Daylight Savings Time: how to handle it from here

 Miracle of miracles: the Sunshine Protection Act passed the U.S. Senate! Unanimously! 

So it should sail through the house and be on Joe Biden's desk for his signature any day now, right?

Not so fast ... all of a sudden a bunch of whiny sleep experts and others have come out saying things like:

• "We've evolved to be synchronized with daylight, so we should really be focusing on staying on Standard Time, not Daylight Time!"
• Melatonin only works when it's getting dark, so this will mess up sleep!
• "Little children will have to go to school in the dark in the winter! This is baaaad!"

So to keep us from missing the opportunity to get this done ... I propose the Light Up All the Little Kids Waiting for the Bus rider for this bill. Since the last time we tried this (Nixon administration), there have emerged a bunch of cheap LED headbands:

This one is $19.99 from Amazon ...

Let's allocate enough money ($100 million?) to get one of this for any little child who wants one.

OK? Let's not miss this opportunity!

Week 2: Miner gets to work!

My Helium miner started producing a trickle of the $HNT token it produces. So far I've made 0.41 $HNT, which is worth $7.22 at the current $HNT price of $17.62.

This shows one factor to consider: $HNT was about $24 when I started looking at this about a month ago, which would have made my little snippet worth $9.84.

Oh well; looks like $HNT pretty closely tracks Bitcoin, which is down with the rest of the stock market over the next month.

How far away is my breakeven point? Clearly this can't be predicted with any precision, as the $HNT price could go anywhere at any time. So I'm going to just assume $18. I've been generating $HNT for a week now (the miner was "syncing" for a few days until then.

So if the mining rig cost $585 and it makes $7.38 per week, that makes the breakeven point 79+ weeks away.

Let's go out 5 years with the same assumptions:

7.38 x 52.5 x 5 = $1937.250.

That's $1352 or so when subtracting out the capital cost. Not bad!

Also:

•  I'm neglecting Internet and electricity cost ... both are tiny.
• I'm assuming the hardware is reliable enough to run without a glitch for 5+ years

Next week I'll figure out how to convert the $HNT into real $$$ and move them from my virtual wallet to my real wallet  and will post the details here! See you then.

Week 1: Helium Miner installed and syncing

 I received the Helium network miner yesterday and got it installed (see below).

The helium network map looks pretty saturated with hotspot nodes:

But in my (new) neighborhood, not so much; there are my new one and two more visible.

I may be able to get more range by moving my miner up ... we do live near the bottom of a pretty steep hill, which may be blocking some signals, I guess ...

Payments are determined by the number of nodes you can reach and how capable/powerful those nodes are. So I am motivated to increase my node's visibility on the network if I can do that without too much trouble.

Helium apparently uses '3 words' addressing ... my node's ID is quite festive:

                            Bubbly Beige Ant

Helium is based on blockchain technology, which is the basic idea behind bitcoin. My node is still "syncing" with the blockchain so hasn't started earning money yet.

Anonymity reigns ... I of course had to give my name and address for shipment and payment of the miner, but Helium doesn't ask for any of that to register you on its network. It has a 12-word password scheme that's generated when you log in that's like a Bitcoin password but more easily readable. Make sure you keep a record of it!

And make sure that your local node is up and listening before you assume it's registered. I goofed on this to start with ... it connects with your phone via bluetooth to start, but bluetooth is only active for the first 10 minutes it's up. So I had to press the pairing button to wake it up and then I got the node set up as Bubbly Beige Ant.

So: still down the $587.87 capital cost of this box, plus a smidgen of electricity.

More next week!

Crypto mining that's socially useful ... and can make a bit of money too!

I recently read a book on the background and the highly dysfunctional team behind Ethereum, one of the leading crypto "coins":

 

Some of the principals behind this coin made boatloads of money. I missed the whole crypto investment thing until I bought $5 worth of Ethereum and $5 worth of bitcoin several months ago via the Webull app. My account is up 52% from inception in early 2021 ... but current value is $222.06: not a life-changing amount.

The New York Times had an article a couple of months ago about a socially useful application of crypto mining. 

I recently moved into a more densely populated area that it seemed to make sense for me to try this, so this week I took the first step of buying the equipment. It was $587.87 and will be here soon.

I'll update the blog every week on my results on this project; watch this space!

Lindsay Ellis' Sequel to *Axiom's End* is even better than the original!

 I recently finished the sequel to Axiom's End:

This one is even better! Aliens exist and there's a political fight over how to handle them and what rights to give them ... I don't want to spoil the story so I'll just say: five stars!

SF recommendations from Libby and YouTube

 I recently read via Libby a number of enjoyable SF novels. I started with one of my favorites, Iain M. Banks.

After I'd read a few of those I started getting recommendations from Libby, finally trying one that received my five-star award:

This is the story of an alternate history 2005-2010, where the big story wasn't the Iraq War, but a Wikileaks type character (the father of the protagonist of the story, Cora) who outs George W. Bush for lying about Aliens Among Us. ... that's enough without getting into spoiler territory. I found this one deeply satisfying!

Lindsay Ellis is also a YouTube personality

....where I found my next recommendation:

This is another alien story with a quite different vibration. A quick synopsis: A huge statue appears in the middle of the night in New York City, and aspiring YouTubers take video of it and are the first to be on this story ... identical statues have appeared in cities all over the world.

Complications ensue ... I still quite enjoyed this one ... four stars.

Hank Green turns out to be the younger brother of John Green,  Hank and John are together the Vlog Brothers, who have an enjoyable YouTube channel with posts of generally about 4 minutes:

Last but not least ... I got this recommendation from one or another of YouTube book recommenders, and it's the darkest of the three here:

The author is Rick Yancey .. I went into this one knowing nothing about it and I will do the same for you. Five stars! Already a motion picture, too ...

Back to reading ...

Book recommendations via YouTube and my newfound ability to read fiction without skimming

 For some years I have been partaking most fiction via Audible, since in the past I have been to much a skimmer to read fiction the normal way.

But recently I've tried some recommendations from my local library and from these YouTube book recommenders (see below) and found that I read without skimming and very much enjoyed some.

I'll have another post on my book recommendations for this period, but now for some of the YouTubers I've been watching lately:

 

 This guy's not exclusively a BookTuber, but this is the first one of his I watched.

I also got a couple of excellent recommendations from my local library on their Libby app.

Last but not least, there's Kindle Unlimited, I had this pegged as "just unsellable cruft" but that's no longer so if it it ever was! It's $10.85 per month.

Two vivid examples:

I just found Bloomberg Businessweek there, for which I have been paying $70 per year for a print-only subscription.

The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells' series of fabulous novellas, have the first two now on Kindle Unlimited for free. I recently read both of these and found them "virtual pageturners" even though I'd heard both the stories before on Audible.

Overall it's a feast of reading for any reader!