Archived News starting from 04-14-2014 and earlier
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Today Windows Phone 8.1
released for developer preview and I immediately upgraded. I was happy to discover The "Siri Killer" assistant Cortana is equally capable in doing text-to-speech as the old system, which is all I previously used. The notification center is yet another new feature I don't really need on account of live tiles, but the central location to find alerts is handy, and the quick toggle buttons at the top are nice for bluetooth/wifi battery savings. Project my screen is so far my favorite new feature, displaying my phone on my projector for mobile games feels excessive, but I'm worth it! The Wi-Fi Sense feature caught me off guard when I connected to a hotel network and it started accepting the agreement. I was convinced Steve had hacked into my phone and was downgrading me to iOS but then the internet connection completed and I remembered it was a feature. Amazingly, the upgrade seems to have
increased the benchmark score significantly.
UPDATE:
Looks like Cortana is a snoop. After granting her access to my email, she told me about
Lisas flight and told me it was
time to leave for a reminder I setup.
With temperatures peeking above 30° today, I decided it was time to finally swap my Focus spare tire for the
newly repaired wheel.
I also took the opportunity to scan the OBDII check engine light which had been lit for the last 3 days. It turned out to be a
misfire, but since it only
reported one I took the chance and cleared it hoping it's only bad gas. The proper tire location also cleared the "tire pressure sensor malfunction" giving me a warning light free dash. To celebrate,
a full car wash was completed, including the now safely tucked away spare tire.
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.
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