it gets my scent off of it and removes any question of fleas or other little critters. But whether you want to do a project of building a roller trap or just pick up some of these guys in the grocery or dollar store or what have you, Small little critters on invited guests of that sort are likely to be a problem that we're not used to dealing with, but will recur. In fact, these are... that rodent problems have been such an issue throughout history that I have read historians claim that domestication of the house cat is what initially permitted the development of civilization in the Nile River on grounds that granaries were not feasible until cats were available to keep the rodent population down. That's a possible theory. I can't discount that. It might be a slight exaggeration, but I don't think that rats in the granary were a problem until there were granaries. So I think maybe granaries slightly predate the domestication of the cat. But even so, obviously they do go together and are highly traditional. And so one of the reasons that every farm has had cats, right? Matter of fact, think about it this way. Yeah, they had the granaries, then they saw the problem. The mouse trap, somebody said, we have one. A million inhabitants or granary are wearing it. And they are self-replicating in fact. Yeah. They're tribbles! They actually have to keep them down a little bit, you know. They're tribbles after the triticale! Quite as nice as tribbles, because at least they just kind of purr and, you know, look like a fluff on a log staring at you. Nice, not so much. Yeah, tribbles never shredded anybody's hand when they were cranky. Okay, so let's see. Recently I had occasion to go shopping for some small electromechanical parts and as usual did that on Fleabay. It's one of my favorite places to go hunting if I am dissatisfied with the prices and offerings to other outfits. And I encountered a little bit of a surprise. I saw the usual China and Hong Kong sources and a few US sources and things of this sort. I was just looking for little standoffs, you know, mechanical assemblies. They make these by the millions and they ought to be cheap. Not everybody offers them for cheap. So naturally I go hunting until I find something that I consider adequate. Now, I was a little bit surprised in that when I saw all the usual vendor locations, one of them that popped up as a little bit unusual was in Athens, Greece. And their offering wasn't bad. It was pretty much in line with the Hong Kong offerings. A bag of 50 of these things goes in the mail and it's a small thing. They have to pay much higher postal rates than China does. I think everybody pays higher postal rates than China does. When you can buy a $1 item from China and they can not only sell you the item but also mail it to you for that $1, some funny business is going on in the international rates. You can't send them a first-class letter with a sheet of paper in it for that cheap. So obviously some rigging of the game has occurred behind the scenes. So, shipping from Athens is, of course, much more expensive than that. In this case, it was about $3. But I made a decision to go ahead and I ordered my little items from the computer shop in Greece. Why would I do that? Well, We watch the news, we know what's happening. Things have fallen off recently, the coverage has fallen off recently, but basically Greece was looted and plundered by the Banksters. The vampires did a number on them and just really ripped them up. And they are still in sorry shape. They're no longer in the headlines because it's old news and of course old news is not news as they say. But the realities remain the same. My attitude on this issue is that, gee, these guys were really, really turned to shreds for no particularly good reason. The vermin just robbed them blind. If I can buy something from them instead of from the Chinese and help them out a little bit, even if they're only, you know, profiting a dollar or whatever the case is, Well, that's my little drop of water into the drought zone. That's not going to repair their economy, but it helps a little bit. So, that is my little middle finger waved at the vampires. deliberately steering a little bit of business in their direction when they are, you know, cost effective and competitive with the other options anyway. I chose to do that and I suggest to other people that they might want to consider the same thing. I have bought machine tooling, small stuff, not, you know, monstrous big machines, little big tools and stuff from Belarus, for instance, and from Czech Republic and so on. The same rationale being that if I steer a little bit of business in the direction of these guys, I am in a very, very tiny fashion, but a non-zero fashion, opposing the vampires. I am helping the people over there make a living and bear up under the assault. And surviving the initial assault is the first stage towards counter-attack and win. So I would put out the thought to other people that you might want to keep an eye open for opportunities to do that sort of thing. Don't buy something for twice the price that you can get it. But if an offer is competitive and one of the countries that is offering your thing, whatever you're shopping for, has recently been victims of the vampires, maybe help them out, do a little business with them. Your thoughts? Well, again, if they're producing a better product, right now China Sport is of course the other direction you have to go for a lot of the stuff. Actually, do produce a better product. It's a matter of whether or not it gets past the border and into the US because of Chinese priorities. Well, in this case, I imagine the origin is China regardless of where you buy it from. Right. Because I'm buying 50 