Google AdSense: All Hail Our Digital Overlords

Welcome to the new, advertisement free blogs of yours truly. Apparently, I have violated Google's AdSense policy, and as such, my AdSense account has been disabled. The specific reason(s) for my account being disabled are not known, because such things are secret. Basically, "we could tell you but then we'd have to kill you." Seriously -- it's almost that bad! Check out the information:

"Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we're unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that might have been involved."

So you don't know why your account was deleted, other than that "something" happened that they deemed in violation of their policy. I have a guess as to what may have happened to me (people on my local IP clicking ads, including perhaps young children -- also potentially frequent refreshing of web pages from my home IP), but what's bothersome is this: if Google, at their sole discretion, deems any clicks or page hits to be invalid, they already remove those clicks and/or hits from your earnings. You don't get paid, you don't get warned, and they still shut down your AdSense account. How does anyone make money (other than Google, naturally) from AdSense!? (Other possibilities: me linking BTC and LTC at the bottom of each post may have been a violation, or perhaps any Amazon Affiliate links -- either could potentially be "cause for concern".)

What bothers me most is the timing of this. I've had an AdSense account for about seven months. During that time, I have not had any violations that I'm aware of (not that they'd tell me, I suppose), and I have basically been using my blog sites in the same way as far as I can tell. Right now, I have "potential earnings" but have not received any actual money as I have not met the minimum payment threshold of $100. Based on my traffic, I should have hit that $100 mark this month, but wouldn't you know it: I violated their policies and now any and all AdSense revenue is gone. Seems like a great way to get out of paying a blogger $100 while still keeping all of the revenue from the actual advertisers!

Nearly 50,000 page views, fought and scrapped for, have all been for naught, at least as far as advertising income goes. Obviously, I'm not doing this blogging for the direct advertising money (I'd be making something like $0.10 per hour I think, if I were to get that $100 AdSense payment). However, the principle of the matter is greatly frustrating. Lately I've been averaging around $20-$30 in revenue per month, which if nothing else is a nice little surprise when you actually get paid. ("Hey honey, let's go out to eat -- my treat!") Barring people actually donating via BTC/LTC, about all that I've gotten out of these blogs is a few nice comments and maybe $5 or so in Amazon Affiliate links. Woohoo! I'm rich! (LTC mining, incidentally, even at the current increased difficulty continues to generate more than $20 in income per day from my computers -- 30X more profitable than AdSense, and thankfully it can't be arbitrarily seized by Google.)

I can also look at my blog traffic (where I don't even include my own visits, as I have the potential to open the site on upwards of a dozen different PCs each day), and from that I can see that at least 75% of all traffic is 100% guaranteed to not be from me (i.e. the traffic comes from the wrong browser -- I never use Internet Explorer, Safari, Android, or iOS, and rarely use Firefox). Of course, the Blogger statistics are also a fair estimate, showing around 200-500 Pageviews every day (and at best only 2% or so would possibly come from me). And any and all YouTube traffic would have been valid -- I don't have time to visit YouTube and watch a video so that I can click on an advertisement, so I only go there when I'm uploading a new video. So most likely, of the blog traffic that actually earned revenue, all of it was legit (since the 2% that wasn't legit was already removed by Google -- I assume if a page hit or click came from my home IP, it didn't count, right?) But, their system has detected some violation, I don't know what exactly, and so I'm out of luck and Google keeps the $90 or whatever that I had almost earned.

Naturally, I have appealed the decision, and I even admit some clicks and refreshes came from my home IP address. (I view my own blogs, duh. So if there's a typo or comment, I'm going to reload a page several times, plus hitting the URL so that I can post it to Facebook. And on occasion, there's an advertisement that is either so bad or in rare instances potentially useful that I've clicked it.) We'll see how the appeal goes, and I'll be sure to report the result here, but I suspect this blog entry alone will be enough to ensure I don't get reinstated. I do love this part of the appeal FAQ: "Once we've reached a decision on your appeal, further appeals may not be considered, and you might not receive any further communication from us." So, they will come to a decision, it will be final, and most likely you'll never hear more from Google again. Nice, guys. Way to take your ball and go home.

Over the many years that I've been in the tech industry, I've heard people express concern about the success of Google -- and their size, data mining, etc. Most of the time someone says, "I wouldn't trust my data to Google..." you'll hear someone else jump to their defense. Well, actions like this in regards to AdSense are part of the reason people don't trust Google. They can do whatever they want, and it's your privilege to serve them. Blogger/Blogspot was one of their many acquisitions, along with DoubleClick and many other companies. People used to be afraid of the size of Microsoft or Intel; these days, I'd say Google and Apple are far scarier propositions!

On the bright side, I won't worry about trying to generate any other revenue through advertising. I suppose there's a chance my AdSense appeal will be heard and those will start showing up again, but it doesn't seem likely. Big Brother was watching, and I got the one strike you're out ruling. Don't bother to try signing up again, as they'll notice that at some point (probably right before you get your first $100 check) -- and if you're related to me, that might be enough for Google to question your account as well!

As for me, I continue to write on the Internet, here and elsewhere. This sort of stuff is nothing new, and as one of the largest and most successful businesses around, Google knows how it's done. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; Google will soon buy out any remaining competition. And I for one welcome our new digital overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground spambot search optimization networks.

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Sapphire: Trying to Deny My $20 Mail-In Rebate

Sapphire, for shame. Your rebate process is a joke, with documentation that doesn't make it clear what you're after. What's more, when someone provides the correct UPC, your rebate department rejects it thanks to your incompetence. This all started with me ordering a bunch of GPUs for Litecoin mining. Sapphire was offering $20 off via rebate, and since their cards were already the cheapest it was a free $20 per GPU discount, right? Wrong. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start with the rebate email. This is what I received from their rebate company:

"Your Rebate was not approved for the following reason(s)
- Original UPC Barcode Label (#840777061794) (Not the shipping label barcode) is missing"

Okay, here's an image from a second card that I ordered, since I'm sure no one can get a rebate from it now. Let's just send this little box to the scrap heap (or recycle bin), shall we?

