Do-It-Yourself Machine gun

Finnish belt fed .22LR machine gun

Dripper53:

An 80-year old man in Finland created a belt-fed .22 caliber machine gun out of an electric drill. The cam-driven weapon had a firing rate of 420 rpm (for comparison, the US M3 Grease Gun is 450 rpm). The man was not prosecuted, but he had to give up his creation.

 

Communication Channels

My Wiring 'Closet'

I finally got around to replacing the across-the-floor ethernet cable with one routed across the ceiling and inside the wall. When we started the big remodeling project over a year ago, we moved into the basement and we took our TV with us. The remodeling project was only supposed to last a few months, so it's okay to have a cord running across the floor. I mean, we're in the basement. Actually the only place it ran across the floor was at the bottom of the stairs and we covered it with a rug, so it was practically invisible. But it's been a while, and the TV is still in the basement, so I ran a new cable in a more secure and permanent manner.

The Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon's NBA team, have been having a rough time since all their star players have moved to greener pastures. They're getting better, slowly. They beat the Atlanta Hawks Tuesday night in a nail-biter. Since they are rebuilding the team, they are also trying to rebuild their fan base, which has been decimated since the all-star team they had is no more. To that end, they are now broadcasting all of their games on commercial TV - Charge! 2.2. We have an antennae in the attic, let's see if we can pick it up. Plug the upstairs TV into the coax and bingo! NBA basketball clear as a bell. The antennae is a big old thing that I probably set up 30 years ago. It's not one of these miniature things they are using for their ridiculously high frequency, but it works fine.

Since I was running a new ethernet cable, and since we discovered a new use for coax, I figured I might as well run a new coax cable as well. Plug in the basement TV and run setup to scan for broadcast channels. It found, I dunno, a couple of dozen including the one channel we care about. 

But then I remember that new stuff has been showing up on the ROKU, so I go take a look. One of the new things is TV channels, and there are a bunch of them. ROKU displays a list and I spent a couple of minutes scrolling through it looking for Charge! 2.2. I must have scrolled through a hundred channels. I did not find Charge! 2.2 and I did not find the end. It might be there. Seems as though everybody and their mother that has a broadcast license is making the content available over the internet. I noticed half a dozen news channels from around the country.

There is only one coax cable running to the upstairs TV and no easy way to run ethernet, so now I'm wondering if I can send ethernet signals over the sane wire as the antennae signal. I mean, what frequency domains are we talking about here? Are they even in the same ballpark, or are they in different leagues, playing in different cities, on opposite sides of the country? I have no idea. 

Turns out you can run both broadcast and ethernet signals over the same coax and both signals come through loud and clear. Previous post about the Hitron adapters I used. I am only using one set of signals at a time, so it's possible if you were using both sets of signals simultaneously there might be some interference.

Those stupid screw-type coax connectors are a royal pain. If you hold the cable at the correct angle, the nut screws on easily, but get just a little off center and it jams up. You make or break half a dozen of these connections and your fingertips start complaining. It's basically ridiculous, but it's what I've got. There used to be quick connect coax connectors that just plugged in, no nut screwing required. I think those came with video games, but I don't have any of those connectors and all my coax cables have threaded connectors.

Our country has a zillion video channels all being broadcast simultaneously. YouTube has like a zillion channels, but each of those YouTube channels only put up new stuff intermittently, like once a week. But there are a zillion people watching those channels. How many channels are active at one time? Channels where we have someone broadcasting and somewhat actually watching? Is it a zillion times a zillion times a zillion? Or maybe the cube root of a zillion? If you had access to YouTube statistics you might be able to come up with a number. Of course, YouTube is only one player in the great social media landscape, and all of the traffic that involves an actual person is no doubt dwarfed by the tsunami of bits flowing between machines.

