u/akenthusiast

I normally carry a Benchmade Auto Stryker, I'm looking for a less expensive backup, one that I can take to places I wouldn't want to lose the Benchmade.

There are a lot of fairly cheap push button autos out there but most of them are gaudy and awful with wacky blade shapes and grips. not to mention I don't know which ones are any good.

I'd like this to be simple and subdued in the vein of the Auto Stryker, Gerber Propel, Hogue Ballista, or Protech TR-3. Aluminum handles would be cool but are not a requirement.

I'm looking at the Boker Kalashnikov and the Cobratech Recon. Are there any other standouts in this category that are worth considering?

Would like to keep this sub $100

Basically title. One of them is a steele industries unit and another is one I assembled, both elbit tubes, both in Carson housings. When shaking the one I assembled, I can hear the tube moving a little. That's my bad, I'll crack it open and tighten it.

Shaking the steele industries unit produces a much lighter sound, more like a tapping than anything really moving. When they shut off, it's not just power to the tube going, it'll even kill the illuminator if it was on.

What I find inexplicable is that I've had the Steele one for almost 3 years and the one I assembled was over a year ago. Both have been flawless until they both started acting up on the same night.

I'm a little more hesitant to crack open the one I didn't assemble because of the warranty.

Anybody ever have anything like that happen?

Just posting so that it exists and is searchable on the internet (I couldn't find it yesterday and had to go get some thread pitch gauges)

15/16" - 20 UNEF

I have a media server PC that runs plex and it generally has the VPN turned on 100% of the time. This PC does not have a monitor, I control it by windows remote desktop.

Recently, turning the vpn on or off busts my remote desktop session and I need to reconnect. It never did that up until about a week or so ago.

It also has started to prevent plex from identifying movie and show uploads. Plex is no longer able to access whatever it's using for metadata. Again, this was never an issue up until about a week ago.

I have split tunneling on, with plex on the exclusion list and I have "Allow LAN connections" turned on.

This all worked just fine up until very recently, I haven't changed anything.

Anybody else seeing these kinds of issues?

Not a clue what's happening here. I installed Apollo on my computer and Moonlight on my TV and it's been performing basically flawlessly for months. Today I tried to fire it up and it was showing my PC as offline.

I checked my firewall, made a rule for the ports, did a winsock reset, and even fully uninstalled and reinstalled apollo.

Several times through this process the moonlight app on my phone has briefly seen the PC, allowed me to re-pair by pin but it almost instantly reverts to showing the PC as offline after that. At my wits end here.

Anybody have any ideas?

Edit: Installing tailscale for an experiment and then uninstalling it broke my shit all the way to the core apparently. I had to do a system restore to a few days ago before I installed it

I'm not trying to make any point here about whether or not you personally should prioritize throw vs flood on the flashlights you choose.

Rather, my point is that high candela ratings are not a feature that actually costs extra money.

This is not a question of using higher quality or more powerful components. The only thing that it takes is choosing the right LED and putting it in a deeper reflector cone.

Speaking of LEDs, Surefire/Cloud/Streamlight and the rest of them all use the same handful of LED emitters. Surefire generally uses Osram LEDs and the new Streamlight HPX uses a Luminus SFT-12R. These things cost less than $2 a piece at wholesale prices.

You can spend $20 on a convoy C8 with one of those same emitters in it and it will shine every bit as far as a Surefire DFT.

The actual cost associated with a weapon light is everything else, durable construction that will survive under thousands and thousands of recoil impulses. 20,000 candela vs 100,000 is a difference measured in pennies on the manufacturer's side.

Point being: next time someone comes out with their new ultra turbo hotness and adds $100 to the MSRP you should tell them to shut up. This is the tactical tax at it's worst.

A notable exception to this is LEP lights. Those emitters actually are expensive but I don't think anyone except Zbolt and Weltool sell LEP weapon lights because the utility in those is pretty limited