What's the problem? Well, it appears Sapphire is reusing boxes, so the original UPC on the box is hidden under the new UPC sticker (which they call the "shipping label barcode" in their email). So the UPC I cut out (from a different box, but it has a similar number) says "HD7950 3G DDR5 PCIE" but the rebate people want the code underneath that sticker where you can see the label, "HD7950 3D GDDR5 PCI-E HDMI/DVI-E/DUAL MINI DP WITH BOOST".

The good news is that I called the support number for the rebate, and when they tried to tell me I didn't have a Boost card I argued with them and said, "It most certainly does have Boost -- it's right there on my Newegg order, and the same Newegg page links to the Sapphire rebate form." He checked out the order apparently and then agreed I had the right card and made whatever "changes" were necessary to process my rebate. And it only took 35 days since the time I placed my order. How's that for fast? (/sarcasm)

I guess the real question is: who's to blame on this one? Newegg.com, perhaps -- did they reuse a box somehow, or slap on a new UPC code? Maybe Sapphire is the one slapping new UPC codes on boxes, which would make it rather difficult to actually get a rebate. My feeling is that this is more than just an accidental slip-up, and in fact when I called the support line I could hear a conversation going on in the background:

Support Guy: "Is this that same guy again?"
Support Gal: "No, this is someone different."
Support Guy: "And he's got the exact same problem?"
Support Gal: "It would appear so."
Support Guy: "Okay, let me talk to him...."

There's more to the story of course. I purchased more than one of these cards, on the assumption that I could get the $20 rebate on each card. Oops: it's only one rebate per household! So not only did they try to rip me off for $20, they did so after I purchased five of their cards (actually, eight counting those from a friend -- the Dual-X cards are definitely worth the extra $25 in my opinion). My advice, then, is something I've said many times to people:

Never buy a product because of the mail-in rebate. If you're not willing to pay the asking price, then don't buy it. If you want the product anyway and the rebate is simply a nice bonus, go ahead -- just don't have your heart set on getting that money, because there's a good chance the "paperwork got lost", or "you have the wrong UPC code", or even "sorry, the company the processed our rebates went out of business; we're not the ones that offered the rebate, that was a third party." I've heard all of the above over the years, and others besides. In some instances, there was no communication and the rebate simply never came; any attempts to find someone to call or write about the problem met with no success. The whole mail-in rebate thing feels like a red herring to me; I think I've received rebates about 50% of the time, and it's always about two or three months after the initial purchase.

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Detailed Settings for ~600kHash/sec Litecoin with Radeon 7950

So I have a few Litecoin mining rigs running, and the latest has three Radeon HD 7950 cards in it. I detailed most of the hardware in my previous post, but this time I wanted to provide some clear steps and settings for mining that get close to 600kHash/sec on a single 7950. If you look at a list of scores, for example this list, you might think hitting 600kHash is trivial. Well, I suppose it can be, but don't expect it to happen by just running with the default settings. Here's what I ended up doing to get there.

First, my latest HD 7950 cards are from Sapphire, this time the dual-fan model with a stock clock of 925MHz on the cores. (As far as I can tell, that's the stock clock and not the Boost Clock.) They're available for $300 each, and they come with the Never Settle Reloaded bundle of Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3, and Far Cry: Blood Dragon -- you can typically get close to $50 for the bundle via eBay. As I already have three other Radeon 7950 cards, you'd think I have a decent handle on settings by now, but I'm still tweaking and learning.

My main PC has a single 7950 in it, and I game occasionally on this system. I also use it to surf the web, email, write, etc. If you're not using a PC that's mining Litecoin, you can go for Intensity 20, but for a PC that you're actually trying to use for other things you'll never be able to use it properly with Intensity more than 13. So, I have two folders, with two different CGminer configuration files: one for when I'm not using the PC, and the other for when I'm working. The Intensity 13 version gets about 10-15% less hashing performance, but there's a catch: I'm using practically all of the GPU's 3GB of RAM! With a single thread, I get around 330kHash, but with two threads I'm at 510kHash. Here are the two cgminer.conf files I'm running on my "daily use" PC:

cgminer.conf Usable:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "coinotron.com:3334",
"user" : "[USER].[WORKER]",
"pass" : "[PASS]"
},
{
"url" : "newlc.ozco.in:9332",
"user" : "[USER].[WORKER]",
"pass" : "[PASS]"
}
],

"intensity" : "13",
"vectors" : "1",
"worksize" : "256",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "17920",
"shaders" : "1792",

"gpu-engine" : "900-1025",
"gpu-fan" : "40-100",
"gpu-memclock" : "1550",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"gpu-vddc" : "1.100",
"temp-cutoff" : "99",
"temp-overheat" : "95",
"temp-target" : "80",

"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"failover-only" : true,
"gpu-threads" : "2",

"log" : "5",
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "60",
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",

"scrypt" : true,
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

cgminer.conf High Hashing:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "coinotron.com:3334",
"user" : "[USER].[WORKER]",
"pass" : "[PASS]"
},
{
"url" : "newlc.ozco.in:9332",
"user" : "[USER].[WORKER]",
"pass" : "[PASS]"
}
],

"intensity" : "20",
"vectors" : "1",
"worksize" : "256",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "21712",
"shaders" : "1792",

"gpu-engine" : "900-1025",
"gpu-fan" : "40-100",
"gpu-memclock" : "1550",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"gpu-vddc" : "1.100",
"temp-cutoff" : "99",
"temp-overheat" : "95",
"temp-target" : "80",

"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"failover-only" : true,
"gpu-threads" : "1",

"log" : "5",
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "60",
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",

"scrypt" : true,
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

That might seem like a pretty simple configuration for some, but let me run through some of the specifics. First, the "Usable" configuration has thread-concurrency at 17920. I arrived at that number by trying different values until I could get cgminer to start; I think I'm hitting maximum RAM use perhaps, though maybe I could increase it slightly. Either way, it's not running much faster I don't think so I leave it alone. The second configuration file is basically what you often see recommended for Radeon 7950, but I usually see talk of 650+ kHash, which is only going to happen with some serious overclocking and tuning!