Meanwhile, over in Finland, somebody cut one of their undersea communications cables:

Undersea data cable between two NATO countries breaks 

Excerpt: 

“Disturbances occur from time to time and there can be various reasons,” Bergstrom added. “For example, they are susceptible to the weather and damage caused by shipping.”

Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO) told Yle that it was too early to assess the cause of the cable break, noting that around 200 undersea cable breaks happen around the world every year.

“The most common cause of cable breakage is human activity, such as fishing or anchoring,” a SUPO spokesperson said.

Two days later we get this report:

Danish Navy Hunts Down Chinese Ship Suspected Of 'Sabotaging' Baltic Sea Cables

From Michael Every:

So, if you want to worry, look at less glamorous but arguably more significant headlines that don't point to world war, per se, but to world disruption, and major world market volatility.

Official allegations of sabotage were made in the EU as: two of Finland's five nuclear plants had to be shut down; a key Norwegian oilfield was shut by a power outage; the support cable on a Finnish suspension bridge broke; and two key Baltic EU data cables were severed. The Chinese vessel Yi Peng has been flagged as a possible cable culprit and at time of writing was forcibly moored in Denmark. This is likely to prompt a strong Chinese diplomatic response; and perhaps an EU one if it proves a Chinese ship damaged key seafloor infrastructure (again: this also happened to a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia in October 2023).

Roman Shumov

Roman is a historian who sometimes writes for RT. I read a couple of his stories today. I think they are well done. Now I'm wondering if there is American news site that is produced in Russian, and if there is, what does it sound like? Does it sound reasonable like RT does to me, or is it like the Washington Post and The New York Times, full of bullshit and lies? I suppose it matters which stories you choose to read. I don't read anything about Ukraine or Gaza because everyone writing about those two war zones has an ax to grind. Yes, wars are horrible, but that's the way of the world these days, there is always a war going on somewhere. I think it's because people just like to fight and there are 'leaders' who are willing to take advantage of this natural inclination and are able to organize those people into a coherent force.

Anyway, here's a couple of stories by Roman:

• Russian officer, Finnish hero, Hitler’s ally: The fascinating story of Carl Mannerheim - 80 years ago Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim became President of Finland. An extraordinary person, he was a military commander and statesman in both Russia and Finland, and left behind a controversial legacy in each country.
• Beyond their 790-mile shared border and 108 years of being part of the same state, Moscow and Helsinki have other things in common: their complicated attitudes toward Carl Gustav Mannerheim. Once hailed as a hero in both countries, Mannerheim was a Russian army officer who became Finland’s president during the Second World War. His legacy is fraught with ambiguity and marked by countless lost lives, both Russian and Finnish. This article explores who Mannerheim was and why monuments dedicated to him are frequently splashed with red paint on both sides of the Finland-Russia border.
• The mother of Rus towns: How a legendary Russian city ended up in Ukraine - Once the heart of the ancient kingdom of Rus, it was made capital of Soviet Ukraine in 1934.
• This paragraph rang a bell: "In the 9th century, a country emerged which would come to be known as Kievan Rus, the homeland of the ancestors of modern-day Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The backbone of this state was a network of river trade routes. These routes began in Scandinavia, traversed the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Finland (near present-day St. Petersburg), and split in two. One route headed east to the Volga River and then to the Caspian Sea, skirting Iran and Azerbaijan before reaching the Arab lands. The other route went south through Novgorod and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea, leading to Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. Iron, wax, furs, linen, weapons, and slaves were sent south; north came intricate metalwork, books, and, most crucially, silver." - Reminds of Vikings: Valhalla
• Ruins of Yugoslavia: How Russia learned that NATO poses a threat - The US-led military bloc’s illegal strikes on Belgrade in the spring of 1999 forever changed relations between the West and Moscow

New-to-me words:

hecatomb

• (in ancient Greece or Rome) a great public sacrifice, originally of a hundred oxen." After Pythagoras discovered his fundamental theorem he sacrificed a hecatomb of oxen"
• an extensive loss of life.