units or something. I'm not buying a container load of it. So, it's a matter of choosing the retailer. But, same principle, right? In fact, a lot of different things that they're either disposing of because it's the last of what they have from their own production, air sites, in the last several years, and they're actually turning things around again. Yeah, some of them are playing patsy with the patty cake with the vampires. You know, Poland's doing that, for instance. So, you know, they are not my happy list right now. But we keep an eye out and so on. When I bought little tools and such from Belarus, for instance, you can be sure that's old Soviet Union, old stock somebody found in a warehouse someplace and said, oh, here's a gear cutter, here's a mill, here's this, that, and the other thing, see what we can get for them. They have to go through proxies because the financial warfare has sought to cut off all trade with us, but they can go through intermediaries and so on and that's what they did. And everything went well and I got my little widget, so I'm happy. And I am slightly pleased that in a very small way, in a little single droplet of rain in the drought zone, I am resisting the vampires in that regard. Okay, so all right at any rate yeah, some of this stuff is The machine tools for instance are probably old Soviet stock in a warehouse Even some of the Romanian and Hungarian stuff will be that way to a degree because they haven't released as much they're longer in the tooth on our Inventory turnaround so the cool thing is you never know what we're gonna get typically the quality is a little higher because like you said you're getting the new old entry unissued, but made by grandpa. Right, and some of their front line stuff may not have been quite as good as our front line stuff, but if you look at the cost of our front line stuff, it's completely out of reach. And we'll exceed the new China Sport commercial standards, which are vastly lower standards than anybody ever used in the past. Now people have made the comment, it's true, the Chinese can make good stuff, but they can't make good stuff and sell it, you know, for the same price as sacks of dirt. and therefore that's not what we're seeing out of their market. And we have to bear in mind what's the game here. The vampires are intent on collapsing Western civilization and building the next mega empire. You know, each empire they build is bigger than the one that they just collapsed. They collapsed the European empires and built the American empire even though most of us were unaware of its existence during its heyday. You know, this new phenomenon. You know, the members, citizens of the Roman Empire knew they were part of an empire. The citizens of the American Empire didn't realize that there was an empire going on because most of the empire building was dirty deeds done in the dark, you know, far away from the homeland and not spoken of. Now the vampires are repeating the cycle. Their goal is to collapse Western civilization and build a new planetary empire centered on the Chinese. I don't think the Chinese are up to the task. I think they are internal centered, they are to internally corrupt, they are not very good empire builders, but they've been given all this stuff. The vampires in the West are trying to do that. Their war on Eastern Europe is, in my opinion, an effort to try to collapse them, to make them a resource node to artificially feed a Chinese empire. And of course, they have to collapse the West because the Chinese are not doing it on their own merits. So they were force-fed our technology, our intellectual property, and our markets. That was the key part. They did not bootstrap up. by building a consumer market and an economy and then competing on an equal basis. They were handed our markets on a silver platter and that's what's fed and overfed their industry. They are now going into a recession period. because they have overbuilt and the bubbles are popping. It will be interesting to see how that works out. But in the long run, we can see what the vampires are doing and we can oppose them in big ways and little ways. One of the things we can do is we can also look to domestic production. We have not mentioned this source for a while, but there is an independent maker of bullet molds in the US, sole proprietor. A fellow's name is Verell Smith. was vaguely aware of him and became more aware of him when Don invited him on one of Don's hours. Later on, I had him on my hour as well, and we had a nice little interview. A transcript of that interview, in fact, is in PDF format on Spike's site. IndianaFreedomTalkRadio.com archives all of our programs and also maintains some other documents, one of which is that transcript. One of our friends transcribed that entire interview, removed all of the ums and stutters and other nonsense from old BK so that I sound like an actual professional radio broadcaster in that transcript. And that transcript is available on IndianaFreedomTalkRadio.com. You can download it. In that we discuss the general mold manufacturing process, the means by which he makes them as opposed to the large factories. There are different methods of machining these things. But we also have a special topic of the paper patched bullet. That's an interesting old technology that's a little bit more labor intensive than the methods that people are more familiar with. But it has some interesting capabilities in that you can achieve some remarkable muzzle velocities without a soft lead or a medium alloy bullet flying apart because the paper patch works remarkably well. And it's not hard to do, and all you really need to do is have a mold that's cut for the purpose. So we discuss all of that stuff and the