Blog Archive: February 2018
Blog Income: 104% Increase YoY in Google AdSense Revenue 2018
| Blogging | 17 seen
Learn how I increased revenue from Google AdSense by 104% Year over Year and how you could too.
For a prelude: I have been using Google AdSense for already eight and a half years by now, from whom first four and a half years have generated a really modest sum of EUR 100 from couple of low traffic and let's be totally honest - thin content websites (I had installed AdSense ad units on dozens of sites). I started using Google AdSense to monetize my websites back in 2009.
Today by accessing Google AdSense reports (02/26/2018) I noticed that my lifetime revenue from this channel has reached EUR 2,704.25 for a time period Sep 4, 2009 - Feb 26, 2018. It is for eight and a half years. Nothing much, right? About EUR 318 per year (that's less than a euro per day), on the other hand, the real increase has started from 2014. In fact, half of the money I made just in the last 365 days.
If compared year over year, during the past year, it has been a whopping 104% increase. …
Top 20 Aluminium Chassis Notebook / Laptop Computers
| Laptop Reviews | 4,025 seen
As they say, Aluminum / Metallic chassis laptops are more durable than plastic ones.
Indeed the surrounding chassis matters, but still when choosing an aluminum chassis laptop don't forget to see what's inside the chassis, like the graphics card, processor, RAM, and of course HDD.
In today's article, I've listed the TOP 20 bestselling aluminum chassis laptops on Amazon. Following laptop/notebook manufacturers is a popular user choice for aluminum chassis - Samsung, Acer, Lenovo, ASUS, DELL, The Razer Blade, and HP.
Most Aluminum chassis laptops come with the price attached and nowadays there are both traditional, touchscreen, and of course gaming laptops surrounded by metallic cases.
See: HP ENVY x360 - 15-cn0003ur Convertable Touchscreen Laptop Review
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on the Amazon site, I might earn an affiliate income from that. Prices for laptop computers listed on this page are retrieved using Amazon Product Advertising…
Winter in Bākūži 2 - 2018
| | 3 seen
A couple of weeks ago I made a couple of HDR's back at Bākūži (Bākūži Winter 2018), despite it was still a winter, we had little to no snow back then. Now at the end of February 2018, I made some more photos - let's say this - there is still room to grow to reach the levels of the fairytale in Tbilisi, but still lovely.
Snow, frozen pond, and lonely rock garden see it for yourself
Car parked next to the pond
Pile of firewood
Still needs to be processed
Rock garden in Winter
The house
Still, a lot to do :)
How To Verify Skype Account Without US Credit Card (Microsoft Account Verification)
| Servers | 46 seen
In today's article, I'll share my experience how I managed to verify my age for Skype account. It all started that one day I was not able to login to my skype account, which I have been using for more than 10 years already.
It turned out Skype / Microsoft thought I'm a child, as apparently in my Skype account I had entered my birth year as 2008. Now back in 2008, it didn't seem an issue. Since Microsoft acquired Skype back in 2011, apparently, some new rules have been pointed out and it was on the February 2018, Skype started to think I'm a child. I was not able to login to my account, even despite I've been a paid subscriber to Skype OUT
Trying to Google out some solution for this strange case I ended up in this article: How do I change the birthdate on a Microsoft account?
I’m an adult, but my account thinks I’m a child
To change your own account from a child account to a full account, you need to prove that you're an adult. You have two options:
- Option 1: Provide a valid U.S. credit card number
- Option 2: Send us proof of age
Despite I have a valid U.S. Credit Card (see…
Google Introduces Machine Learning AdSense Auto Ads
| Blogging | 21 seen
Yesterday I received a promotional e-mail from Google AdSense, introducing the new Auto Ads.
As a long-term Google AdSense user (How I Made $2,135.03 with Google AdSense in 8 years), I decided to give it a test for my Drupal-powered blog, despite I was amazed at what I saw, I still removed Google AdSense Auto ads shortly.
Let me explain - Google Adsense ads have been featured on this blog for about 4 years, during the past 4 years the blog has grown into a complex multi-topic website/portal. Despite I'm serving Google AdSense ads on most of the content pages, there are sensitive categories and pages I'm not using Google AdSense to monetize the content. With enabling Google AdSense auto ads, this exception is not honored and I saw Google AdSense auto ads served even on About page. Sure I believe I could custom code to remove auto ads from specific categories and pages (How To Hide Drupal Block For Nodes In Specific Taxonomy - Example With Google Adsense) , but right now the solution of the box just didn't work for me. Probably after some custom coding and longer testing I could implement Google AdSense auto ads on the blog.
…
Back testing BTC/EXP RSI on Gekko Trading Bot
| Crypto | 27 seen
For the past couple of days, I've been testing Gekko BTC trading bot, executing a few trades running the bot on my laptop, ending to build a VPS to run Gekko trading bot on a cloud. As you can see for right now - I'm fully determined to master this trading bot.