P. S. Map of places mentioned in the story about Carl Mannerheim:

Finland

Blowing Up a Truck Tire Just For Fun

Exploding GIANT Truck Tire with 4500 psi Compressor
Beyond the press

It's nice to see wives in videos with their husbands.

Deadwind Season 3 - Netflix Series

DEADWIND Season 3 Trailer
Original versions

Sofia Karppi (Pihla Viitala), the lead detective, and Sakari Nurmi (Lauri Tilkanen), her sidekick, are investigating a series of gruesome murders that are happening on a daily basis. Plus we have drug dealers,  an evil pharmaceutical company, family problems as well as a cold case involving Karppi. There are also some bits about the history of medicine, so there is plenty to keep our little minds occupied.

A mosaic of Hippocrates on the floor of the Asclepieion of Kos, with Asklepius in the middle, 2nd–3rd century

The killer leaves a symbol with the bodies of the people he has killed. Eventually they discover that it is a predecessor to the Caduceus that medical-industrial establishment uses today. So they go back to Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC), who lived on the island of Kos, the same island that a couple of people in the story visited. Turns out the symbol is sold as a tourist trinket all over the island. So things are getting tied together. I did not find any evidence of this symbol being a real thing, but does it matter? It works in this story.

Helsinki to Kos - 1,600 miles

In Episode 7, just after the 5 minute mark, Nurmi quotes Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) , father of toxicology, from the 16th century, saying "the dose is the poison", which leads Karppi to look at the problem in a new way. Supposedly the pharmaceutical company is trying to develop a new drug to help drug addicts break their addiction. But now Karppi wonders if maybe they were working on a new, undetectable poison. Might be a lot of people interested in something like that. Might also explain the rash of dead bodies that have been showing up.

Flak tower in Rajamäki

In the course of their investigation they pay a visit to a Flak tower. It might be the only one in Finland. It's 30 miles north of Helsinki. Rumor has it that it was built to protect a nearby distillery that was busy producing Molotov cocktails. Never heard of anyone producing Molotov cocktails on an assembly line before.

Porsche Tacyan Turbo

Nurmi has new fancy car - an electric Porsche. Never mind the Turbo name, it has no turbocharger, it's all electric. Scenes with the car include whining electric motors. I wonder how realistic that is. It could be spot on or it could be amped up for effect. Sounds are funny, sounds you normally ignore can wreak havoc with audio recordings.

Somewhere in there is a scene where our heroes are in a bar having a beer, and the beers are Coronas. Struck me as funny. Ooo, look at us drinking imported beer. Kind of like drinking Heineken over here. There is also a nightclub called Kansas. Over here it sounds absurd, why would anyone want to name a nightclub after the middle of nowhere? To the Finns, the state of Kansas might seem like a dreamy fantasyland.

Season 1 post. Season 2 post.

Comedians

ICEYE Satellite Image of Crimea Bridge

The Crimea Bridge is a relatively new bridge that connects the Russia mainland with Crimea.

Finnish satellite-imagery venture ICEYE announced on Thursday that it has signed a contract with the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation which will provide the Government of Ukraine with ICEYE’s Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite imaging capabilities. - Defence Blog

ICEYE is a Finnish company that builds and operates microsatellites. I am surprised that microsatellites can deliver high resolution images. I thought you needed big cameras with big lenses being carried by big satellites. But ICEYE isn't using cameras, they are using radar.

Looks like we have another charity supporting Ukraine's war against the big, bad, Russian bear. But just who is this Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation? It's a foundation founded by Serhiy Prytula, a Ukrainian comedian. Is this whole war effort just a big comedy show? I mean, the President of the Ukraine is also a former comedian. And the war doesn't make a lot of sense unless funnelling a few million more dollars into Joe Biden's pocket is more important than all the worthless peasants in Ukraine.

Google Satellite Image of Crimea Bridge

Or you are afraid that Russia will take over the world. I, for one, am not too concerned about that happening.