transcript is there if you want to read the transcript and obviously the live program is there if you want to sit through an hour of butter knife nattering on the transcript. It's a more efficient way of handling that. Veroel Smith suffered an accident and resulted in fairly serious injuries. He has recovered to a large degree and is in operation. So I would remind people that that's an available source and my recommended a high quality source for bullet molds, semi-custom made. He will fabricate a mold that is measured and designed to get the absolute maximum accuracy from your specific rifle if you want. If you want to go through the procedure of taking a chamber impression and sending that in, you can do that and he will cut a mold specifically for your rifle or you can tell him Okay, I want a mold that's going to work with several rifles. Go ahead and build the denominable dimensions and he will do that. You can specify nose contour and weight and tell him what sort of alloy you want. The default is wheel weights, though those are getting harder to find nowadays. You can still find them. Different alloys shrink different amounts and he understands how that works. He will cut a semi-custom mold for you. He's not going to cut a mold, it's the shape of an old Coca-Cola bottle. We say semi-custom. There is a range of legitimate shapes, but he will do that. He does not use CNC, he actually uses mechanical image. tooling that he fabricated. I can envision how that probably works. It works for him. He's familiar with the tools and he will run off one of these molds for you. His website is LBT. That is Lima Bravo Tangle Molds.com spelled in the traditional fashion with a U in molds. M-O-U-L-D-S. So take a look at his website, but you know before you do that just grab a copy of that transcript. and read that and think about that. See if you might want to look into either a traditional or I would recommend a paper patch. mold because you can get some terrific performance out of the same materials and the same casting pot and the same everything that you use in a more traditional fashion, but you can get better performance out of that. That information is freely available to you. It's on IndianaFreedomTalkRadio.com. Grab that, that, transcript and read it and that will tell you more than I can give you in a quick rundown. Comments or collaborations? Well, big thing again, you mentioned paper patch. Guys, that's one of the earliest tightening systems for bringing the groups in was to go to simple paper patch. Quality of paper, well, just like quality of cloth for WOD, would of course dictate the performance or the consistent performance. So you wanted to know your paper weights, and they really are paper weights, 10, 20, 30, 40, and also how best to choose the material that will be durable for carrying in the field, since a lot of the paper wrapped loads were used by or as you know, buffalo hunters, biddlers that were looking at food production, health production. able to reach out farther, the critters didn't have as much of an idea where the bullets were coming from. They weren't right up on top of what they were hunting. So, again, long range, ridge to ridge, where a lot of the expo, the first of the optics that were available, paper patch technology. It's not really outdated, it's just about being able to go to it. Actually, if we have to start working with other unique materials for bullet production in general, or if we have to go to a softer lead, maybe 10 and anamony aren't readily available, you gotta go. it work for you, kind of like a sheath, it of course absorbs, corrects the contact for the lands and grooves efficiently, splitting, free floating, you know, with, you know, ahead of the patch and around the patch, or I should say inside the patch and encapsulated. So, a bunch of advantages to paper patch. Cartridge or transition cartridge guns of the era, that means that the weapon stayed functional for a longer period of time too, and especially with that big bore stuff. We can assume that anything that is not used much anymore must not be nearly as good as what we use now. But the fact of the matter is that part of the reason for transition to a jacketed bullet that we're accustomed to is not performance, but rather it's more easily manufactured in a mechanized fashion. It does not hand labor to wrap the paper around that. And, of course, it's also a little bit more waterproof because if you have a paper-patched bullet, there's some chance that it will absorb moisture and so on. So, you want to have the usual care in storage of anything that you would routinely use. But when the US got involved in these mega wars and was producing billions of rounds of ammunition and rampaging all over Europe twice, and everywhere else it seems. That requires a considerable industrial production base and it's just plain more convenient to go with a jacketed round. Now, you know, a jacketed round is a very, very good technology, but the difference in performance is not very great. The biggest advantage of jacketed versus paper patch There's a huge performance difference between jacketed versus regular unjacketed, just lubricated, traditional cast. But the difference between jacket and paper patches is more a matter of manufacturing convenience than it is performance. And mentioned in the transcript, Viril as a stunt ran some .30-06 cast bullets up to about 4,000 feet per second and they did not fly apart. Doesn't mean that he got optimal accuracy. you know, pulling a stunt like that, but it does demonstrate what the technology can do. So, LBT mold, that's Lima Bravo Tango mold. M-O-U-L-D-S, go ahead. Yeah, pretty much. You don't add a lubricant. The paper is sliding along in that bore anyway, but it is