fwaggle.org

So I believe I’ve mentioned the ATI HD5770 I picked up a while back… well it came with a mail in rebate from the manufacturer, which finally came yesterday in the form of a check. Suddenly, a thought crossed my mind: how the heck am I gonna cash this thing?

We don’t actually have a local bank anymore – I’ve looked into our local credit unions, but haven’t found one I particularly like (most want us to carry a balance, something we’re not particularly good at lately) and since we might be heading out to Australia soon it would be of absolutely no benefit to us.

I looked into places to cash ‘em, Walmart wants $3 apparently – for a $25 check, that just seemed a bit steep. The local check cashing place in the next town over, complete with guy behind inch-thick lexan smoking a big fat macanudo cafe, was even more obscene in pricing.

I remembered something about my mother in law’s Chase account allowing you to cash checks with a smart phone, so I went looking at Ally’s website to see if they did it too. Turns out the answer is “kinda”.

They don’t allow you to do it with a smartphone, or a camera at all really – it must be a scanner and they’re very picky about the format it’s in. Apparently it’s a limited trial, and we’re among the lucky users allowed to do it – but when I visit their site not logged in, that feeling of elitism quickly washed away.

So anyway, we endorsed the check as instructed, drew little dots on each corner as a “cropping hint” according to the instructions, scanned the images at the recommended settings and began the wizard. All told, it was about 20 minutes’ work – I couldn’t drive to a bank in that amount of time, even if we had one locally still.

The check hasn’t cleared yet, and I’m a little concerned because it’s a rebate check (with nothing but our address on the back of it – no security features or endorsement lines or anything) – but hopefully it goes through without issue.

At least if you have to deal with something as archaic as checks, the electronic stuff makes it easier, right?

So a town near us is having their annual city-wide rummage sale at the moment, and since I had to drive out there anyway to drop Shaina off at work, we decided to tootle around and see what was available. So far the only thing I’ve found that I wanted enough to part with my money was a webcam that was too cheap to pass up – I got it for $2, and I even got the lady to throw in the headphones with microphone that were near it so now Sabriena can Mumble again too.

The webcam is a Logitech S5500, and it’s kind of a nifty little device. The picture quality is not fantastic, but much better than the webcam built into our laptop. It was cake to set it up on Windows 7 despite lacking a driver disc for it, and it installed this “Vid HD” videoconferencing software, which turned out to be garbage. I uninstalled that pretty quick and went looking for another videoconferencing solution that wasn’t such a bear to work through firewalls and such.

We ended up messing around with the Hangout feature on Google +, which worked pretty well once we got around the fact it’s apparently utterly broken in Opera. I ran it in Chrome and my wife ran it in Firefox on her Mom’s laptop, and it all worked really well with no issues with firewalls and such.

One of my favorite parts about this particular webcam is it has a “privacy screen” – a hardware switch that actually slides down over the lens so that if your machine is hacked, someone can’t film you unknowingly sitting in your underwear browsing Reddit at 3am. The drivers even have a feature where when the switch is engaged, you can replace it with an image of your choosing – since Duncan apparently really enjoys seeing himself live on “TV”, I quickly knocked together an image that says “The Duncan Show will be right back after these messages…” which gave me a pretty good chuckle whenever I’d engage the privacy screen.

There’s still a few more days left on the rummage, so we might go back out and see if there’s anything else nifty.

My wife and I have had a desire to visit some of the more famous cities in the USA for ages now – places like Chicago, NYC, New Orleans, etc are all interesting in their own ways. We conveniently managed to trot around Chicago for a couple of days in order to replace my passport, but other than that we’ve not really been anywhere interesting in a very, very long time.

It’s pretty unlikely we’ll make it to NYC any time soon either, which is a shame. Apparently there’s a “Bitcoin Conference” going on sometime soon, though the details on it are a bit sketchy. I don’t think it would warrant us getting a Trade show booth type setup for it, on account of we don’t really do much with Bitcoin besides treat them as an interesting little experiment.

New Orleans is pretty unlikely anytime soon too – there’s just no real reason to go there that doesn’t involve anything beyond fun, which kind of sucks.

This blog of mine is not much to read – I fully acknowledge it’s just a ragtag collection of my more incoherent thoughts, with very little effort actually placed into it’s presentation. Man, it doesn’t even have the really good “so I shit myself right?” stories on it anymore. I don’t actually expect anyone to follow the minutiae of my short attention span, I really just put shit out here for my own benefit.

Hungry Hacker on the other hand is my baby. It started in about 2001 as a small mail order company for the surplus crap I found at flea markets that might be interesting to other hackers – we never got rich off it or anything, but it was a fun project… I got to play with all kinds of neat shit and then sold a reasonable portion of it onwards to finance getting more new stuff. I am actually still sitting on a Netopia ISDN router that’s brand new from it, one day I will canibalize the POTS drivers for it and see if I can homebrew the hardware for an Asterisk PABX. Anyway…

We started out on the .org domain, I’m not sure why – I think it was due to my fixation with the H2O initialism I’d invented for it. Anyway, at some point we switched to .com and started providing information. We went through a few iterations of my awesome document management software which finally just proved to be too much of a pain in the arse, and we switched to WordPress.

It’s sat dormant for the last couple years, mostly because I’ve not really been hitting up yard sales and whatnot looking for nice surplus gear to hack on. It’s one of the very few things I miss about Sacramento – between the flea markets and neighborhood cleanup there was a never ending supply of interesting things to take apart. Out here, not so much.

Since the Deepbit pool lifted their 0% fee weekend thing, I’ve gone on to using the Reddit pool instead but man… the difficulty is kicking the crap out of us now. There’s been a couple blocks this weekend that took like almost 20 hours to get through – brutal.

Sometimes the low-variance of a really huge pool is nice, but I think I still end up averaging more money on MtRed than I do on Deepbit.

I’ll just be really glad to get this damn GPU paid off and start getting into the black – even if it is only enough after electricity to buy a budget game every month or whatever.

I’m having a lot of fun goofing around with this Bitcoin shit – it basically paid for a graphics card for my PC (almost paid off, anyway). I wouldn’t advise against doing that now, because the mining difficulty’s gone way up and the price hasn’t followed…

… but man you can’t argue with a free PC upgrade. I got a copy of Dirt3 with my card, and sold it to another user for the BTC which I eventually went on to re-sell for about $35USD. I could now, if I wanted to, buy that game back for about $12USD. I’ve seen users like tomatouk selling TF2 items, and I thought about doing that too but I’m not sure if it’s against TF2′s ToS or not.

If I’d have acted on every single deal I could have made a tidy profit almost all the time – I think I’m just getting really lucky though, so I’m reluctant to gamble any sizable stake on a move. At the rate things are going, I’ll be happy if I just 100% pay this GPU off, and maybe if I can make enough to pick up a game gift or two that’d be icing on the cake.

I happened to follow a link from another forum to the Overclock.net forums, and I thought to myself… “I remember this site.”

That is quite possibly the worst thing to happen to me in terms of productivity all year. After being “clean” (read: sticking with a stock case) for almost 5 years, I’m bitten by the bug again. It’s started out innocent enough – I took all the guts out of my PC and shot the inside of it with some black paint, because I think it looks better that way than the naked sheetmetal.

Now I’m seriously considering taking some cutting tools to it, to make a hole for some extra fans and whatnot – shit I probably don’t really need. I mean it’s not like my little x2 250 runs all that hot or anything… but damned if I don’t look at people’s water-cooled rigs and just drool.

God damn it.

This weekend marked the return of our tiny town’s yearly city-wide rummage sale, so we went out on the hunt for some good deals. For the most part, there really wasn’t much… no baby clothes that’d fit Duncan (tons of girls clothes though), no cool PC stuff (except an ancient 6800GT card that’s not much use to me), some guy selling franklin mint style knives and probably fake mens diamond watches, another guy selling furniture for almost brand new prices, etc.

I did manage to pick up a laser printer for dirt cheap ($5), and after a bit of tinkering it actually works (the toner cartridge wasn’t seated correctly, which led me to think I’d screwed myself). It’s in really nice condition and is not actually that old (only a few thousand pages according to the built in calculator).

I also picked up a whole-house water filter, which is great news because our old one exploded last winter and we’ve been drinking bottled water (the biggest rip-off on the planet) ever since. I need a couple fittings to connect it up and then we’re back in business. Huzzah!

I love getting stuff in the mail. I hate waiting for stuff, but getting stuff rocks.

So I was thinking about setting up something like this, except on Half.com instead – because I love getting cheap PS3 games and there’s a ton of them on Half that I wouldn’t mind playing. Obviously it’d need caveats, like I don’t want every sequential copy of Madden ever made… but still.

Lately all I get is junk… credit card offers, rv insurance quotes (because I signed up for something to get free stuff and now for some reason people think I own boats, RVs, etc). I wouldn’t even complain if the credit card offers were decent, but the last one I got was like 30% APR and a $75/year fee – screw you guys.

So I was thinking if I set up a script or a site where I could put some money in every so often and it’ll buy me shit when there’s good deals on it.

… and I kinda like the idea.

I’ve always felt that barter shouldn’t really be taxed, but I suppose if you were going to keep track of barter with a pseudo-currency like Bitcoin, I can see paying taxes on it.

MumbleDog is now accepting BitCoin payments on a small basis, but we’re not really advertising it. All our bills are in USD, and we don’t really want to open the flood gates and risk having to try and convert a bunch of Bitcoin to USD in a hurry (or worse, get caught with our pants down having them devalue over night and have to dig into our operating expenses savings accounts to pay bills we should have had money for), so we’re not pushing it very hard.

What I can’t figure out is why so many folks are in such a hurry to turn BTC into something it’s not – talking about inventing hardware-based crypto-currencies to make an effective BTC coin, keeping track of IOUs or made-up-cash advances from a central issue seems to pretty much defeat the purpose of it to me (not to mention that inventing your own currency and printing notes is what got Liberty Gold in trouble to begin with).

Basically my issue with the whole thing is that Bitcoin skirts currency regulation because it has no innate value – it’s only value stems from your ability to convince other people it has value. When you start making an actual currency with coins and notes and such, you pretty much can’t do it without promising value. Sure, there are local currencies that pretty much amount to vouchers usable in a particular town or county, but that’s not what people are suggesting – they want an actual currency backed by something and redeemable.

The fed has a pretty good monopoly on that right now, and treading on their ground is done so at your own peril. I like Bitcoin the way it is – keep it worthless beyond the perceived value, and everyone can participate (well, if they can get their hands on some BTC anyway).