Archived News starting from 02-20-2014 and earlier
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With my Lumia 928
approaching it's 9 month birthday, and the long rumored
Lumia Icon finally launching, it was of course time to spend my $500 work anniversary gift card
on an unsubsidized phone purchase. Aside from the Snapdragon 800 chipset upgrade, which
blows away the S4 on the 928, I get
twice the RAM, twice the resolution (720p vs 1080p) and an extra half-inch of screen size. Amazingly, it does all this weighing only 4 grams more, with all dimensions within 2-3mm of the 928.
Sadly, I lose the Xenon flash and glance feature from the 928, the latter of which baffles me, and I hope it will be added back in at some point in the future. I'm glad this 5" moderate beast
came to Verizon instead of the
6" 1520 gigantor AT&T got, I just wish Verizon would get on board with external storage like AT&T seems to
be happy to approve for devices on their network.
My Bitcoin madness reached a new level this week with the purchase of a
second ASICMiner cube.
This time I only paid $315, bringing me up to a total of $700 investment and 80 GHash/s that has thus far only netted $56 since
Jan 22nd.
Two of these miners quickly heated up my server room, then larger family room before I decided on their
final setup in the hallway between
my basement and garage. Here they can run overclocked with the fans on low, constantly sucking 700w of power.
This translates into 16.8 kWh a day rated @ ~ 7¢/kWh, so $1.18 / day I need to make just to break even. Not satisfied with Bitcoin, I decided to add Litecoin and Dogecoin mining as well.
These use the Scrypt hashing algorithm rather than Bitcoins SHA-256 and as of yet there is no specialized hardware for it, meaning
my two nVidia GPUs
had a shot at making some Litecoin. It also meant I could buy a cheap video card for work and
take advantage of free electricity despite the lowly 300w
power supply in that computer limiting me to under 90 Kh/s.
After accepting that nVidia video cards do in fact suck at mining, I found a gently used
Radeon 7970 card with 3 fans for extra kickass and paid a whopping $400 for
the privilige to mine with it. Hopefully the two nVidia cards sell for at least half that, which would put my new hobby at $900. This is close enough to the $1,000 barrier that I'm ending purchases and allowing
the coins to roll in. The impressive 688 KHash/s I was able to get from the new card caused a
GPU tornado in my tiny server room, and
after creating a startup script to auto-mine on power up I
introduced my Bitcoin miners to the new Litecoin/Dogecoin miner. Now at a combined 900w I'm slowly
killing forests of trees all for some numbers that may or may not end up being worth something.
Over 7 years ago, I successfully defeated the comment spambots with a stupidly simple CAPTCHA system.
This proved to be an impenetrable fortress of code against the heavy traffic (and spambots) this website regularly recieves.
Sadly, it looks like that fortress has finally fallen. I doubled the number of images and offset the type in an effort to repair the damage, but it looks like
the integrity of fortress itself has been compromised. Flooded with spambots, I have no choice but to hop in my escape pod and start all over.
I have high hopes for the
industry standard and plan to integrate it shortly.
Less than 2 weeks after my
dabble in bitcoin mining, I've
dropped $389 on a new
ASICMINER Block Erupter that runs a steady 38 GH/s when overclocked. Currently combined with my
4x Antminer U1s, I'm pushing upwards of
45 GH/s which means I won't make back my investment for at least a year, if at all. Add the
additional 288 watts it uses off my web server power supply and I'm in the hole forever. My only hope is for bitcoin value to go through the roof and acivate my retirement plan.
A few weeks ago, the wonderful winter weather of Michigan created a giant pothole I was able to hit hard with my passenger front tire. I stopped to inspect the apparently undamaged wheel and continued on my way. Fast forward to today where my
essentially bald tires once again proved they are completely useless in snow (as the warning in my user manual clearly stated, but I chose to ignore). After
freeing the Focus with some slams from the Fusion, I dropped if off at Belle Tire with instructions to mount the cheapest 235/40-18 tires in the hopes I'll get marginal traction. Turns out, that pothole
left it's mark on my rim, prompting me to buy just one tire and activate the spare for the damaged one. After delivering the damaged wheel to my dealer, it was confirmed the OneCare warranty would not only replace the wheel but also the tire. My mind quickly subtracted the cost of the second tire and plans to keep the spare on throughout winter were finalized. Now I'll have two brand new front tires and acceptable rears for lease turn-in, hopefully preventing any additional charges.