There's more to starting CGminer going than the above, however. First, nearly all of my 7950 cards have default voltages that are far too high to run reliably without water cooling, at least in my ~75F environment. The dual-fan Sapphire cards for instance all come set to 1.250V, but under mining load even at lower intensities I can hit 95C and higher on some of the cards. What's more, three of the cards at 1.250V running slightly overclocked settings consume 1000W and more from the outlet, with an 80 Plus Platinum PSU even. Wow! The trick for me has been undervolting and overclocking, which isn't what you'd immediately expect.

MSI Afterburner is a great little utility for overclocking and undervolting, but it doesn't work with all cards -- the dual-fan Sapphire cards for instance don't allow voltage adjustments with it. Sapphire has their own TRIXX utility that works with their cards, however, so that's what I used. Here are my standard settings for reasonably reliable operation:

Vcore: 1.100V
GPU Clock: 1025MHz
RAM Clock: 1550MHz (6200MHz effective)
PowerTune: +10 (or +20 -- this doesn't seem to matter much)

I've managed to use those settings successfully on six different Radeon HD 7950 cards now, so I'm pretty confident they'll work for most users (at least if you're in a decent climate -- if the room is above 85F, you'll probably have issues). Okay, that gives us the overclock/undervolt settings as well as CGminer settings, so we're done, right? Not quite!

The final step is launching CGminer properly. For that, I created a batch file (a sequence of commands for Windows to run). Since I have CGminer starting up with Windows, I had to play around a bit. MSI Afterburner (or Sapphire TRIXX) is set to load automatically and restore my clocks, but depending on the PC this can take 10-30 seconds before it's complete (more on a slower CPU/HDD). If CGminer launches before the clocks and voltage are set properly, there's a very good chance your PC will crash and require a hard reboot! The other lines are to ensure the thread-concurrency options work properly, and then to tell CGminer to automatically tune fan speed. Here's the batch file (paste this into "LaunchCGminer.bat"):

@echo off
set GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
@ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 30000>nul
cgminer.exe --auto-fan --failover-only


Create a shortcut to that batch file and place it in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and you should be set. But there are a few final items to mention! I have two different CGminer (currently 3.1.0) folders, one for high intensity and one for low intensity. There appears to be a bug with AMD's drivers or CGminer or something, with the result being that if I run CGminer, quit, run it again, quit, etc. then maybe on the third or fourth cycle I usually get a system crash. Ugh. So rebooting between runs is often required. Also, you'll want to close out of most other programs (especially your web browser!) before starting CGminer, as if it can't get enough VRAM it won't run properly. Oddly, after it's started and working well, you can start Firefox, Chrome, etc. without issue. Also also, if you run Photoshop, I suggest just exiting CGminer until you're done -- it's not worth the potential hassle, trust me!

I think that's it for now. Happy Litecoin mining! My latest build is named "Frankenmine" because it's sort of in a disassembled mess right now while I wait for a few more pieces to arrive (specifically the PCIe slot extenders). It's definitely not safe for kids to be around at this point in time! If there's interest, I can provide the cgminer.conf files for this as well, and I have some other stories to relate involving the joys of Linux. But for now, this is what I'm using to get ~1800kHash/sec:

As always, if you find this stuff useful, please feel free to kick a few digital pennies my way!

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Or if donating directly is too much, go play at the LTC4You faucet and typically win 0.04 LTC every hour. That's a free $1.20 for clicking a button and typing a captcha. :-)

Update: Need help? See my Toubeshooting Guide.

Bitcoins and Litecoins: How to Build a Mining Rig

Some of you might think the time is past for building Bitcoin miners, and perhaps you're right. With Avalon talking about open sourcing their ASIC and Butterfly Labs shipping "any day now", we could see a flood of hashing power coming online in the next couple of months. Of course, I suspect the time it will take to actually get a wafer made, cut, and distributed -- and then tested, assembled, and more testing -- is more likely to be another six months, unless the original creator lines up everything so that you just have to order one. In that case, it would probably only take three or four months to get your ASIC from China.

As for Butterfly Labs, the jury is still out on whether they're a scam, an unintentional ponzi, or just highly incompetent with a horrible public relations/customer support staff. I actually emailed them to see if they'd be interested in sending me a unit for review; no response to the email so far, which means they're likely completely understaffed, or they're trying not to let any reputable hardware sites do any coverage. The ponzi aspect is pretty easy to get, though: you offer preorders for an "amazing ASIC" that can hash at 60GH/s while drawing 60W. Eventually, that comes out as 25GH/s at 150W, but demand is so high that instead of fulfilling long-standing orders for the 1500GH/s rigs, you start by shipping a few of your lowest performance solutions (5GH/s).