Molotov Mobile

New Hyperion

Drive Tribe has the story:

It was 1932 when the Soviet Union, thanks to a commercial agreement with the Ford Motor Company, built its first mass-produced passenger car. Called GAZ-A, it was derived from the 1931 Ford Model A and was built up to 1936 in several thousand specimens. In 1933 the Soviet leadership wanted, however, the realization of the most technologically advanced car and it was decided to build it based on the new Ford Model B.

After three years of experimentation, the new GAZ-M1, whose name derives from Vyacheslav Molotov, notorious Soviet foreign minister, was finally presented at the 1937 Paris Expo. The car was built until 1943 in more than 62,000 units and today represents one of the icons associated with the great patriotic war. In 2019 a customer applied to the Truck Garage tuner in Saint Petersburg to transform the wreck of an M1 into a modern off-road vehicle and after a year the new Hyperion was presented this week.

The notorious Vyacheslav Molotov? Yah, notorious is the word. Some bits from Wikipedia:

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890 –  1986) was a Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s onward. 

During the 1930s, he ranked second in the Soviet leadership, after Joseph Stalin, whom he supported loyally for over 30 years, and whose reputation he continued to defend after Stalin's death, having himself been deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the Stalin years.

The improvised incendiary weapon known as the Molotov cocktail is named after him.

Well, of course the cocktail is named after him. I mean it must be, I've never heard of anyone else named Molotov. How it got that name tells us a little more about the man (from another Wikipedia story): 

The name "Molotov cocktail" was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called Molotovin koktaili in Finnish. The name was a pejorative reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939.

The name's origin came from the propaganda Molotov produced during the Winter War, mainly his declaration on Soviet state radio that bombing missions over Finland were actually airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbours. As a result, the Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs "Molotov bread baskets" in reference to Molotov's propaganda broadcasts. When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack and destroy Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the "Molotov cocktail", as "a drink to go with his food parcels".

So the Finns used bottles of gasoline to toast the arrival of the Soviet tanks.

Bordertown Mural Murders

Bordertown: The Mural Murders - Official Trailer | Your Trailer Suck's | 2021
Your Trailer Suck's
A grisly serial killer murder mystery. This time have a movie, it's a follow on to the series we watched and watched and watched. It's got all your standard elements, but I think the best part was seeing all the old familiar characters like Kari, Lena, Olivia and Katia.

Update December 17 replaced missing video. WTF YouTube?

Good Morning

Taivalkunta Beat - You're No Good (cover)
Taivalkunta Beat

I got my second Pfizer jab on Tuesday and after three days of abject misery I'm starting to feel human. Still have a bit of a headache, but well enough to fix myself a cup of coffee, and then this comes across my computer screen and all of a sudden I feel like life might be worth living.

Via Flares into Darkness

Deadwind Season 2

DEADWIND S2 Trailer
We watched the entire second season of this series over two days. That was entirely too much. We need to start restricting our TV watching.

The plot is a little complicated. I'm not sure I've got it all straight, but the good guys figure out who the bad guys are and the bad guys get their just desserts, so it's all good. There is a serial killer at work killing half a dozen people over a short period of time. The lead detective, a youngish woman with a child and wild, wild hair, figures out the connection between these murders and puts them on the track of the culprit. But there is something about one murder that doesn't add up, and she digs around until she finally figures out who done it, and it's someone that no one suspected. Turns out he's been at it for years and killed a bunch of people, many more than our recent revenge based murderer killed.

There are also a couple of killings that happen on the spur of the moment, both in response to being threatened. You just don't know what's going on in some people's heads.

There were a couple of interesting bits. One is the proposed Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel. It is a big issue with mayor's new political party. It also seems that some people in real life are serious about it.

Ferries play a role as does cold water.

