There are a few outdoor ranges around Edinburgh but they focus on clay shooting and shotguns. I think there are one or two rifle ranges in town but they only accept students.
The one I went to is indoors, although not a tunnel but a Nissen hut [1].
I think it depends on the discipline, NSRA .22 in the post uses the outermost edge, but ISSF (Olympic rifle/pistol, for example) uses the innermost edge.
Isn't .22 a bit small for deer? I don't know anything though, so this isn't an informed objection just a question. Or were you just learning fundamentals of shooting before trying a bigger caliber?
Aye, I think most people use something like .243 for stalking, but the closest range was indoors, so I didn’t have much choice.
My goal was to get a deer stalking certificate (e.g DSC1), which includes a shooting test: 2 chest shots at 100m from prone, 2 chest shots at 70m from standing/kneeling/sitting, and 2 head shots from 10-20m standing (they use cardboard deer targets, so not far from training at a range).
Counting rings is easy indeed, but scoring borderline shots without a scoring gauge is not, because the visible bullet hole is often smaller than the bullet itself.
But why would he care about this millimeter precision? His objective is not to participate in the Olympics but to shoot deer. He wants to improve general shooting abilities, not sub-millimeter accuracy. If he now and then counts a ring wrong, then what's the problem? That's what I don't get.
There are multiple mentions of him being motivated by wanting to shoot deer for meat. It is a through line via the article.
> The article is about someone in Scotland who took up marksmanship as a hobby.
I wish it were so. With a bit more self awareness the author could have said “initially picked up a rifle to learn to hunt deer, but doing so i learned how targets are scored and become interested in automating that process.” There is nothing wrong with that. But pretending that someone is doing all this coding to get better charcuterie is where it becomes frustrating yak shaving.
The guy is clearly an obsessive hyper-perfectionist- he's telling (or boasting) of taking a culinary obsession from reproducing fine-dining dishes (when most people are content mastering a few decent recipes) to building automates curing chambers and butchering whole animals. It's kind of obvious that this personality leads from any random objective to into the deepest of the rabbit holes where everything is studied and annotated with the utmost precision. Funny as a clinical case, not sure I'd like to be around someone like this though :)
Point is that sub-millimeter precision when measuring rings is doing absolutely nothing to further his shooting skills to take down a tasty deer. To the contrary. Time is limited, and every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting. In other words, this may well have made him a worse shooter than he could have been. Nothing wrong with it, but let's call it for what it is.
A perfectionist defines a goal and then finds the perfect path to get there. He was just giving in to distractions and "perfectionist" is the wrong label.
It's not about submillimetre precision (OP here), it's about knowing if you can shoot well. The most common deer stalking certification in the UK (DSC1) involves three shooting tests from 20, 70, and 100m - if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.
> every minute spent perfecting this automation was not spent improving shooting skills by, you know, shooting
I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours.
> if I don't care about 8/10 vs 9/10 shots from 25 yards, there is no way I am putting a shot within a 4" circle from 100 metres.
Totally with you there. Though isn't what counts in the end how close you were to the center? If you look with your eyes and it looks like it was in the 3rd ring, what does it matter whether it "technically" wasn't because half a millimeter was in the next ring? It was surely much better shot than fully in the next one, unless you actually want to go to the olympics or are otherwise competing in the sport.
Don't get me wrong, I totally respect the challenge of automating the counting but that this actually helped your progress still seems doubtful to me.
> I mention in the post that I had access to the range only 1-2 evenings a week, so there was no way I could improve my skills outside of these few hours
Ok, fair. Though we can surely agree that even though the automation-building that you did during all this extra time improved your skills, it was coding skills rather than shooting skills? (Which, again, is fantastic!)
Maybe it’s just that I identify so strongly with the author in that way, then - I saw that, but didn’t see it as a rationale for the rest of the article. It was just “here’s the path that led to my picking up marksmanship as an interest”.
No, that's fair (OP here) - I went to the range to learn how to hold the rifle in the first place, but indoor shooting with .22 from 25 yards in a stiff shooting jacket is as far from shooting a deer with .243 as it gets, so I stayed for the fun of it and the community around it.
I would definitely get to the point of stalking deer faster if I were to book a few 1-1 sessions at an outdoor range instead, but "faster" was never the point.
On that note, the easiest way to get your hands on some protease is to buy digestive enzymes sold as food supplements (most often they're made out of dried pork pancreas).
You also don't need much equipment: scales and an immersion circulator should do the trick.
Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and fix iOS and Vision Pro apps from medical devices and high-traffic consumer apps to vibecoded startups struggling to pass App Store reviews.
Senior iOS engineer / consultant (12+ years). I build and rescue iOS and Vision Pro apps that have to work: medical devices, high-traffic consumer apps, and anything where your previous freelancer said “not possible”.
I am usually brought in for the awkward parts: background reliability, performance/crash triage, architecture refactors, and migrations (SwiftUI, TCA, Swift Concurrency).
Available for MVP builds, agency oversight, joining your team for a sprint or three, and due diligence (I read the codebase and tell you what’s solid, what’s duct tape, and what it’ll take to fix).
Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.
But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.
Hi OP! I’ll share what I mentioned below in hopes of a response from you directly, because I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think:
Seems like people should be of whatever age we consider mature before they start capturing intimate data about themselves on random platforms. If we don’t think you’re able to understand the risks of pursuing your reproductive impulses, do we think you can measure the risks of sharing data about those impulses on a platform you don’t control?
Local data or not, if I were the steward of a marketplace I’d use that position to create this kind of teaching moment for pre-developed consumers. If young people had been warned since the mid 2000s of how much of their intimacy they were handing over to Meta, ByteDance, etc. before they started, the world would certainly be better off.
Hey! I don’t disagree that people of any age should think twice before putting personal data (intimate or not) into any platform.
My point wasn’t about lowering the age rating. The issue is that Apple doesn’t have a real category for this kind of wellbeing at all. The age gate itself is sensible, but what’s funny is why it exists. It’s not "because we carefully considered how to protect teens’ data", it’s "because in 2009 the Store was drowning in farting apps, and we’ve been patching around that ever since."
Urm, did you read a different article then the one linked?
Because there's isn't really an argument innit - at least none that I took notice of. Isn't it just exploring the reasons why it is like it is today? They even made it abundantly clear in the beginning (and in the comments here) that the rating is fine for the app
And for what conceivable reason would this need to have sure underage people aren't using it?
A period tracker has relevance in the context of a sexual relationship, but there is really nothing about it that needs to be censored from underage people. It is not explicit content. It's a specialized journal, that's it
I bet that the ratings are dictated not by usability but by liability.
Yes, people younger than 18 engage in sex, but this has different legal consequences than for people past 18, and Apple has no interest to wade through that legal quagmire.
> Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
I would imagine that the confusion arose because they read past that sentence. You wrote that you don’t mind that the app you specifically made for adults to use got the rating that it did and then sort of talk about how you don’t find the rating system to be rational.
I couldn’t tell if the subject of this article is “I think my intimacy tracking app shouldn’t have an adult rating because a user could use it for general wellbeing” or “I don’t like Fortnite”
That’s fair feedback, thank you. The point I was trying to make wasn’t "my app deserves a lower rating", it was "I built something for adults and realised there isn’t actually a correct category for it at all."
Once I noticed that gap, I went digging into the history to understand why the App Store age ratings and categories are the way they are, hence this archeological detour of a post.
The one I went to is indoors, although not a tunnel but a Nissen hut [1].
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut
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