So far, apparently four units have shipped out, one to a blogger, and naturally that results in a ton of new interest. $274 for a 5GH/s Jalepeno? SIGN ME UP! Except, the current wait time is at least two months according to some sources, and more likely it's two or three times that long -- and that's assuming you ever get the hardware. If I could get a firm deadline, like four months, even now I would be willing to fork over the $1100 or so for four of their Jalepenos. That would net me 20GH/s and use a whopping 120W, which is 4X my current hash rate in about 1/30 the power use, or approximately two orders of magnitude better in efficiency! But they're still unproven, so until I have $1000 around that I can afford to lose, I'm going to hold off.

Which brings me back to building a mining rig. Bitcoin mining with GPUs is still quite profitable. For example, a Radeon HD 7950 can run at about 500MH/s without too much effort, and it will draw about 250W for the system. At the current exchange rate of $137 per BTC, that works out to around $110-$125 per month in BTC with a power cost of around $18 per month. So let's just call it earnings of $100 per month, for a $300 graphics card. Right now, difficulty is increasing about 10% every two weeks, so if pricing stays static you'd make $90 on month two, $80 month three, and after four months you've more than paid for the hardware and as long as the difficulty doesn't get above 60 million or so you should still at least break even -- and in the winter months, you can deduct some of the power cost from your heating bill! :-)

Litecoins are a different story, as ASICs aren't available and may never become available. With a 7950 and a bit of tuning, you can readily get 550kHash/s out of a single 7950. At the current price of roughly $3.80, that works out to $155 per month, or $140 in net income. In less than three months, you could more than pay for a Litecoin mining rig, even in today's pseudo-ASIC Bitcoin landscape. And yes, recently I even put together another Litecoin mining rig for just such a purpose.

Here's what I used and recommend, keeping in mind that you ideally want a motherboard that supports as many GPUs as possible. That rules out AMD's Trinity (FM2) platform, as those motherboards only have two x16 slots as best, and given the price and power considerations I decided Intel was a better choice. There are some big Extended ATX board that support four or more x16 slots, but they're expensive at around $300 minimum, so I figured a solid ATX board was best.

3 x Gigabyte HD 7950 GPUs @ $310 each (the triple fans mean less noise)
3 x PCIe x16 extenders @ $5 each (so you can better separate the GPUs for cooling)
1 x ASUS P8Z77-V Motherboard @ 165 (supports 3 x16 slots and has WiFi)
1 x Kingwin Lazer Platinum 1000W PSU @ $180 (room to spare on power)
1 x Intel Celeron G1620 CPU @ $52 (no need for a fancy CPU)
1 x Mushkin 2x8GB DDR3-1600 RAM @ $98 (you could get 2x4GB, but this gives you room to spare)
1 x ADATA 60GB SSD @ $70 (you could get a slightly cheaper HDD, but you don't need a lot of storage and the SSD is faster booting, cooler running, and generally more desirable)

Now, here's the big question: where to store all the components. I can tell you from experience that having everything in a case just makes for hotter quarters, so if you don't mind going ghetto you can grab a plastic crate and store stuff in there. Otherwise, I'd suggest getting a really inexpensive case that you can dismantle a bit, since you want to spread out the GPUs to provide better cooling opportunities -- the Gigabyte case should work. If you want a "real" case, though, I'd get a full ATX tower, and Silverstone has some good options like the TEK SSI-CEB for $100. What about the OS? Well, get yourself a copy of Windows if you must, or get comfortable with Linux for free. I may see about doing a Linux configuration guide for Litecoin in the near future, once I've gotten familiar with the process, so stay tuned.

Grand Total: $1510
Expected Returns: $500 per month

Note that rate of return could go up or down depending on price and difficulty. I expect it should pay for itself within four months at most. There's more good news as well. The GPUs come with a game code good for three free games, which you can sell on eBay for typically $50 or so each. Second, even if Bitcoin and Litecoin become unprofitable for GPU mining at some point, you still have a very nice system -- well, the CPU is weak so you might want to upgrade to a Core i5-3570K or a Core i7-3770K. You should be able to sell such a system for at least $750, even if you only have one GPU in it -- $1000 would be reasonable with two GPUs.

So mine for as long as it's profitable, make a few upgrades, sell the hardware, and you could easily earn $5000 extra this year. That's my plan at least! And I'd seriously consider saving all of your Bitcoins and/or Litecoins for a while -- I could see Bitcoin hitting $1000 in the next few years, so at 2.5BTC per month, decreasing 10% each month, you'd end up with around 25 BTC by that time. Or if you hold LTC, you could have 1200 LTC by the end of a couple years, possibly more. At that point, sell them for $25 each and pay off all of your debt!

If you find this guide useful, I gladly accept donations:
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Update: Need help? See my Toubeshooting Guide.

TopPower Nano: When Is Gold Not Gold?

Okay, I admit it: I got duped! I was in the market for a good power supply to run my new Litecoin mining PC, so naturally I went to Newegg and searched for "80 Plus Gold" efficiency power supplies. As the PC currently has two high-end Radeon 7950 GPUs running full tilt (and I might add a third), I also wanted at least a 1000W power supply. A quick search at Newegg gets you these results. The TopPower 1000W is currently out of stock, most likely thanks to other unwitting purchasers like myself.

What really amazes me isn't that someone tried this -- it's that they so far have gotten away with it! Well, that or they changed the packaging? Anyway, check this out: TweakTown calls it an 80 Plus Gold, and so does HardOCP. It looks like the front of the box had an "80 Plus Gold" sticker for both reviews, but look at the back of the box (these are my photos, but the above reviews have the same image, more or less):

Okay, so now it gets interesting, right? The box says 80 Plus Bronze, but that's because the box is sort of made for all of the six PSUs in the same family. The front of the box is clearly different (it says 1000W), but that's just a sticker over the original label (most likely 700W). So the question is: is this an 80 Plus Gold or an 80 Plus Bronze?