1991 BMW 850i

Another was the car driven by one of the detectives: an aging BMW 850i. The distinctive blue & white BMW hood emblem was blacked out in the show. Kaarppi, the woman lead detective, tells her partner, Sakari, that he has a car now and hands him the keys. (Season 2, Episode 1, Mark 17:30).

On Netflix, in Finnish with subtitles in English.

Spoilers follow. The lead detective, Sofia Karppi, has an adult step daughter, Henna Honkasuo. Henna finds a stash of Subutex that was hidden in the snowy woods (where have we seen that before?). Never mind that the guy who buried it there has been murdered by our revenge motivated serial killer, somebody figures out that she has the drugs and wants them back. Probably because she told her new boyfriend, who was trying to sell them wholesale and got killed for his trouble. The bad guys want these drugs, but when she finds that her stash, which was hidden under a railroad bridge, has gotten ripped off, they offer to let her work off her 'debt' by smuggling several kilos of drugs across the border from Tallinn. She and her handler take the ferry to Tallinn, get a taxi to the middle of nowhere, dig up a million dollars worth of contraband from underneath some rubbish in a derelict house.  Now another couple of guys drop off a car for them and they head back to Helsinki on the ferry. Henna overhears a phone conversation with her handler that convinces her that they are going to drop her in the shit. This leads to a heated discussion and her handler pulls a gun on her. She relents, he puts his gun away, she pulls out her dad's big switchblade and stabs him in the gut half a dozen times. He collapses and dies on the deck. The big, open, windswept, totally unoccupied upper deck. She drags his lifeless body to the rail and dumps him overboard along with his gun and her knife.

The mayor kills her number two man when he threatens her so she pushes him off the end of dock. Bad place to be standing if you are going threaten somebody, dummkopf. He flunders in the ice cold water for a few seconds, but makes no attempt to save himself. Doesn't he know how to swim? If that's the case what the heck is he even doing on the dock? Double dummkopf. He was a political hack, so he got what's coming to him. Is that the message here? It was just kind of weird and unexpected. But we already know the mayor is cold blooded from a previous encounter with some skateboarders who were harrassing her blind daughter who is trying to ride to a board.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago at least, but I didn't post it. Possibly because I had more to say, but now I don't remember what that was, so here we go, even if it isn't finished.

Hooked

Acorn TV | Hooked clip
Mother of his child shows up 16 years after running off after giving birth, so we've got some emotional turmoil going on. The actress is Matleena Kuusniemi. She was in Bordertown where she played Paulina, the wife of the lead detective. I think she looks a lot like Mariska Hargitay of Law & Order SVU fame.

Mariska Hargitay

On her advice a cocaine peddler buries his stash in the woods and uses his phone to record the GPS coordinates. Could your phone record the coordinates accurately enough that you would be able to locate the stash again? Sounds kind of like geocaching.


The coordinates are given to 6 decimal places: 60.252425, 25.140787 which is in the woods outside Helsinki, Finland. Google Maps only goes to five. If your phone can actually give you GPS coordinates to 6 decimal places, you should be able to find your stash.


Bruce Lee : Ping pong with Nunchucks
When the lead detective's girlfriend asks him about his Nunchucks, he mentions that there is a film of Bruce Lee playing ping pong using Nunchucks, so I had to see if I could find it, and here it is.

10 Episodes on Amazon Prime

Finland

Thunderstruck by Steve'n'Seagulls (LIVE)
Steve'n'Seagulls are from Finland and will be touring the USA next month. The comments on the YouTube page are great. My favorite: "Bro I heard ACDC covered this song". Via Detroit Steve.

Must be Finland's turn in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we started watching the second Season of Bordertown, which is set in modern day Lappeenranta, which is just across the border from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Akso started watching a Lindybeige video about the Battle of Bomarsund, which took place on a Finnish island in the Baltic Sea back in the mid-19th Century.