To master trading like a pro some should learn basic technical analytics, in today's article, I will speak about using Relative Strength Index (RSI) for crypto trades. I believe RSI is one of the easiest ways to trade cryptos.
Disclosure: I'm not a financial advisor and I don't give you any advice, I'm just sharing my own experience. Investments in stocks, funds, bonds or cryptos are risk investments and you could lose some or all of your money. Do your due diligence before investing in any kind of asset.
RSI (Relative Strength Index)The relative strength index (RSI) is a momentum indicator developed by noted technical analyst Welles Wilder, that compares the magnitude of recent gains and losses over a specified time period to measure speed and change of price movements of a security. It is primarily used to attempt to identify …
How To Setup Gekko BTC Trading Bot on VPS (Ubuntu 16.04) with GUI (Vultr.com)
| Servers | 57 seen
Gekko is a free and open source Bitcoin TA trading and backtesting platform that connects to popular Bitcoin exchanges. It is written in javascript and runs on nodejs
For the past couple of days I've been playing around with Gekko trading bot installed on my laptop (Windows 10), I have made a few trades and experimented with a couple of strategies. First impressions are promising. See: Simple BTC Trading Bot Gekko - First Impressions
Running a trading bot on a laptop is fun, but if you are looking for a bot 24/7monitoring market and executing trades, either you should keep your PC turned on 24/7 or you could set up a cheap VPS and setup bot on it.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links to cloud hosting companies like Linode and Vultr, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on cloud hosting sites, I will earn an affiliate income at no cost to you.
As I have a couple of VPS from Linode, my first idea was to test this setup on Linode VPS, but fortunately, I found a cool tutorial How to setup VPS on Vultr.com and run Gekko by…
How to send international fax to USA using Faxapp
| Servers | 4 seen
Think fax is outdated? Think twice, fax is still popular in certain business areas, and fax is kind of popular in the United States. I believe the last time I have seen an actual fax machine in work was back in 1994. Now 24 years later at one stage I thought, it would be good if I would have a fax machine in 2018.
I had to send a fax confirming my identity to the Microsoft Corp. Keep reading to learn how to send an international fax without having a fax machine.
Turns out, there are several online apps allowing to send a fax from the web, after a quick research I decided to give it a try for Faxapp.
FaxappSend faxes without a landline to a "classic" fax machine. You’ll get your own local fax number.
No software required, but available.
All received faxes are swiftly delivered to your email inbox.
Ten-day trial
- Send and receive faxes for free
- Cancelled automatically
- No credit card required
It took me some 5 minutes to open an account at faxapp, and the next thing was just to send international fax to the United States
Faxapp dashboard…
Simple BTC Trading Bot Gekko - First Impressions
| Servers | 35 seen
The idea of using a bitcoin trading bot comes up just shortly I decided to trade up from 0.03 to 0.05 BTC. In the past, I've been using Coinlend bot to lend free coins on exchanges and earn some little interest.
Doing a quick google search I found a few bitcoin bot traders, most come with a price, but as I wanted to test how these bots actually work I continued my searches and found free bitcoin bot trader - Gekko. Setting up this bot will be simple for a tech-savvy person, but might be a daunting task for a novice, as bot asks to install nodejs and in fact, it took me some 4 hours to set up this bot, as there were some issues (more on that at the end of this article)
Gekko is a free and open source Bitcoin TA trading and backtesting platform that connects to popular Bitcoin exchanges. It is written in javascript and runs on nodejs.
You can either create your own trading strategy or start with the built-in example strategies. Once you have a strategy you can use Gekko to automatically run it in a few different ways:
- Backtest: You can start a simulation of the strategy over a historical data period and…
Ethereum (and other altcoin) mining review after 2 months in 2018
| Servers | 48 seen
February 16 marks a small 2-month anniversary since I've started to mine Ethereum and others altcoins. In today's article let's take a quick review and try to understand is GPU mining still profitable in 2018?
It all started with a FOMO back in December 2017, after successful second part of the year of investments in crypto, I decided to build a 12-GPU mining rig.
Currently, I've invested $1,661 in this mining rig and after 2 months of operations, the current ROI is 12.53% (not counting in cost for electricity). Meaning that in past two months I've mined coins worth of $208.05.
I have experimented both with different GPU cards and different coins. Here are coins I've mined so far: ETH, SC, ETC, and EXP
Mined coins
Currently, the rig consists of 4 GPU's:
- Mining with SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon™ RX 560 4GD5 Review
- Mining Ethereum With EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 (Single Fan), 6GB GDDR5 Review
- Mining Ethereum With ZOTAC GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti OC Edition Review
- Mining Ethereum With Asus Geforce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB ROG Strix OC Edition…
How To Mine EXP (Expanse) with SMOS
| Servers | 15 seen
A couple of days ago I shared a quick tutorial on how to mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SMOS (Simple Mining OS), as there is an upcoming ETC Callisto airdrop happening, the idea to pre-mine couple of ETC's sounded tempting to me.