To answer that, let's turn to the HardOCP review. Oh, what's that? It fails to reach 80 Plus Gold certification levels? Color me not surprised. They pretty much skewer the TopPower, and rightfully so (good job, [H]. It did better over at TweakTown, where it appears to actually meet the requirements. They gave it an award as well, based on the value proposition. So which is it, Bronze or Gold?

Unfortunately, in my book it's neither -- at least in terms of awards. I've read a few other reviews, and I've come to the conclusion that there's a good reason this is the least expensive 1000W "gold" power supply around: it's also one of the worst. Thankfully, even a bad "80 Plus Gold" is usually good enough, but hopefully I don't end up eating my words. You see, a PSU may not seem like a big deal -- it just supplies power, right? -- but if you end up with a PSU failing at some point, it can take out most of the rest of your PC as well.

If I had it to do over, I'd spend more to get a power supply with better reviews and a real 80 Plus Gold efficiency, like this KingWin. In fact, all things considered at that price I would just go whole hog and upgrade to 80 Plus Platinum, which once again lands me with KingWin, this time with the LZP-1000. The Platinum model even gets a JohnnyGuru Recommended award, which is about as good as you'll find.

In the meantime, my Liteminer PC is chugging along merrily at around 1100kHash/s from the combined GPUs. That should get me around 4-5 LTC per day, which works out to a mere $6.75-$8.50. You see, Litecoin (and Bitcoin) just took a tumble on pricing, to about half their former value. Still, with a power use of around 600W for Liteminer, that's about $1.50 per day in electricity, so $5-$7 in profit isn't terrible. It does mean that it might take a few more months to pay off the hardware in Liteminer, at least if I were selling my LTC.

You see, I did that before with BTC; I could have stocked up on roughly 1000BTC if I had just been patient, and that would have been worth more than my house just last week! It might take a while, but we've been here before and I expect BTC and LTC are both here to stay; now, it's only a matter of waiting for the pricing to get high enough! My current MtGox has a standing sell order in for the crazy eights: $888.88. I wonder how long it will take us to get there? I'm hoping before the end of 2014, as that will take care of all my debts and then some. :-)

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LTC: LXpEZcNJtikd263z7Ha3vrdYDcLU7hiKWv

Bitcoin Breaks $100, Litecoin Rising As Well

A little known fact is that I started mining Bitcoins back in June of 2011 -- right around the height of the initial Bitcoin bubble. I had some spare hardware handy, read an article, and decided to give it a shot. After mining a couple coins in a couple days and selling them for over $20 each, I did some math and figured as long as the price stayed above $3 or so and difficulty wasn't too high, I could make a bit of extra money with Bitcoin.

My initial set of hardware allowed me to hit roughly 2000 MHash/sec, which was good for over 1 BTC per day. As the price came crashing down, eventually bottoming out at just under $2, many people quit Bitcoin and so with an improved 2500 Mhash/sec and an electricity cost of about $125 per month for the PCs I was mining with, I started seeing as many as 4-5 BTC mined per day. At $2 I was right around the break even point, and other than a week or two I kept mining. Sadly (for me), I kept selling the coins to pay for power and other bills, and I lost 80 BTC with the Bitcoinica disaster.

Last January, I watched the price go from $3 or so back into the $10+ range and suddenly I was clearly making a profit again. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I sure wish I had hoarded a few coins, because in the past two months BTC went from $20 to the current price of $135! Over the nearly two years I've been toying with Bitcoin, I figure I've mined in the neighborhood of 800 coins (primarily with the Deepbit.net mining pool, if you're wondering). Had I saved those coins rather than selling, I could have paid off all my debt and half of my house today!

So why this post, and why now? With custom ASICs coming online and the mining reward halving late last year, Bitcoin mining is becoming increasingly questionable on GPUs, and CPUs are totally out of the equation. But there are alternate cryptocurrencies, like Litecoin. Due to differences in the cryptography algorithms backing the currencies, ASICs aren't likely to touch Litecoin for a while, and it was designed to actually be more CPU mining friendly. So, now I've decided that while my high-end Bitcoin mining GPUs will continue in that realm for now, I'm going to see about mining some Litecoins with the lower end GPUs as well as my various CPUs.

What does that get me? At the current difficulty, a single quad-core Intel processor will manage somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 KHash/sec. That may not seem like much, but do a quick run over the LitecoinMiningCalculator.com and look at the reward estimates. A single CPU mining at 50 KHash/sec will get you nearly 10 LTC per month. With Litecoin now trading at over $4.00, that's $40 per month of potential income, with one of the worst ways of mining for LTC. (Doing Bitcoin, that same CPU would only manage about 15 MHash/sec, with a potential monthly income of around $5.)

Where does all this take me? First, I've started mining LTC now at around 500 KHash/sec, which means potential earnings of $400 or more per month. Second, my Bitcoin mining is now making me around $1100 per month, and currently rising. So, while I might sell a few coins here and there, my plan is to only sell enough to pay for power if needed, and just keep all the LTC and BTC I mine for the foreseeable future.

I thought a year ago that Bitcoin would never reach $20 again, let alone $50 or $100. Now, with the massive increase in public awareness over the past couple of weeks I'm thinking $1000 might not be all that crazy -- and that's a tame estimate compared to the bulls over on Bitcoin.org forums talking about $10K and more for a single Bitcoin! Meanwhile, I can see Litecoin potentially following a similar path, and even if it remains valued at 1/25 of Bitcoin it's actually currently more profitable to mine LTC with the prices we're seeing.

