Hardware

A Long and Short Journey with Dogecoin

Something something, I am not a financial advisor and am not giving financial advice.

Everyone is talking about Dogecoin in the last few days. I’m not sure why exactly, there are a thousand different Crypto Currencies out there and DOGE isn’t new. Personally, I do not follow Cryptocurrency at all. It really feels like it’s just a digital MLM scam. Sure, people are making money but the long term use and sustainability isn’t going to last. People like it now because it’s all “deregulated” but at some point, if it ever became big enough to be mainstream, it’s going to become regulated, which would kill the appeal. It doesn’t help that your regular everyday person has no idea what Crypto even is. The best quote for “what is crypto” I’ve seen floating around…

“Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

One of the most common points I see is that “Crypto is just as real as the dollar (or any other currency).” This is of course because the dollar is “worth” what it is “only because the US government says it is”. Which honestly is kind of a misrepresentation of why a dollar is worth a dollar, but ok, lets go with that. Dogecoin, or any crypto, is “worth” something, because a bunch of speculators trying to get rich quick and not be holding the bag when everything collapses say it is worth something. The Dollar is worth something because the entire economy of the US, and a lot of the world, and the Government, backed by it’s people and an army and a general long term trust, says it’s worth something. So technically the original statement is true, but in reality, the level of backing on the dollar is much larger than that of a bunch of random kooks online.

Anyway…

Back in 2014, Dogecoin got big on Reddit. It was literally just a meme making fun of Bitcoin and people were using it as a sort of upvote/award system with Dogetipbot. Which was fun. I bought around 5000 DOGE for around $5. I got some tips, I gave some tips, eventually I stuck in all in a local wallet and I think the Dogetipbot broke so the whole thing kind of gotten forgotten about.

Then, this year, for some reason, Dogecoin started booming. Fortunately I had my old wallet. Unfortunately, syncing the last 7 years of blockchain takes a long time. It took something like a month to get my wallet in a usable state, and the software felt really buggy, requiring many restarts to kickstart the sync. Suddenly my 5000 DOGE was “worth” about $1500. I admit I got a little caught up and figured, I’d see how far it would go. Everyone says they want to take it to a dollar per DOGE. Let’s see if that happens.

I could see the hype taking it to a dollar. I really can’t see it every getting to Bitcoin levels of thousands. At the very minimum, it would take long enough that by the time it happens, the Governments of the world would have started regulating crypto to the point where it all mostly died off anyway. DOGE kept climbing, fifty cents, sixty cents, seventy-five cents. At some point, I decided that if it managed to reach a dollar, I’d go ahead and buy myself a new PC. I’ve been considering updating my desktop, some of the components are around ten years old (the Processor specifically), and what better to spend my sudden surge of fake money on. I also decided to buy a pre-build machine. The main thing keeping me from working towards an upgrade was how hard components are starting to be to acquire, a lot thanks (no thanks) to crypto mining.

I found I could buy directly from NewEgg using BitPay, so I prepped up half my DOGE into a Bitpay wallet. When it got up to seventy-five cents I was really close to just going ahead and pulling the trigger. I got to a point where I cared more about my PC upgrade than the DOGE. I even dumped a bit more into my BitPay, ready to use. I also figured I should pull the trigger at eighty or ninety cents, since it seemed like a lot of people were planning to dump at $1.

But then I saw news about Elon Musk going on SNL, and being a mechanism to propel DOGE to $1. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk at all, for reasons I’m not getting into here, but I figure if anyone can make this go up, it’s probably Elon Musk. So the decision was made to just wait for SNL.

Then Elon was on SNL, and DOGE dropped from $0.70 to around $0.50. It seems to have leveled off around this point as well, even dropping a bit at times. At this point, I had to remind myself, that I am not a “cyrpto guy” and I have no interest in becoming a “crypto guy”. This was just a dumb meme that I had jumped on years ago.

Long story short, I dumped the rest of my DOGE into BitPay, and ordered up a new kick ass gaming desktop PC.

I am now super looking forward to running games in blazing FPS with RTX and all the Ultra Super Graphical bells and whistles. In the meantime I’ve got to work on shuffling some files around to make everything work once the new desktop arrives. I currently run two desktops, one is my “main PC” and the other is an old 32bit Linux PC that mostly serves as a file server and a web project server. I don’t need to run 3 PCs and the 32bit PC has been a thorn in my side for a while with it’s 32bit limitations, so I plan to shift my current main desktop to be the new Project server and dump the old Linux machine. I look forward to being able to actually host a sweet Minecraft server and OpenSIM server and getting the chance to better learn how to use Docker.

A Second Hard Drive in My Aspire E 15

Recently I purchased an SSD for my wife’s Thinkpad. It wasn’t a big one, 256 gig, but her laptop is a little slow all around and the bottleneck seems to be mostly in the drive, which I am pretty sure is still old school spinning platters.

Unfortunately, the drive in her laptop is 320 Gb, so I couldn’t straight clone the drives. I could have done some partition size adjustments and made it work but she was already fussing and worrying I was going to lose some of her files so I decided I’d just wait and get a larger one later.

I’d already planned to pick up a second one of these drives to add to my Laptop. The main drive is one of those funky newer styles that’s basically a circuit board, but it has an empty bay for a laptop drive. I stuck the new SSD in and went about using it. Nothing hard here at all.

To my surprise, the drive vanished a week or so later. Thankfully I didn’t stick it in my wife’s laptop, it was apparently bad. Or was it?

