DIY: crypto mining

In the world of money, there's virtual currency, digital currency, and cryptocurrency.  These currencies overlap at times.  In cryptocurrency the most popular software-based payment systems right now are Bitcoin and Litecoin.

What caught my attention about crypto was a report of a shortage of AMD video cards due to cryptomining in Litecoin.  Here's some information on the reason for the shortage, "Massive surge in Litecoin mining leads to graphics card shortage."

You may well ask why a newly-released, discrete video card is needed for cryptomining.  In December, 2013, the CoinDesk reported:

Bitcoin mining on a standard GPU is a thing of the past. Put simply: it’s no longer economically viable, given the power consumption of discrete graphics cards and their relatively high price.

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Litecoin hash (1 month), CoinDesk

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Note that hashrate is directly related to profit. The difficulty reported in the graph above is due to investors/miners competing for coins.  As you know, a fundamental tenet of economics is the greater the demand, the higher the price. The CoinDesk explains "How Bitcoin Mining Works." CoinWarz has a nice online mining and profit calculator.

You can make your own mining rig.  Jason Evangelho at Forbes offers "Litecoin 101: How To Build Your Own Mining Rigs." CryptoBadger describes setting up a Linux rig. There are detailed instructions at Crypto Rigs.

If you just don't want to get into making all these parts work together, you can buy a custom-made at Xidax that looks pretty impressive.

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Cryptocurrency mining rigs, Xidax

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Options for software are posted on the Litecoin Wiki. To see how involved people can get with their rigs, take a look at "Insane Crypto-Currency Mining Rigs."

-- Marge

Cartoons: the genie out of the bottle

Gary Varvel, The Week

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The news this week may appear to be about Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, losing the Virginia primary to a Tea Party candidate, but it's really about what voters will tolerate.  In the Washington Post's Opinion Section E.J. Dionne says:

We’ll never know whether Cantor would have done better if he had held steady on the subject [of immigration reform]. What we do know is that sending out campaign literature bragging about a news story that declared him “the No. 1 guy standing between the American people and immigration reform” did nothing to placate or persuade those who were out to defeat him.

Dionne's article is an excellent look at Republicans, the Tea Party, and the effectiveness of Republican attack ads, presumably backed by Big Money Republicans.

I don't know about you, but to me the Tea Party has become scary. They seemed innocent enough when they started out and their goals looked good, then they shut down the U.S. government and gloated about it.

At least the cartoonists can still evoke a laugh.

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Adam Zyglis, The Week

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Steve Sack, The Week

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Michael Ramirez, US News

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R J Matson, The Week

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Interesting that in this last cartoon Google takes on the role of Supreme Manipulator.

-- Marge

DIY: Mother's Day

Well, I started out with the idea of showing some fun projects for making Mother's Day gifts.  After pages of cheesy fur-like necklaces and tin cans punched with holes and planted with who-knows-what, I began to ask what moms really want for Mother's Day.  Here's what I found.

At Huffington Post (2013) there's this graph, first published at Rants from Mommyland.

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As you know, Mother's Day is a favorite of retailers everywhere.  They would love for you to spend big bucks.  A good example of this is Forbes.  BuzzFeed suggests wine (an idea I like a lot) and alone-time.

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Many of the articles about what Mom really wants for Mother's Day emphasize time off and time alone. Older moms and grandmas, on the other hand, may have all the alone time they wished for in years past.

Looks like it's up to you on this one. 

-- Marge

Cartoons: Who's your master now?

Today's post riffs on the cartoon below and the cartoon below plays on the old RCA logo, which I can't show here because it is subject to copyright.  The subject today is income inequality, a topic addressed here before and will probably be addressed again.  It's important.

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Tim Campbell, The Week

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There is no simple fix for income inequality; numerous articles propose how to fix it, but mostly talk about what's wrong.  An article in The Economist, "Growing apart," looks at some of these effects, such as:

A BARRAGE of new statistics on American living standards offers some grounds for optimism. A typical American household’s income has stopped falling for the first time in five years, and the poverty rate has stopped rising. At last, it seems, the expansion is strong enough at least to stabilise ordinary people’s incomes.

But the main message is a grim one. Most of the growth is going to an extraordinarily small share of the population: 95% of the gains from the recovery have gone to the richest 1% of people, whose share of overall income is once again close to its highest level in a century. The most unequal country in the rich world is thus becoming even more so.

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Drew Sheneman, US News

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From the Economist article:

Inequality can be a symptom of inefficiency. The implicit subsidy provided to banks that governments judge too big to fail allows bankers to overpay themselves. And a highly skewed distribution can lower growth, if it translates into less equality of opportunity for the next generation. This seems to be happening. The gap in test scores between rich and poor children is 30-40% wider than it was 25 years ago: given that the distribution of innate intelligence is unlikely to have shifted so much in a generation, that suggests that rich youngsters are benefiting more than ever from their economic and social advantages. Measures of social mobility between generations, already lower than in much of Europe, have stagnated.