If you'd like to know more, or if you're a friend who lives nearby and would like to give Litecoin or Bitcoin mining a shot, I'd be happy to build you a potent mining rig. I talked with a friend last night about this and ran some numbers, and I figure $2000 for a system that could mine at around 1500-1600 KHash/sec (or MHash/sec if you do Bitcoin) is entirely possible. I think BTC mining is set to get even more difficult as more people start doing it, plus all the ASICs, so Litecoin looks to be the better long-term proposition. That $2000 PC would end up mining roughly 300LTC in the first month, which would be $1200. In less than two months it would pay for all the high-end hardware inside, at which point everything else is profit! (Bitcoin would be more like $500 per month, and less if/when the difficulty goes up.)

Okay, there's a TON of terms and phrases used above that I didn't bother to explain, but let's end this simply: cryptocurrencies have serious potential to outperform gold and silver, so long as we have the Internet. If you want help setting something up, drop me a note and I'll be happy to provide some input. I'll even accept payment in LTC if you want a "no risk" proposition! My plan is to have well over 1000LTC stored up by the end of the year, and if all goes well at some point down the road I'll have several thousand LTC that are each worth the $135+ Bitcoin is currently valued at.

I missed out on stockpiling BTC because I was too timid, but I'm not going to make the same mistake with LTC! So come join the fun, and if you find this useful then please donate to one of the following addresses:

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W
LTC: LXpEZcNJtikd263z7Ha3vrdYDcLU7hiKWv

Yahoo! Mail Is Garbage

I've been around since the dawn of the Internet -- I remember getting lists of FTP sites back in college and connecting to them so I could download the latest scene demos, games, etc. Before that, I even used dial-up modems and BBS services, including connecting via a Commodore 64 using a 300 baud modem. Ah, good times, watching 40x25 text characters come over line by line. I remember using Netscape Navigator 1.0 (then 2.x, 3.x, 4.x), and I remember when Yahoo! was the search engine. Then things changed, mostly for the better, but some companies just failed to really keep with the times. Yahoo! is one of them as far as I'm concerned, and my latest experience merely confirms the fact.

Given my long and sordid history with the Internet, it's no surprise that I have accounts with practically every major instant messaging service: Yahoo!, Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live, Google, AIM, ICQ, and even Trillian (not to mention Facebook and Twitter accounts, a MySpace account that I haven't used in several years, etc.) Almost all of those accounts come with email, but I currently only use three email addresses regularly: my work email, my Comcast email, and Gmail. My mom unfortunately doesn't like computers much and gets confused every time she's asked to switch to something new/better/different.

When we first got her a PC, she used the rather horrible service Juno. It was free, but it was so problematic that when we finally convinced her to pay for broadband I had to celebrate the demise of her Juno email address. After Juno, she switched to Yahoo! Mail, and sadly things have only been marginally better. They've revamped the interface several times over the years, often slowing things down and always confusing her (she's in her late 70s, so changes don't come easily). Then earlier this year her computer got a virus, which I wrote about here, and that required a good ten or more hours of remote troubleshooting to fix. Now, three months later her Yahoo! account has been compromised; my guess is that virus logged her keystrokes and it just took a while for anyone to get around to trying it out. And this is where we get to today's story.

Things started with an email from my mom to all of her Yahoo! Mail contacts, with the clearly scam subject: "Trouble Trip Help......([Account Name])". Here's what the message said:

Hello,

I'm sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it's because of the situation of things right now.

I’m with family on vacation in Manila Philippines and a lot of crap has been spewing. We got mugged last night in an alley by a gang of thugs on our way back from shopping, one of them had a knife poking my neck for almost two minutes and everything we had on us including my cell phone, credit cards were all stolen,quite honestly it was beyond a dreadful experience for us but looking on the bright side we weren't seriously hurt or injured and we are still alive so that is whats important. I've reported to the cops here and canceled all our cards,it appeared I had acted quickly enough or they almost would have succeeded in cleaning out my bank account. I'm really having some difficulties clearing our hotel bills and also need to pick up a voucher ticket at the counter for us to catch a flight back home in a couple of hours.

I was wondering if you could please loan me (2,000 USD) money pending when we get things straighten out and I promise to refund as soon as we arrive home safely.

Write me back and let me know how soon you can get it to us asap.

Thanks!
[Name]

Yeah, I'll buy that for a dollar.... My sister-in-law was kind enough to help her regain access, which probably took far more effort than it should. She changed the password to the account to something you wouldn't be able to just go out and guess (unless you think a 20 character password with numbers, symbols, and letters is something you could hack?), and my mom got back into her email. Sadly, the hackers were jerks and not only did they send out the "ransom" message but they also deleted all her email, sent mail, and contacts. Ouch!

I had emailed Yahoo! support to see if they could restore her deleted email and contacts, but hadn't received a useful response yet (just a form letter saying I should contact support -- thanks, that's what I did!) That's when things went from bad to worse. Earlier this week, she got locked out of her account again. Going to the web page where you can reset the password, we got the helpful message: "Your password can’t be reset online. For security reasons, you need contact Yahoo! Customer Care to help you reset your password." So I contacted customer care and jumped through some hoops, only to receive this email (I listed my email as the secondary contact):

Hello [Name],

Thank you for contacting Yahoo!.

I have analyzed your message, and it is best addressed by our Yahoo! Accounts team. To protect account security, this team requires specific information about your Yahoo! account that you provided during sign-up or when you last updated your account. I will need to ask you to contact Yahoo! Accounts team directly to provide the necessary information to resolve your issue.

Note: Please do not reply to this message. Submitting an email through the form is the best way to get your answer.
Please visit Yahoo! Privacy Center for information regarding Yahoo!'s Privacy Policy.
Also, please read the help article about registering a Yahoo! ID.
For additional help with Yahoo! products, please visit the Yahoo Help pages.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo!.