Bordertown Part 2

Ville Virtanen as Kari Sorjonen

We just finished watching the first season of Bordertown and it's pretty great. It took us two weeks to watch all eleven episodes, each of which ran about an hour. It was interesting that it was set in Finland near St. Petersburg. Haven't heard much about that part of the world other than Nokia phones and Peter the Great. The show is dominated by old folks. They have all the big important roles. There are a few young, cute faces but compared to the world-hardened adults and they are kids and are treated as such. The adults command center stage, the youngsters are important, but do not play central roles in the story.

The series of eleven episodes covers four or five major cases. These cases involve some pretty heinous crimes. Maybe there's a reason your parents warned you not wander off into the deep dark woods, which is what Finland is covered with.

The best part of the series, for me, came in the last episode. I have been watching these people (the detectives) for ten hours now and I've sort of gotten to know them, but they are characters on a TV screen, how well can you really know a person if all you see is a projected image? But you watch them long enough, and some of that personality starts to come through, and for me, I really got a feeling of knowing a couple of the lead characters in this, the final episode, and that was pretty cool.

Update November 2017. Map of locations.

Blend into the Arctic night

Arctic Glass Igloos Rovaniemi, Finland

Close to the Arctic Circle, next to SnowHotel you will find the tranquillity of the glass igloos. Staying overnight in a glass igloo feels like sleeping in the open, but inside the igloo it is just as warm and cosy as a hotel. The igloo village is set in an opening surrounded by pine trees, sufficiently far away from the city lights, making ideal conditions for watching the Northern Lights and enjoying starry skies. Have a good night’s sleep as the Aurora Alarm searches the skies for you: once the Aurora Alarm has woken you up, all you need to do is open your eyes, look at the night sky and enjoy the sight from the comfort of your bed. - Arctic SnowHotel and Glass Igloos

Post-Glacial Rebound

What we have here is a promotional video for a shipboard automatic mortar. Main difference between a mortar and a cannon is that the mortar barrel has a smooth bore, not a rifled one like cannons. Of course, our main battle tank the M1 Abrams is also a smooth bore, but that's on of account of it being such a bad-ass it don't need no steenking rifling. Mortars shoot shells with fins and at much lower velocity than a cannon. Cannons have more range. They are good for killing people and blowing things up in the next town. Mortars are for destroying the enemy who is just over the next hill.
   So this thing can basically be used at low elevation like a tank for close in stuff, or elevated for over the hill stuff like a conventional mortar. They show this gun holding its heading while the boat goes through some gyrations, but you'll note that the water is smooth as glass. I wonder how well it would do when the water it gets a little rough.
    Anyway, there was some discussion of where a boat like this might be useful, and AngryFinn mentions that it could be really useful in Finland if the Russkies ever come calling because

The Finnish Archipelago Sea is the Europe's largest archipelago area, and it has the largest amount of islands (40 000) in a one island group in the world.

Google Maps has changed and I haven't figured out how to embed a map, so we have a screen shot and a link. Map is about 200 miles across.

 I've noticed that there were a bunch of islands in this area before, but I didn't realize there were 40,000 of the dang things, and there are going to be more or less in the future:

The islands began emerging from the sea shortly after the last ice age. Due to the post-glacial rebound the process is still going on, with new skerries and islands being slowly created and old ones enlarged or merged. The current rate of rebound is between 4 and 10 millimetres a year.

So in ten years these rocks are going to be 2 to 4 inches higher. In a hundred years, assuming this rate doesn't change, and I doubt that it will, we're talking ice-age time-frames here. In a hundred years they are going to be two to four feet higher out of the water. Unless global warming catches on.

Aker Arctic’s ARC100HD – A Powerful, and Unusual Icebreaker

BY ROB ALMEIDA ON MAY 9, 2013

Aker Arctic’s ARC100HD Icebreaker

At first glance, very little about this new icebreaker looks right.  The port side shares almost nothing in common with the starboard side and even the bridge doesn’t appear to be facing the right direction.