The
10th Anniversary Jan LAN
was today,
and the turnout was about the same as it was 10 years ago. We did manage to play Team Fortress 2 consistently, with very little game fragmentation,
and were introduced to
AirMech which is correctly labelled as a "spiritual successor to
Herzog Zwei."
I of course had to show off my new 4K TV, and we managed to get Battlefield 4 running at the 3840 x 2160 resolution. The rumor that HDMI 1.4 can only handle 30Hz at 4K appears to be true, at least for
the video card we used, but it still looked amazing despite the ~3fps it managed to run at. Lila and Lexi both seemed to enjoy the party, reducing their toddler demands to minimum for the duration of the event.
After viewing tons of BF4 videos using explosives to deliver vehicles halfway across the map, we decided tonight was the night we'd
make our own
such video. We eventually learned M2-SLAMs and tank mines are the most effective, and piled them under the various launch targets. With a 650 meter record, I can say I'm now satisfied with launching
things and ready to get back to killing.
like this.
With
Overstock.com announcing they accept Bitcoin for purchases, I finally decided to wake up and pay attention to this crypto-currency that will take us into the
post-apocalyptic economy. I immediately went home last week and started mining with my 3 year old
GTX 460 video card to yield a 40 MH/s mining speed.
I look back with my now week-old expertise in the mining field and laugh at how silly I was. Mining with GPUs has been over for months, especially with nVidia cards which only n00bs used when it was hip.
The hot new thing in Bitcoin is APU mining, so I quickly secured two
Bitmain Antminer U1 USB miners, putting me $120 in the hole and
an
amazing 4 GH/s rate, which clearly
blew away anything my GPU could hope to achieve. Naturally, I decided to blow another $120 for a total of 4 of these
hyper active hash crunchers, and hope to get the 8 GH/s to over 10 GH/s via my old friend overclocking. At the current difficulty rating, that will be 0.00229235 BTC or $1.78 per day. A horrible
investment, but I choose to hold on to the dream that bitcoin will naturally deflate due to limited availability and the exchange rate will only rise until I'm a bonafide billionaire. Now the delusional
plan is exposed, and when I read this a year from now I'll either be rich or out $240 trying to sell devices for a currency nobody wants anymore.
Lucys
first trip to the North American International Auto Show was today, and she was so excited it was a whole 15 minutes before she fell asleep.
The Senator and family also joined us for a double-family NAIAS outing, featuring Lexi and Lila holding hands for the majority of the event to make it harder to kidnap them.
While I already own the best car at the event (Focus ST) it was fun to look at all the loser cars trying to pretend they even came close. I did make a stop at the Lexus LFA to
honor it's multiplayer prowess in Forza Motorsport 5, but was disappointed when the rep informed me it wasn't really able to bounce cars into the ditch like it does so well in the game.
We hit the traditional stops, including the basement which was void of the typical electric car test driving leaving a sad empty space with a few parade items that somehow fit into new car purchases.
The toddlers survived a surprising 2 hours, which was more than enough time to see everything, so we were able to escape before the level 6 tantrums hit.
With the release of
Basemark OS II for Windows Phone,
a true cross-platform fanboy brag tool finally exists. I immediately
rated my Lumia 928 only to have it crushed
by the Senators
iPhone 5 and Myrns
iPhone 5S.
Fortunately someone already
posted a video of the Nexus 5 crushing both the iPhone 5 and my once yearned for Lumia 1520 so I had something
to throw back in their faces. My use of the word "crush" and "crushing" are of course appropriate because even 1 point of difference is enough to warrant a fanboy escalation (and I can always fall back on
"that isn't a perfect run, x factor was slowing it down!"
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