Regards,
[Name Withheld]
Yahoo! Customer Care
www.yahoo.com

So basically, I went to Yahoo!'s support page to fill out a form telling them (in some detail) what was going on, and in response they sent me an email telling me I need to go to the same form and submit that for help! And even better, in their email they tell me not to respond as I should go through the form; so I did (again), with additional information and referenced the previous incident number. One day later, I got the SAME. EXACT. RESPONSE. Welcome to the land of recursion, which comes from the root word "recurse"; that means to curse again, obviously, because that's what I've been doing with Yahoo! today.

Turning to Google, I searched for the password reset error and even came up with a phone number for the Yahoo! Verification Department. (The number, if you're wondering, is (866) 850-4303.) I called, I waited on hold for ten minutes (being repeatedly informed of their higher than normal call volume -- but if the call volume is always high, why is it "higher than normal"?), and then I finally got put in contact with a support person.

I explained the situation, I referred to both incident numbers, I explained that my mom is 70+ years old, currently on an airplane, and I'm trying to get the situation resolved so that we can restore her email messages -- which in order to do you need to be logged in to Yahoo! and send a request within 10 days. See where this is going? After explaining several things to the lady, she then told me she needs to speak with the account owner. Being the honest type that I am, I said that I am not the owner but I can answer any necessary questions. "No, I need to speak with the account owner for security purposes." I also asked a very pertinent question: if you lock an account for 24 hours with three successive incorrect login attempts, and if this account has been compromised in the past, what is going to prevent someone from "griefing" the legitimate owner by simply trying three times to log in ever week or so? "I'm sorry, I can't answer that question without speaking to the account owner."

So to recap: Yahoo! automatically locks you out of the account for 24 hours after three incorrect login attempts in a row. The account was compromised and all of the email and contacts were deleted. In order to even try to recover your deleted email and contacts, you have to be logged in, and you have to fill out the appropriate form within 10 days. Anyone that feels the urge can get your account locked by trying to log in with the wrong password. If you go through the Yahoo! Accounts form and request help, they say they can't unlock your account until after 12 hours (or more?), and they apparently can't stop the account from being locked out repeatedly anyway.

This is an actively hostile system, compounded by horrible support with an unwillingness to help. Long story short, I'm now telling my mom that her account is dead unless she can get through to support and deal with their useless support personnel. Whether she can get help or not, I'm also going to tell her to ditch Yahoo! and go with a better service, likely Gmail. I can't say that I like everything that Google does, but after the fiasco of Yahoo!'s "support", it can't possibly get any worse. Oh, and did I mention that my mom has had issues probably at least twice a month where Yahoo! fails to work properly for a couple hours -- server problems most likely. Why would anyone trust these people?

At least I received an auto-response for my incident asking me what I thought of the customer service experience. I detailed my displeasure with their lack of help and concluded with the fitting epitaph to this whole thing: "Thanks...for nothing."

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W

Jury Duty at $10 per Day

So once again, my number came up for jury duty in the great state of Washington. This is probably the fifth time in ten years, and each time they give the same spiel: pay attention, we so appreciate your willingness to be here, and you'll get paid a whopping $10 per day. Never mind the fact that the summons to jury duty is accompanied by the kindly note, "Failure to report for jury duty is a misdemeanor...." Yes, we're all very happy to be there! But it's the $10 per day slap in the face that really irks me.

They explain (as they've likely been doing for over 60 years now) that the $10 per day rate was set back in 1950, at which point it would have been a reasonable pay for a day of work -- at least somewhat close to minimum wage. Back in 1950, the minimum wage was $0.75 per hour, so $10 for a day means they were actually giving you $1.25 per hour (for eight hours), or 67% more than minimum wage. Today, Washington actually has a state minimum wage of $9.75, which means now for a typical eight hour day you're getting paid about 13% of the minimum wage rate. Meanwhile, and this is what really chaps my hide, we have lawyers and judges getting paid $200+ per hour for their time in court.

Is it so hard to see why people hate doing their "civic duty" and serving as a member of a jury? Your work is required to give you a leave of absence, but there's no requirement that they reimburse you -- and mostly it's only the people working for big corporations and the state employees that still get their regular salary. So today, seventeen people showed up for half a day in response to a summons, and the courts paid us a combined total of $170 (I'm assuming that we all got paid -- I'll find out by the middle of April). Sure the state is "bankrupt", but again the courts continue to run and I've never heard any talk of cutting the pay rates of the lawyers and judges. I'm reminded of a quote:

"And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers." That's Jesus Christ talking to the lawyers (scribes and pharisees) who were continually seeking his destruction, and it could easily be said of our system today. I had to hire a divorce attorney at one point; I paid $250 per hour for the case work, and court time was paid at 1.5x the normal rate -- $375 per hour. You'd think that with a $125 per hour increase in cost, most of that should be passed along to the courts so that they can in turn pass along some pay to anyone that is needed by the courts (e.g. jurors), but as far as I can tell it's just a way for lawyers to make more money. Here's another quote:

"For the leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that are led of them are destroyed." That's from Isaiah 9:16, written some 2600 years ago, and I can't help but feel that we still haven't learned the lesson. Nearly every one of our problems that the various legislators are currently "working so diligently to solve" can be laid directly at their feet. All this hand wringing over the so-called fiscal cliff and the posturing and so forth; and why is it that we're at this stage? Because the legislature couldn't properly budget for their needs -- but the same people certainly had no problem voting themselves salary increases, and they had no problem signing huge budgets that couldn't hope to be paid back.

The sad thing is, as corrupt as the system is, I don't see other places doing any better.

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W

Daylight Saving Time -- Why?

I find it rather incomprehensible that in this day and age of technology, we continue to do the stupid Daylight Saving dance twice each year. And by "we", I mostly mean America and Europe -- many of the other countries in the world have come to realize that shifting clocks to generate more "daylight" doesn't actually work. What's more, it's inconvenient at best, causes a bunch of headaches at worst, and while people argue about whether it's good or bad most of it comes down to this: we continue to do it because we've done it for a long time now, and there were several proposals done roughly 100 years ago that suggested we could benefit by changing our clocks ahead in the summer.