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Pat Bagley, Cagle

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Back to the article in the Economist --

The attack on favours for the wealthy ought to start with the budget. America’s tax code is riddled with distortions that favour the rich, from the loopholes benefiting private equity to the mortgage-interest deduction (an enormous subsidy for those who buy big houses). A simpler, flatter code with no exemptions would be more efficient and more progressive. A blast of deregulation would help, too. Many of America’s most lucrative occupations are shielded by pointlessly restrictive rules (think doctors and lawyers).

Investment in the young should focus on early education. Pre-school is a crucial first step to improving the lot of disadvantaged children, and America is an international laggard. According to the OECD, it ranks only 28th out of 38 leading economies in the proportion of four-year-olds in education. Mr Obama has a plan to push universal pre-school. The details are imperfect, but it is a goal that Republicans should embrace. Equality of outcome will always be a fantasy, but America should do more to spread opportunity widely. A society without hand-ups won’t have much hope.

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Drew Sheneman, US News

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Another way to look at this topic is from the angle of wealth distribution. Dr. Dale Archer, writing in Forbes, asks the intesting question:  "Could America's Wealth Gap Lead To A Revolt?"

If we consider a "master" one who has control over your economic well-being, who's your master? The financial institutions that hold your money?  The government that issues your social security check?  The company that pays you?  Do they owe you a fair chance?

-- Marge

DIY: troop therapy

Despite lack of support from the Veteran's Administration, soldiers returning from war are finding a way to help themselves and each other.  And it's heart-warming to see how they're doing it.  You can find a detailed description of some groups' efforts in an article at Time online (open to the public) by Joe Klein, titled "Can Service Save Us?".

Quoting from Joe's article:

This self-help ethos stands in stark contrast to that of the more traditional military-related charities. Eric Greitens, the founder and CEO of the Mission Continues, is notoriously tough on veterans who come to him with service-related excuses. “People understand the tremendous sacrifices that veterans have made — and they instinctively want to do something for them,” he says. “And that sometimes leads people to give veterans an excuse: Oh, you didn’t show up for work on time. It must be that you have posttraumatic stress disorder. Oh, you’re disabled. Don’t even try. Or, you’re being a bad partner to your husband or wife, or a bad father or mother. It must be that you lost a bunch of friends. We simply do not accept those excuses.” Jake Wood has little tolerance for veterans who see themselves as victims. Posttraumatic stress is, he believes, a condition that can be battled and defeated. “If you’re out doing disaster relief,” Wood says, “you’re less likely to be thinking about yourself and more likely to be thinking about the people you’re helping. You’re also presenting yourself, and other veterans, as a model, as a potential community leader.”

My favorite group of volunteer veterans is Team Rubicon. These guys put muscle and skills where needed.  They helped clean up after Hurricane Sandy, the recent Oklahoma tornado, and other disasters -- as shown in this video.
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The Mission Continues and Team Rubicon are not the only service-oriented groups out there.  There's also All for Good (geared to local needs), ServeNet.org (offering youth opportunities to help and funding for projects), VolunteerMatch  (a portal for matching volunteers with local causes), and Catchafire (a portal for professionals to volunteer their skills).

In case you didn't know there's currently an epidemic of suicides among veterans and active duty military.  Whatever we can do to help diminish these harsh numbers, we must do.

From Forbes comes this thought for the day:

“ The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ”                                        — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

-- Marge

DIY: Wear your brands, make money

In a recent article in Time Magazine, titled "The Human Billboard," writer Roya Wolverson wrote about a relatively new phenomenon -- microcelebrities.  The claim-to-fame of the microcelebrity described below, Jordan Reid, is a fashion/food/home decor blog known as Ramshackle Glam.  Quoting the opening paragraph of Roya's article (you must be a Time subscriber to read the whole article) --

Jordan Reid seems to be having a morning much like any other young mother's in suburban New York. "I'm really sorry, but I'm covered in spilled milk," she says as she steps out of her blue Subaru Outback after having tended to her 18-month-old son. Yet her catalog-ready appearance--Reid is wearing a leather bomber jacket, polka-dot ankle-rolled jeans and pink patent-leather flats under that spilled milk--is a tip that she isn't quite like her fellow moms. On any given day, after dressing and feeding her son, Reid spends an intensely regimented half hour cleansing her face with Moisturizing Facial Wash by Simple, washing her hair with Dove Color Care shampoo and riffling through a wardrobe chock-full of TJ Maxx clothing to compose a boho-chic outfit. She grabs one of her four Timex watches and one of three pairs of Ann Taylor sunglasses and scrambles down the stairs in her sunny three-bedroom home to eat breakfast on her new Noritake china collection (an eclectic mix of the Rochelle Gold, Hertford and Yoshino patterns).