soft enough to be gripped by the lans and grooves. So that is the whole point, yes. So the thing to do, first step to take is to grab that transcript from IndianaFreedomTalkRadio.com. Second thing probably to do is to order Viral's little book on lead bullet casting. He discusses not only paper patch, but also the traditional methods. This is a tiny little book. It is a half sheet format spiral wound, and it has some, it was obviously typeset on a dot matrix printer a long time ago. It is in need of some traditional editing. Uh, don't let that stuff put you off. That book is well worth the price picking up. He discusses heat treatment, the rate at which these alloys change hardness over time in storage. They do that. Nobody talks about that very much, but they do do that. Methods of heat treatment, alloys, nose shape, all sorts of stuff that you don't normally encounter. discussed is covered in that book. It may seem expensive. If I recall correctly, maybe it's $25 for the book. And it's a small little thing. You're going to glance at that and say, oh man, I paid this much for a tiny little book like that because I'm used to paying $8.95 for a paperback or whatnot. It's worth it. I recommend that book because for all of its imperfections in form, The actual content is quite unique, is highly desirable, and I strongly recommend it. So grab the transcript, absorb that, order the book, absorb that, and then consider placing an order with Mr. Smith. I think you will be very, very pleased with the quality of the mold you receive. Anybody have any wrap-up comments before we move on? No, go right ahead. Okay. If we're on the topic of resources available on Spike's website, it's been a long while since we discussed the spreadsheet. So we should mention BK's spreadsheet. It is my opinion that many of us have put up some food I certainly hope many of us have put up some food. Many of us will look at that store of food, whether it's a full closet or some pallets that are covered or whatever the case may be and say, golly gee, that's a lot of food. I guess I'm all set. My thought is that chances are you have less than you think you do in practical terms. Once you actually start using that, it will go away faster than you expect. So, for that reason, I wrote a little spreadsheet a few years ago. It is posted and available on Spike's website. You can download it for the standard traditional butter knife price of $0.00 and 0 cents. It is written in open office, so you will want to grab a copy of open office or LibreOffice, one or the other of those, and run it. You will need to enable macros. do not worry about the macros. If you get that from Spike's site directly, you know you've got a clean copy. It does use macros for some of its internal calculations, so things are not going to work quite right if you haven't turned those on. That being the case, Anybody can throw together a little spreadsheet to keep track of material. Why should you grab this one that'll be k-wrote? Well, I did a few things that took me quite a while to figure out how to do, but are worth it in the end, I think. So, the front sheet on the spreadsheet is very traditional stuff. It's got columns for you know, what it is that you're storing and what is it, why and how many of them do you have and where are they located and all that kind of good stuff. So you can put whatever you want in there. But if you use descriptions that are standard and you will see them in a later sheet in that spreadsheet, if you use the right spellings and everything, the spreadsheet is capable of recognizing those food items In most cases of bulk items, for instance, it knows the density of those items and it can perform some calculations for you. So while you may say, you know, can revue all these 16 ounces, blah, blah, blah, and as you can see, okay, 16 ounces. If you say, you know, one gallon of wheat or one liter of rice or what have you. It knows the density of those things and it can do the weight calculations and estimate the weight. That's kind of a neat thing and that uses macros. Once we've gone from there, we then move to the next phase. There is a sheet within the spreadsheet that's got some, a small database of fat, protein, carbohydrate values of various foods. And it uses that sheet to then perform a final calculation on a later sheet that estimates man days, man months, man years of the three categories, fats, proteins, and carbs. So if you fill in a bunch of data, if you receive the spreadsheet, it'll have some fake data thrown in there just as a demonstration of the things you can do. You can say one ounce, you can say two gallons, you can say, you know, five liters. There are a lot of different formats you can use. Just follow the examples and you will have an idea of what works and what doesn't. But once you have entered actual real data into that first sheet, you can take a look towards the back end and see a aggregate calculation. that says, okay, you know, you've got X many man days of carbs and Y many man days of proteins and also for fats. And that should give you an idea of where you're strong and where you are weak. Most of us will have far more in carbs than we do in proteins and fats because, frankly, carbs are cheaper. And if you're not careful, they're easier to store as well. So, that will show you if your stores are in balance. They will also give you an idea of the sort of run time you have. You may find that you have less stored than you think you do, in which case the spreadsheet will have done you a major service by saying, okay, get a move on here, deepen your stocks in this area or that. That spreadsheet, once again, is available on Spike's website, that is indianafreedomtalkradio.com. We have discussed it many times, but it's been a long time since we did, so I thought it was time to bring it up again. You will need Open Office which is also free. You can get that from OpenOffice.org. It will run on almost any PC that you have available whether it was sold to you by Apple or more competitive vendors. As long as your Open Office will run on your version of Windows then it doesn't really matter what version of Windows you've got. I don't know if it will go all the way back to the 98 versions, but it will certainly go back at least as far as Windows 2000. So anything since then, if you can run OpenOffice, you're good. It will even run on Linux, in which case you're good there. So even a curb grade computer, one that's almost ready to be kicked out to the curb and sent off to the trash man, will be good enough to run that spreadsheet. So you have no excuse not to use the modern 20th or 21st century accounting tools to keep track of what you've got and to analyze the value of what you've got. Comments? Again, with regard to inventory, guys, remember that this spreadsheet allows you to add things. So if you have something unique, something unusual that needs to be added to the inventory, maybe something you get as a special deal, a special program, the way it's set up. And you want to do that if you have something that is in short supply and has been incorporated. The reason you do this is so that you can integrate it more efficiently rather than piling up one course or one type of food for, you know, like say food fatigue issues. You can break down and actually come up with a second schedule now that you have an accurate way of identifying and then utilizing the inventory. So the spreadsheets are again especially critical because they overlap into obviously carbohydrate, protein, Not to mention, you know, basic cooking, the material and support elements you need, everything from whatever type of oils is whatever you're using there. We've talked about the minuses of that. But also basic components, sugar, salt, spices of whatever type, into the inventory and you keep track so that you can identify what you've used and you know what you need to replenish. The most important thing here too, you're going to be doing a running, you know, inventory. When you're doing some support for preparedness or for any kind of future issues, you typically are going to be using what you are storing. And you need to do that anyway to rotate inventory progressively. But example, right now, all the Christmas stuff is a lot fresher than the regular stuff just like it on the shelf. You may have Hershey's Kisses that have the Christmas symbols on them. Go take a look at the storage and packing date for the ones that are on the shelf that are the regular ones. Take a look at your production date and the ones that you have that are on sale. More time you're getting the best you actually keep in an inventory before again function is required so that you don't waste the material Okay, so if we have worked that one, it's time for a fun nerd topic. One of our friends bugged me a couple weeks ago and says, you know, BK, you want to run this one out, this could be useful. And he's right. There are a number of different microcomputers available to the hobbyists. They're calling themselves makers nowadays. to tinker around. And most of them are used for fairly trivial stuff, blinking LEDs and putting together little robots to run around in circles on the tabletop and things of this sort. But they are becoming more common, they are becoming much cheaper and they're becoming much more capable. One of the most capable versions, it's very, very cheap because it's being produced and sold at only a little bit above cost by a non-profit in Britain, actually, is the Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi has gone through several versions. They've gotten more powerful and more memory and this kind of stuff. One second, please. They keep coming out with new versions. It uses the ARM processor. Basically, you don't want to program the ARM processor at the bare metal level. It's a fairly complicated mess. But demonstrating how cheap these SOCs have become, this stands for System on a Chip. That is the core of the smart cell phones and things of this sort. A new version of Raspberry Pi has been released and this one sold out instantly. So you can't buy one right now, but you can be sure that additional production runs have been scheduled and they will become available again. Well, actually you can buy one if you want to spend 30 bucks on eBay. But the latest and greatest, well, or latest and most interesting version of the Raspberry Pi is called the Pi-0. And I guess the name comes from, they're trying to get it as close as possible to zero cost. They've gotten awfully close. The Pi-0s sell for $5, if you can believe that. Most processor chips cost more than that. And yet, here they're selling you this little widget that's about an inch and a quarter by two and a half inches, something along those lines. It has a system on a chip. and this thing is a full blown computer. You'll need to add an SD card to give it mass storage. It's got built into it a USB port and an HDMI port. So you plug in an HDMI monitor and the thing has full blown video available. You will need a powered hub to connect your keyboard and mouse and so forth. And you will need adapters because it uses mini USB, not full blown regular size USB. Part of the cost and size is using the tiny connectors. You'll also need to provide it a power supply. That power supply is another mini USB port. It looks like it's got too many USB ports. One of them, however, is only for power and the other one actually functions. What do you plug into the power unit? Well, that's the standard