Get this (from the DST Wiki): two of the earliest proposals were from a guy that liked doing stuff after work in the summers and so he wanted to shift the clock two hours ahead to accommodate his hobby, and the other guy was an avid golfer that didn't like having a round of golf cut short -- and he was also irritated by all the Londoners sleeping in and missing out on the daylight hours. So basically, the initial idea came from people that wanted later daylight hours in the summer for selfish reasons.

Later, with WWI and WWII, DST use became more common as a way of rationing. You'd get up with the sun and go to bed when it set, more or less. I don't see how changing the clocks really makes much of a difference if you're doing that, but the nanny state says that's what we should do and so we do it.

Actually, I personally don't really mind DST -- I'd just as soon go on DST permanently if I lived on my own. It's the changing of the clocks that irritates me. However, this past week, when we did the "spring ahead an hour" thing, our two boys (ages 1 and 3) surprisingly enough didn't care that the clocks had changed, so they have been staying up "late" and waking up a bit later. They'll get with the program eventually, but while I am more of a night person than a morning person, I find that my children are the opposite (except for my 10-year-old daughter). What's more, getting little children to bed when it's still plenty bright outside can be rather difficult at times. "But daddy, I'm not sleepy and the sun is still up!" "That doesn't matter -- the clock says 8PM so get to bed!" I know from experience that where we can often get our children to bed by 7:30 or 8PM during the winter, once summer rolls around and it's light until 10PM, all bets are off. They still wake up at 6AM though...ugh.

Anyway, this isn't really a "tech" related post, but it was on my mind this week. Today, interestingly, one of my coworkers located in the UK commented on how he now has to modify how he thinks about our time as we've switched to DST but the UK doesn't switch until March 31. How's that for a useful "standard"? Everyone just do your own thing and it will all work out! I'm not sure why we changed our DST dates a few years back, other than "someone" told us it was the best thing to do for the greater good or something.

My bet: some environmental group is still using an old study done 60 or 70 years ago that showed DST cut power use, and anything that cuts power use is good, right? And so they lobby for even more DST, rather than questioning whether DST actually saves any power. More recent studies from around the world have generally shown no power savings (and sometimes even a power use increase), which is what I would expect from the modern world where most people have computers, TVs, lights, refrigerators, AC, etc. running whether or not the clock says it's 10AM or 11AM. But instead, we get social engineering to try and "fix" our lifestyles, which end up costing more time and energy than they save but are declared successful.

It's times like this that I think AZ might be a good place to move -- then I can forget about all the DST silliness and just set my clock once and forget it!

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W

Whither Asimov!?

It probably comes as no surprise, but as a youth I was really into reading science fiction and fantasy books. What's really cool to me as an adult is how many of the things that were super far fetched are now not just common place, but the guesses as to what the future would be like have in some cases been too conservative. On the other hand, there are plenty of things that we still aren't doing, here in good old 2013. What happened to our space odyssey in 2001, Dave? And why didn't we manage to make contact in 2010?  (Okay, technically that second one is from the name of the movie.) Maybe it's all just a government conspiracy that the men in black are hiding from us? But I digress (as usual)....

Today, as with most Fridays since we moved to our new home, I picked up my daughter from school and stopped by the library on the way home. The deal is that she can pick up as many books as she wants, but I get to pick one book that she has to read. I try to pick good books that I think she'll enjoy -- recently I got her The Princess Bride, which she loved (and I need to watch the movie with her still -- she doesn't know about that part). Today, I decided she needed to experience a good science fiction book. So, I turned to one of the classics: Isaac Asimov. I figured I would pick up the first book of the Foundation trilogy (which turned out to be something like seven books I think).

I wandered through the adult sci-fi section and didn't find anything; in fact, Asimov wasn't even there. Hrm. Well, maybe he's over in the sci-fi section? So I went there and looked. Nada...not a single book by Asimov. Okay, he's a classic, right? Maybe all the copies are just out right now; let me go check out the computer and see if I can get a copy sent to the local branch of the Timberland Regional Library. I first looked for Foundation, and while I got a few hits, the only one for Isaac Asimov that showed up was the trilogy; there was one copy of that available, six checked out, and the copy was at a different location. As for the first book, Foundation, I eventually found an entry with the note, "No copies currently available." What!? There was a sound recording available, but that's not actually reading so let's just forget that.

Thinking maybe I was just missing the correct entry, I decided to just to straight to the author, Isaac Asimov. I remember there being a shelf full of Asimov books at the library when I was a youth, and I probably read all of them (at least, the fiction ones -- I never touched his non-fiction writings). Under author Isaac Asimov, some 25 years later, I found a list of 90 books, but about a third of them are sound recordings and there are even some that show up that are from other authors (go figure). Limiting the search to books by Asimov, there are only around 70, with about a third of those being duplicates (e.g. paperback and hardcover, or a digital version).

Can I just say how depressing this is? With a bit of effort, I'm sure I can get most of the Foundation and Robot series books from the library, but many are only available as a digital copy, and there are definitely some that are missing. How about another classic sci-fi writer, Robert A. Heinlein? Total number of books (including duplicate formats) available: 31. I can't tell you how many of his books are missing.

These are classic sci-fi authors; they practically invented the genre! And here we are in 2013 and you can hardly find most of their works at the public library. I'm sad now, and I'm going to go drown my sorrows in sweat by going for a jog. Heh. Wish me luck...and while you're at it, pray for our poor children that are missing out on the classics of sci-fi. :-(

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W