Turns out that because the drive is a little on the small size, even for a 2.5″ drive, and there isn’t any mechanism inside the laptop to secure the drive itself, it ended up coming lose and losing it’s connection.

It’s probably not the cleanest fix, but I stripped off a half a sheet of paper and accordion folded it and slipped it in between the drive and the Laptop chassis. This applies pressure to the drive, holding it in place.

I haven’t had any trouble with the drive since. Still it’s kind of a crummy design.

On My New Acer Aspire E15

Acer Aspire E15

Acer Aspire E15 So, right up front I want to say, I’m not trying to sell this as the most amazing machine ever or anything.  I mostly just want to give some thoughts and sort of initial impressions.  I’ve been previously using an HP 311 Netbook as my laptop.  I would argue, at the time, that it definitely was “The best Netbook”.  It’s like 5-6 years old now, it runs like complete crap despite my best efforts.  I’ve replaced the battery and power cord on it 3-4 times, it has all sort of flakey issues with the trackpad and keyboard that start to crop up after it runs for a bit, it’s just, definitely showing its age.  I’ve updated it recently with an Acer Aspire E15.

I’ve been trying and working towards a replacement laptop for a few years now.  I’m awful about saving up large chunks of money given my other hobbies and saving for a laptop is quite a chunk of change.  It also doesn’t help that I keep within my own personal spending budget, and a lot of any “extra income” over the years went to household needs and outfitting everyone else in the family with laptops.

My other problem was trying to decide just what I wanted.  Ideally I wanted something nicer, say, closer to $1000 or so than $500, but saving to that point is kind of a huge hurdle.  I wanted something capable of running games all right, I don’t need or want “highest settings perfect framerate” but I wanted something that would run smoothly for the games I like to play.  These sort of requirements presented a few issues.  Most of the more expensive laptops push form over function, so they would probably work all right for my needs but the higher price mostly means I’m paying for “fancy” looking.  Anything that’s a “Gaming” laptop in that price range is probably overkill for what I want and would be a 40 lb slab of computer.

I also have lost track of “what makes a computer good” several years ago.  Mostly because computing power really plateaued for general use a few years ago.  There’s not a huge difference in computers now than 3-4 years ago aside from power consumption, which is kind of minimal.  In the old days it was simple, more mhz, more ghz means it’s better.  The only real “requirement” I had for processor power was i5 or i7, no i3.  I wanted a decent chunk of RAM, say 8GB+ and some sort of discrete GPU.   Just having some sort of GPU vs “Intel Integrated Graphics” would meet my gaming needs.

Acer Aspire E15I also decided that at some point I needed to stop waffling on what I wanted and just pick something.  I did some searching around on Amazon, filtering specs and such to get less and less selection.  I had kind of been hoping to find a Lenovo Thinkpad but none of them in my price range meet my Graphical desires and they are all brickish.  The brick part wasn’t such a turn off as the integrated graphics.

I eventually settled on the Acer Aspire E15.  It’s a relatively new release (seems to be 2016), it met my desire on specs, it looked fairly nice design wise, it has a ten-key pad.  It was also within my current budget at around $550 dollars.  I did some checking online for reviews and chatter on Reddit and it seemed to be a pretty well liked machine.

I ended up finding it for a $100 less on NewEgg as well, with a 1TB 5200 drive instead of a 256GB SSD.  Now I had a choice to make, way more storage, at a much slower speed, or keep the nice quick SSD.  I even considered ordering the 1TB version and buying an SSD to put in it, essentially giving me a free 1TB drive to use for, whatever.  In the end, I opted for the SSD, for more money.  Having the extra 1TB drive is actually less useful to me than it sounds, I have something like 8-10 TB easily already going in the house across several machines, and I wanted the performance boost of the 256GB SSD.  Also, the hassle of figuring out the best way to install the OS onto the SSD, while not hard, was more trouble than I cared to bother with.  The whole point of upgrading is performance boost over my old laptop.  The most frustrating part of my desktop is I’m still using shitty 5200 RPM drives in it, and it’s the main bottleneck for sure.

Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG Specs

  • Screen Size: 15.6 inches
  • Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080 pixels
  • Processor: 2.3 GHz Core i5 6200U
  • RAM: 8 GB DDR4-SDRAM
  • Hard Drive: 256 GB flash_memory_solid_state
  • Graphics Coprocessor: NVIDIA GeForce 940MX (2GB)
  • Operating System: Windows 10
  • Item Weigh: 5.3 pounds

Acer Aspire E15So, onto the actual laptop on some initial impressions.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now.  It is definitely a nice improvement over my old netbook.  I like having Windows again, though I still like Linux, I like the keyboard with its chicklet keys, I’m satisfied with the size and ports.  It’s even got a USB-C port, which I didn’t notice before buying it.

The 256GB drive is a little tight.  I mostly just need to keep myself more limited to things I’m actually going to use but I’ve installed World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Minecraft, Wildstar, Photoshop, Diablo 3, Office 2010, and a handful of developer apps and I’m already down below 100GB free.  It’s a bit too close for my comfort but I’ll learn to deal with it.  Also, everything runs nicely as expected, though the machine does start to get pretty hot after running Wildstar and Skyrim for a while.

It’s not a touch screen either.  Back when Windows 8 was the hot thing, I would have been all over a touch screen, Windows 10 took us back to a more traditional interface and so the touchscreen is less necessary.  It’s still something that’s kind of neat if it’s there, but it’s less required.

In general, it does seem like a pretty good all-around machine for the price point.  That said, you could probably drop down a bit in price if you don’t want something with a discrete GPU.