for the average cell phone nowadays. So if you've got an old cell phone power supply lying around, you've got something free, otherwise you can pick one up for a few dollars. So you do have to add some Claptrap and the Claptrap is going to cost more than the computer. But if you plug in a little SD card and you can download the image necessary for that and expand it with your PC, Mac, whatever and write it to the SD card, that's not complicated. Plug in that SD card, you end up with a full-blown Linux computer with a fairly competent processor the ability to do full screen high definition video. A lot of people use these things just as home theater computers to plug into their television and play MP4 files and things of this sort. And once you're done programming the device or downloading software into it, you don't have to have the monitor there. You can write a couple little configuration files and tell it what program to run when it boots up. You don't need to have the mouse and keyboard connected and so on. All you have to do to get this thing to run and do some stuff is to give it power and turn it on. Once you've got it configured, there are lots of instructions on how to do various projects with these things. The project that was called to my attention, which I'm going to mention now, is called Pirate Radial. What this does is it consists of a bunch of software that you can download, expand onto an SD card and stuff into a Raspberry Pi. And what you do is you take a single piece of wire and solder it to one of the holes in the Raspberry Pi Zero board. That serves as an antenna. And that is the entirety of your hardware modifications, just adding a single piece of wire to one pin. And this guy then in software synthesizes an FM radio signal. And the driving capability on that pin is sufficient to make a short range FM radio broadcast. Which people have reported to be good for half a mile or a mile or something along those lines. If you wanted to hang a transistor and so on off the back end you could probably make it more powerful than that. But For the cost of $5 for a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of Claptrap, which some of you may already have on hand, and some free software, you can build yourself a little FM radio transmitter even cheaper than the traditional kits that Mark has discussed many, many times before. This has been enabled by the insanely cheap cost structure of these systems on a chip. in the fact that the processors have gotten so fast that it is now feasible to synthesize FM in software. That's quite remarkable. If you want to read about this and find all the links and find out how to do it, all the instructions and downloads and everything, take a look at makezine.com. That's M-A-K-E-Z-I-N-E dot com. So that is makezine.com slash projects slash raspberry. Remember there's a P in raspberry. R-A-S-P-B-E-R-R-Y. So it is makezine.com slash projects slash raspberry dash pirate dash radio slash. And that will give you the how-to and the basics and all of the download links and everything. So for $5 for Raspberry Pi, about the same for an SD card, and a piece of wire. You can build your own little FM radio transmitter. And of course you can put MP3 files in there or what have you, script it a little bit and fire it up. What some of these people have done is glued it to a battery pack and a magnet. They turn the thing on and they fling it at the bottom of a bridge and it sticks to the bottom of the bridge and broadcasts until the battery goes down. So cheap that they can actually do that as a throwaway. But these people have lowered the cost even further of a micro FM transmitter by doing it in software and configuring that so that you can do it with a Pi zero. Mark, comments? Oh, again, there's a couple of different packages that have been out there for quite a few years. Any time that we can build more micro FM's for less, if you've got the time, if you're willing to take the effort, The idea is not only to produce what you need for yourself, but remember once you get good at something, you know, there are other people that need them. There's something to think about there. We've discussed this before, manufacturing and production. Once people know where to go, they will find you and you can satisfy those cuts there needs to be. You could put these things together, configure them, do the script, and set it up as a kit so that you tell somebody, okay, put your MP3 files in this folder and then plug in the SD card and you're good to go. And then they don't have to learn the Unix scripting, you know, involved with, you know, it's not complicated. Most of the work has been done for you. But, you know, there's some value you can add. Now, you can't buy a Pi0 right now. The initial batch has sold out. But within a few weeks there won't be another wave. So, you know, keep an eye out and be aware. $5 plus a battery and an SD card for an FM transmitter. Come on guys, can't get much closer to free than that. Next up actually, once you have the basic transmitter, I'll remind everybody, another place to find amplifiers. FM excite, cable, satellite repair. The individual little boxes are about the size of a modem to get to... typically anywhere from one to seven watts and it just plugs the circuit it's all that was made determines what comes there pulled out of policy no somebody's doing this a hey you got some of us took out some life in it the guys know and a lot of times they'll be working on a bank of these things or sometimes 10 20 30 of them the FM micro we're talking about you take one of these boxes simply put it in line and then it goes up the congratulations that yourself a more powerful FM right off the bat and they usually We'll be right back. you