Image: Rob Almeida/gCaptain

This was a very deliberate design consideration by the naval architects at Aker Arctic however, one that gives the ARC100 some very unique abilities while operating in first-year arctic ice.

Every other icebreaker in the world accomplishes its job while moving forward or astern, except for the ARC100.  This new icebreaker is able to operate as an icebreaker in any direction, and as the diagram below shows, use this to its advantage by increasing its virtual beam to create channels in the ice for ships with wider beams.

The ARC100HD has also been through a plethora of model tests at Aker Arctic’s facility in Helsinki, Finland which have demonstrated the vessel’s ability to break through 1.5m thick ice when moving ahead and astern at 5 knots (2 knots through 2m thick ice). In the oblique mode, the vessel will be able to cut a 50m wide channel through 1.5m thick ice.

In addition this vessel will also be outfitted with features that provide advanced oil response capabilities in an arctic environment. As the image below shows, the vessel deploys a boom arm and uses the full length of the hull to funnel oil to the on board collector tanks for oil separation.  This system allows oil recovery in heavy seas.

Vessel Particulars:

• Length over all: 98.0 m
• Breadth over all: 26.0 m
• Draught maximum: 8.5 m
• Bollard pull: 190 tons
• Main engine power: 2 x 8000 kW
 + 2 x 4000 kW = 24000 kW
• Accommodation: 40
• Deadweight max: 3200 tons
• Fuel oil: 2500 m3
• Recovered oil: 1500 m3
• Fresh water: 250 m3
• Urea: 250 m3
• Operation range: 10000 NM

Excerpted from gCaptain. It is certainly an unusual boat. I like the way they list the fuel capacity in useful units. This boat could probably do something useful with a cubic meter of fuel oil, like travel 4 miles. A gallon probably wouldn't even get it up to operating temperature. But why do we have a tank for urea, unless this a euphemism for sewage.

Update July 2020 replaced pictures that disappeared when Blogger 'fixed' some broken html code.

Russian-built aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya ready to sail, finally

It is without doubt the largest warship ever to be operated by the Indian Navy. But if there is a record for the longest time spent by an Indian warship in a shipyard, the INS Vikramaditya would hold that too. After a long a painful process of renegotiations, price escalations and delays, India's new aircraft carrier finally seems to be on its way home. 
The refurbished ship — it was originally the Gorshkov, launched in 1982 — is currently undergoing an exhaustive series of trials in the Barents Sea to test its weapon systems, flight operations, propulsion and communications. 
If things go well — they did not last year when its steam boilers malfunctioned during what were then considered to be final tests — the warship will be ready for handing over to the Indian Navy on November 15, after which it begins its long journey to India for the formal commissioning. This, nine years after the order was placed in 2004. 
Its designers and refurbishing engineers are confident that it will exceed expectations during the trials, with the head of the Sevmash shipyard — where it underwent the refit — going as far to say that it will achieve a top speed of 30 knots, against the required 28. - From a a very entertaining story by Manu Pubby in The Indian Express.

The Barents Sea is part of the Arctic Ocean, North of Finland and Norway.

75 photos illustrating the conversion from cruiser to carrier

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

Best movie of the year! Or maybe just the wackiest. Eight year old boy Pietari lives with his father in the boonies of Northern Finland where snowmobiles are standard transportation and everyone carries a rifle everywhere they go. Even Pietari, who carries drags his Teddy Bear around with him carries a double barrel shotgun slung across his back. Mom is gone, no explanation give. There are no women in the movie at all.

All those tales about Santa Claus you heard when you were growning up? They're all lies! The real Santa was more concerned with bad little boys and girls, for they became his Christmas dinner. Fortunately for us, the Laplanders trapped him in a block of ice where he has been frozen for a thousand years. But now some wise-ass Americans are determined to dig him up. It's just the best.

IMDB page
Movie page 1
Movie page 2
In Finish with subtitles.

Bonus: Cool movie company logo.