If you're wondering whether this type of blogging is worth the effort, take a look at this second quote from the same article:

For enterprising bloggers, the lure is simple: income that can range from $100,000 a year to hundreds of thousands more. For marketers, the calculus is more complicated. Yes, they can target audiences, and the price is relatively low compared with already cheap online advertisements. And bloggers can offer a more authentic connection to brands for consumers who are weary of varnished sales pitches from Madison Avenue. But companies are also putting their brands in the hands of untested spokespeople and, in some cases, running into controversy about the blogger-sponsor relationship. Leery consumers prefer that bloggers' opinions be independent. Just last month, the Federal Trade Commission introduced tighter regulations for social-media advertising. Though there are clear successes, it's far too early to tell if the approach drives more sales than traditional marketing.

Other bloggers named in the article are Kelley Framel of the Glamourai,

Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes,

and Brit Morin of Brit + Co.

Eric Savitz writes more about Social Media Clout: The Rise of Micro Celebrity Endorsements at Forbes.

So how do you get started?  First, blog well and often about topics that the majority of internet users are interested in.  For ideas take a look at Pinterest, particularly the popular page.  Googling "blog about brands" will yield a good number of resources available.  A number of the sites look like freelancing portals.  One site I checked out -- Bloggers Required -- looks legit.

A word of caution for those who want to sign up for brand blogging at a site offering services -- the internet is full of entrepreneurs that will return little substance for your money.  When you find a site that seems to be what you're looking for, check it out before you sign up.  The service should be free for the blogger/freelancer.  Take time to read the terms of service; you are, after all, contracting with this company.  And keep in mind that many people want to make money freelancing -- be prepared to compete for assignments. 

-- Marge

DIY: print a plastic pistol

Since everyone is talking about this gun, a true do-it-yourself project, here's my two-cents.  As Forbes says "3D-Printed Gun Fires a New 'Shot Heard 'Round The World'."  Defense Distributed did it, as shown in this video:

The Verge notes that "Lawmakers rush to ban 3D-printed guns, but enforcement options are murky."  This article from TheGuardian gives some background on Cody Wilson, head of Defense Distributed (DD).

Photos of the gun, called the Liberator, and replicas can be found in this Forbes article, "DIY Firearms Makers Are Already Replicating And Remixing The 3D-Printed Gun."  Blueprints for the pistol were published to the internet, but DD took them down in response to a "request" by the Feds (U.S. Department of Defense Trade Controls), according to this article by Policymic.  Before they were removed, the blueprints were "...Downloaded 100,000 Times In Two Days ..."

While the gun can fire only one shot, how accurate is it?  Can you hit what you aim at or does the bullet come to rest somewhere not intended?  Can it explode in your hand(s)? An article in Scientific American discusses some of the factors involved in printing the gun and using a plastic one.

Possibly the do-it-yourself project you choose can be fatal.

-- Marge

DIY publishing

If you google "diy publishing book," it looks like everyone in the world wants to help you do it -- for a fee.  That aside, more and more authors are electing to self-publish.  The story quoted below -- about author Theresa Ragan -- is from an article in Huffington Post and explains why authors choose to self-publish.

 For nineteen years she was mostly a stay-at-home mom raising four children -- all the while penning romance novels. But she got nowhere with a few agents and was turned down over a hundred times by publishers. Although she knew about self-publishing she dismissed it as a vanity club. In 2010, while surfing the web for a job to help pay the bills, she stumbled on an article by a successful self-published author which prompted her to give it a shot ("what do I have to lose?"). She hooked up with CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com and self -published her first book in March 2011 in both paperback and e-book formats. Within the first two months she was stunned by the sale of over two thousand copies -- and the sales continued to rise. To date, she has self-published four romance and two thriller novels with sales exceeding three hundred and fifty thousand copies. Theresa expects to cross the million dollar mark in royalties by March 2013. And the good news doesn't stop there. Several top-line publishers are pursuing her.Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's "traditional" mystery and thriller line, will now republish her two thrillers. In my interview with Theresa Ragan on August 21, 2012, she said that prior to venturing into self-publishing, "I would have gratefully signed with any traditional publisher with no advance and a six percent royalty." Lucky for Theresa that all the publishers passed on her.

This article in Forbes reports on the first self-published no.1 best seller, Wait for You by J. Lynn.  It also gives some pointers on how to sell your book successfully, that is, make money at it.

Many of the guides available about self-publishing cost -- sometimes in the hundreds of dollars.  But you can find good information for free on all aspects of writing at Authonomy.  It's interesting to note that Amazon's CreateSpace offers all the information on self-publishing.  Nook has also entered the market for self-publishing e-books with NOOK Press.

An intriguing and informative approach to writing could be something like Wattpad, where you can "Discover a World of Unlimited Stories."  At this site you can --

Find your audience on Wattpad! Write one chapter at a time, or share your full novel. Introduce us to great characters; explore new genres, entertain us and make us laugh... or cry.

Similar sites are Figment, WritersCafe,  weBook, and FictionPress.

-- Marge