Been busy hustling around with projects, SLW, and TLG. It got up to 46* today, so I took Pebbles the Wonder Dog out for a stroll. She hasn't been out of the backyard in several weeks (hey, she's got a quarter acre to roam!), and was most anxious to re-sniff every inch of the path we take.
The tree carving project is completed, but that part of the yard is a mud pit, so I'll have to wait until things either dry out or freeze solid again so I can get out there and take some decent pix.
Spent all day playing with TLG, except for his nap time, and we had a ball doing Guy Stuff, like taking most of his Green Army Men, and cordoning off "The Blob" so we could get it back in it's container. The part of The Blob was played by today's guest star, Color Changing Green Slime. After dinner we played "Captain Hook and The Pirates", a free-form game made up as you go along.
"Arrrrrrgh, Matey! Heave To Whilst We Board Your Scurvy Vessel" was heard more than once, along with "Shiver Me Timbers", and "Walk The Plank Ye Scurvy Dog".
Great fun for all.
I even managed to get ten items listed on eBay. Several of them were posted as "Buy-It-Now" with what I thought were fair prices, and they sold within hours.
Think I'll get some Dogecoin with the eBay sales proceeds....
To The Moon!
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Thanks for the update, DRJIM. You appear to have everything under control.
ReplyDeleteJust haven't felt like blogging much the last couple of weeks. I have the dilemma that if I stop and photograph the work-in-progress, it slows me down. But if I don't photograph things, I have little to "write" about.
DeleteDecisions, decisions....
Glad y'all came through it okay! And grands are fun!!!
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't a big deal here. We didn't get much snow, and while it was cold, it was something we're used to.
DeleteGood to see y'all are getting thawed out down Texas way.
Good luck with those dogecoin investments, Doc. I still can't get my hands around the value of that crypto currency. Is it real or not?
ReplyDeleteEven though Warren Buffet is a liberal Democrat, he knows his investments, and has dubbed Bitcoin as 'rat poison on steroids.' Like the tulip bubble back in the 15th century, this stuff certainly looks a lot like it. The tulip thing, that is, not rat poison.
I'll just watch from the sidelines as millions are made, or millions of tears cried.
Good questions, Fredd. It's all just bits, but the bits represent work processed, and people assign a value to them.
DeleteAnd I was actually pondering the Tulip Question last night myself.
Considering the dogecoin "value" is running well under ten cents at this time, buying $100 worth gets one a couple of thousand "coins". I think "tokens" may be a more apt word than "coins", though.
My Doge Core program is 85% synchronized with the network, and we'll see what happens after it's all set up.
I don't understand the whole cryptocurrency. Learning would involve "reading instructions". Track record? Lived in Seattle 18 years while the whole coffee thing started. Wrote it off as a passing fad.
ReplyDeleteIf you're "mining" a cryptocurrency, you can kind of think of it as getting "paid" for solving mathematical puzzles. You get paid with "tokens", or of you don't want to help generate the tokens, you can just buy them.
DeleteFredd compared it to the Tuilp Mania in Holland some centuries ago. Or I suppose you could compare it to the Beanie baby craze some time back.
Got a question that doesn't address crpytocurrency or tulips... Don't understand them, stocks too and don't want nothing to do with them. My question DrJim, what is teh best SW receiver to buy with a moderate price? No fancy digital do dads, just a simple analog tuner and analog switches that I can put up an antenna and just listen to other places and broadcast on a snowy cold Idaho winter?
ReplyDeleteAlso 12v if there is a beats, so as I can take it with me in my travel trailer as I sojourn on roads the least traveled....
ReplyDeleteBeasts, not beats, ain't into disco....
DeleteWELL......If you want an "analog" radio with an analog dial (slide-rule, or circular?) you'll have to find an older one, like a Drake, Hallicrafters, Heathkit, or Hammerlund. They can be small size, like a Drake, or big size, like a Hammerlund. And most of them will be vacuum tube radios, so no 12 Volt operation unless you use a small inverter to make 120VAC from your 12 Volt source.
DeleteEverything new that's reasonably priced has a digital readout. They still have a manual tuning knob, but you can also use direct entry to tune to a specific frequency, and they all operate on batteries, or a 12 Volt source.
I like the TecSun 660 and 880 radios for a small, portable radio. The small Grundig "G3" is also pretty good, and I use one sitting outside to listen to Shortwave.
Digital readouts are fine, that I can use and tuning to a specific freq has it's advantages, I was lamenting the current mania for digital readouts like for cars and trucks and cell phones with the swipe and multi-function screens where the screen goes out, you have a boat anchor
DeleteOh, no, nothing like "screens" in the SW radio biz. Some of the very high-end transceivers are starting to use touchscreens, but those are $4,000 radios!
DeleteThis is the TecSun Pl-660:
https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/portable/2540.html
This is the Pl-880:
https://www.tecsunradios.com.au/store/product/tecsun-pl880-radio/
This is the Grundig G3:
https://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/portable/4033.html
Some of these are listed as "discontinued" on some websites, but you can generally find NOS radios on eBay and Amazon.
Sounds like a good day!
ReplyDeleteBut out of interest, what's the mining profit on a solo rig v. electricity costs? I know that some people do very well out it, but I don't know the detail.
Also, I'm not sure if the tulip thing applies here because the crypto market seems to be long term and's experienced a steady rise over a decade. The tulips pumped and dumped in a far shorter span. Hmmmm.
Saying that, Doge, the popular Peoples Coin, has had a spectacular rise since January and's retrenched by a couple of cents as of now. Let's see that dog jump up again. But here's the thing, at this moment it's only a few cents -- affordable (Peoples Crypto) and if the pup plays dead, so what? You've lost nothing until you sell and if you do, unwisely imo, you've lost a few pizzas. So.
Anyway, forgive the ramble. Good luck with that mine.
To the MOON!
If you have a high-end, dedicated mining rig you can mine the coins far faster than a PC with a powerful video card. Since modern graphics are extremely mathematically based operations, some smart people have written "helper" programs to allow high-end video cards to off-load the extensive calculations from the CPU to the GPU in the video card since it can process the equations used in mining many, many times faster. Dedicated mining rigs are purpose-built machines using ASIC's (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and FPGA's (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), which are "hard wired" and "hard coded" to do ONLY the types of calculations required to mine the coins. They don't even look like a PC, and you can't use one for a PC. They run around $1500~$2000, about what you'd put into a "Killer PC".
DeleteI don't intend to do either, but will let this PC chug along during the day, and if I find a few coins, that's cool.
Electricity cost is highly variable, depending on where you live. If I lived in the Desert, with LOTS of sunshine, I could see putting some panels up, building a small battery bank, getting an inverter, and do mining for just the cost of the hardware.....
So this mining, how goes this/ Is it too long for a tutorial? You use your computer and hows does that mine? Does it interfere with normal 'puter use?
DeleteBillB said...
ReplyDeleteGlad it is getting warmer there drjim. Down here is now spring again.
I have never fully understood cryptocurrency and mining it. If you have a handle on it maybe a post exclusively on it.
@BillB & Cederq -
ReplyDeleteI'm NOT an expert on this stuff. It involves highly advanced mathematical cryptographic calculations used to solve equations, and that stuff id waaay beyond what I know.
The easiest way to think about is that you're doing these calculations to solve a puzzle. When you get a valid solution to the puzzle, you get a reward, a Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereumcoin, or several other "Altcoins".
Decent article here on the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency