SoylentNews

The L3+, its sold-separately power supply and DHL shipping set me back $2,295.

I at first intended to set it up this evening, then decided I'd put it off until tomorrow evening because I was too tired. CryptoCompare's LiteCoin Mining Profit Calculator yielded the insight that putting it off that way would set me back $9.35 that I would have otherwise earned.

Or rather, that my L3+ would have earned.

I bought their LiteCoin rig rather than the Antminer S9 BitCoin miner because the S9 requires 220 volts. The L3+ can use 110 volts.

I puzzled over ways I could safely power it from my electric stove outlet. I was widely advised that if I didn't electrocute myself I'd burn my apartment building down. Despite all that I am confident that I could have made it work - safely and reliably - but in the end decided that doing so would be a huge pain in the ass.

I have the hope that I can provide for myself purely through mining. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon:

I ordered my L3+ in December, during the Irrationally Exhuberant Cryptocurrency Bubble. At the time the mining calculator said it would make me ten grand a year.

I live in a very modest way. Were I to buy three of them - and I really did have enough money, which I've since spent on hookers and blow - they would make thirty grand a year, which is far more than what I require to live comfortably.

I once earned $120/hour as a contract programmer but oddly never had any spare cash. My current monastic lifestyle is facilitated by having moved out of state then having changed my cell number.

(If the issue ever comes up I can truthfully claim never to have declared bankruptcy.)

To my great dismay that same mining calculator now tells me that my L3+ will produce just $2,900. That's the result of LiteCoin's fall in price after the bubble burst.

Try it yourself:

504 MH/s - Hash Rate

$0.0816 - per kilowatt-hour of electricity (cheap because Pacific NorthLeft)

800 watts - power consumption

$208.12 - LiteCoin Price

I'm not in a pool yet so I don't know what the pool will charge me. But the pool fee isn't really significant.

This is puzzling - the first time I tried today the calculator said my L3+ would mine 19.6 LTC per year. The second time it said 19.3. Now it says 16.65.

I'm going to try a different calculator...

WhatToMine sez it's 18.3, for an annual profit of $3,200.

Were the LiteCoin price to stay like this it would have been a far, far better investment to have bought a second macintosh. That would enable me to write OSX drivers without using my client's equipment.

Really the only way to know is to actually mine some LTC for the next little while as I follow the exchange rate.

I'm going to post this then play with my new toy.

Hi-Rez president compares new ‘Overwatch’ hero to a ‘Paladins’ protagonist

Just bookmarking so I can check out the videogamedunkey video later.

Nintendo Holds Off on Switch 2.0, Looks to Peripherals for More Sales

It would be bizarre to release a new version of Switch so soon. They talk about a slimmed down version (rather than a mid-cycle upgrade like PS4 Pro or Xbox One X). Compare to PS4 (Nov 2013) and PS4 Slim (Sep 2016), and Xbox One (Nov 2013) and Xbox One S (Aug 2016). In fact, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X didn't come out very long after the slimmed down versions.

What they could do is drop in newer ARM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Even if they underclock and keep performance almost the same, the console would benefit from lower power consumption since it is battery-powered in handheld mode.

The opioids have turned into a very big problem for our Country. It’s been going on too long. So I'm listening. I'm holding a Summit. Watch it LIVE at 1 pm EST, noon central, 11 am Mountain, 10 am Pacific, 8 am in Hawaii -- they're part of our Country now. youtu.be/C15wK65Luvs #TrumpTV

AC thinks I'm a creep. I wouldn't want my bad reputation to go to waste

Which of my posts is your favorite?

He livestreamed his own murder on Facebook in a North Carolina town

Man fatally shot on Facebook Live had been outing suspected drug dealers, sources say

LiveLeak.

Subject: Need to take Tuesday off work

Why time off?

The onset of Manic Depression, Schizophrenia and my own Schizoaffective Disorder typically occurs when one is a young adult. In my case it was in the early Spring of 1984, when I was a sophomore at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

I left in January 1985, and eventually earned my Physics degree at UC Santa Cruz.

I have had very, very little contact with anyone or anything that are connected to Caltech since I left. I was in a profoundly altered state of reality my last few months there. My Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder was diagnosed during a psychiatric inpatient admission in July 1985.

It happens that if one has ever been psychotic, simply thinking about psychosis will cause one to become psychotic again. This gives me the odd ability to start hallucinating just by thinking about it.

(I discuss this in The Heebie Jeebies.)

It's best that I not do that.

For me, Caltech is Powerful Voodoo.

I was recently invited to join the Caltech Alumni Facebook group. I have never been a member of the Caltech Alumni Association - again that would be Powerful Voodoo.

I explained my mental illness to the Caltech Alumni Facebook group.

When I was still a student there I found that none of the students, faculty or staff had the first clue about any form of mental illness. That no one else knew how to help me made my Schizoaffective Disorder far, far worse than it would have been had I been attending some other school when I experienced its onset.

None of the Facebook group members were at the Institute when I was. Most of them are quite a lot younger than that.

I didn't expect their response: an outpouring of support for me.

I've been thinking quite a lot about Caltech today.

It's best that I not do that.

I actually prefer not to use version control, or rather, my preferred form of version control is to roll a tarball every day then make multiple off-site backups.

svn commit --message "These should have been checked in before building the 1.0b9 installer. However I am confident that the installer has the 1.0b9 binaries. Before I checked these in were some other coder to build the installer they would have done so with out-of-date binaries."

Melania Trump re-emerges amid marriage scrutiny

Can Trump succeed where FDR and Bill Clinton failed?

Had I realized that before now I would have already changed to a new distro.

While I occasionally use Linux, really I'm a Mac Fanboi. User Interface is important to me.

I just posted this to facebook.

Yes: Facebook.

I'm trying to mine Monero on Linux, because my Linux box has an AMD graphics card. Monero must be mined on a GPU - "Graphics Processing Unit". But I'm still setting up the required software tools. That's because I'm using Linux, and the Linuxheads all seem to regard it as some manner of advantage that you can't just install anything, you have to install all manner of prerequisites first.

I finally managed to dig up the required repository sources. I'm going from 17.3 to 18 as I write this. That requires I download 1.6 GB of packages.

While I was able to build cmake myself, XMR Stak also requires g++ 5.