Now, as I've been using a mixed AMD + NVIDIA mining rig, to get most of it, I'm left using Claymore's dual miner, which just recently released version 11.0 , and I decided to test it with some new coin, after a quick google search I found a quite a few Ethash based coins (good for Claymore's miner) and this time my attention got the EXP (expanse) coin. Reason is quite simple, EXP is listed on Poloniex.com exchange, which means following - I don't need to look for a wallet (I should but for the purpose of this experiment I don't), and since the coin is already listed on a well-known exchange - there shouldn't be problems to exchange EXP to BTC.
As I had some nice ZEC/BTC trade on Poloniex, I exchanged some small amount of BTC to EXP, before going deeper.
Now, before getting into technical stuff on how to mine EXP with SimpleMining.net, let's find out more what do we know about EXP…
Why I'm Investing in Baltic Horizon Fund (NHCBHFFT)
| Investments | 14 seen
Baltic Horizon Fund has been on my radar since the August 2017. Actually first spotted in March 2017, while doing a quick research on Top Dividend Paying stocks in the Baltics.
Despite being listed on Nasdaq Tallinn (aka Nasdaq Baltics) I was not able to purchase fund units from my existing brokerage account. After I sent a short message both to the fund managers and my current broker, informing about the problem I was facing (and I believe a dozen of other customers with a brokerage account in Latvia) the problem was solved and I was able to purchase Baltic Horizon Fund units. Sometimes all it asks is just a brief message.
Disclosure: I'm not a financial advisor and I don't give you any advice, I'm just sharing my own experience. Investments in stocks, funds or bonds are risk investments and you could lose some or all of your money. Do your due diligence before investing in any kind of asset.
Now, there is one bold reason I like this fund, quarterly dividend payments (at least in 2017, and hopefully in 2018), the yield is around 7-9%,…
How to Prepare for Upcoming Callisto Airdrop (Ethereum Classic)
| Servers | 70 seen
Now, this is huge and exciting for ETC holders - Ethereum Classic development team recently announced the Callisto Network Project which will result in a 1:1 CLO airdrop for ETC holders.
As a holder of ETC, and in fact as a miner of ETC (How To Mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SimpleMining OS) I find this very exciting and decided to look - how to prepare for this upcoming "fork" to get most out of it. But before digging into technical details on how to profit from this Callistio Airdrop, let's familiarize with this project a little better.
According to the update:
Callisto is a separate blockchain that is based on Ethereum protocol with its own cryptocurrency (CLO). Callisto has a fixed cap monetary policy similar to ETC. Unlike ETH, ETC is posing itself as a value storage. It should be noted that the ETC does not have any incentives for coin holders. The whole emission is completely controlled by miners and their influence grows with the growth of the network. Callisto introduces a Cold staking protocol that rewards coin holders for being a network participants.
Cold staking is a smart-contract based process that…
How To Mine ETC (Ethereum Classic) with SimpleMining OS
| Servers | 75 seen
For the past couple of weeks I've been experimenting with crypto mining and started with Claymore's dual miner to learn that I can dual mine both Ethereum and Siacoin out of the box, I put my mining rig as it is and let the machine to mine coins for me. See: I'm Making $0.98 Per Day By Mining Ethereum and Siacoin, and I want MORE!
Meanwhile, in crypto space, a lot has happened, and I decided to explore my options to mine some other coins using SimpleMining OS, which IMHO is awesome.
At the end of January, it started to look that mining Siacoin is not any more profitable with gpu's (Is It Profitable Mining Siacoin (SC) in 2018?) and I went solo mining Ethereum only, also I decided to pause adding new graphics cards to the mining rig before reaching ROI at least 20% - Mining Ethereum @ ~53 MH/s and Siacoin @ ~310 MH/s Earns me $5.53 Daily - And It's Time to take a Pause
Now, I decided to explore my options mining other altcoins, at start I wanted to test mining Monero, but as I have a mixed AMD + NVIDIA mining rig, seems Simplemining is not yet supporting both cards for Monero, and it looks like just…
Deep in The Forest (Winter Edition)
| | 8 seen
It was on some February's (2018) afternoon, we decided to make a simple hiking in very familiar to us Latvian forests, unfortunately, the temperature outside was way too freezing and our hiking ended after some 15 minutes, fortunately, I managed to capture some HDR's here.
Followers of Piece of Life series will recognize this forest from Deep in the Forest or Wandering In The Woods B&W Photography series.
Winter in Latvia
No mushrooms or will berry this time of the year.
Marvelous golden hour in forest