Bitcoin mining and profits in the post-homemining era

Bitcoin mining at home is dead. It went completely dead around summer 2013. The rise of ASIC mining has left everyone in the dust.

Luckily there are alternavtive digital coins, so called 'altcoins', and these are mined using traditional GPU rigs and doesn't use 'SHA256' hashing like Bitcoin and it's direct siblings. They use an hashing algorithm called 'scrypt' that is somewhat resistant to ASIC mining.

Depending on the exchange rates and hashing power that goes into the various altcoin mining, it is more profitable to mine certain altcoins at certain times.
Check out dustcoin.com for an overview of the profitability of some alt coins.
At the moment, Dogecoin seems to be on the rise, and is over 2.5 times more profitable to mine than LTC. Want to Dogetip me ? Go right ahead, my crypto coin tips adresses are to the right clolumn,

If you are good at jumping pools, you can still scoop 0.01-0.02 BTC each day with about 1Mh/s of equipment.

Power is expensive, but right now in the winter, I would still need 2000-3000 watts to keep my apartment warm. Now I am heating my place with about 2000 watts of GPU and CPU mining. So in that sense, during winter, mining is pure profit. Keeps the place warm and makes me money too.

There are also a coin called PrimeCoin (aka XPM) that are mined only by CPU power. You can mine with a pool or solo mine with a highly optimized wallet.

You can exchange certain coins for other coins on exchanges like Cryptsy and even buy cloud mining at places like CEX. If you sign up to those two places and start trading from these links right here, I get a referral bonus too :)

Other good coin exchanges are BTC-e, Vircurex

AMD cards are still king of coin mining, but the newer CUDA miners can squeeze a lot more out of Nvidia cards today. My GTX 660 used to mine at 90 k/hs, with the new miner out now, it spiked to 180. I get about 0.15 BTC and 0.010 XPM daily. This money I invest in cloud mining for the long term.

cgminer flags (GUI-miner scrypt edition)
All at intensity 17. 16 Adjust after your liking. Intensity 18 will give me about 10-20% invalid shares. 17 about 5-10. 16 seems to approach around 1-2%.

Thread concurrency should be you memory divided by 32kb.
--shaders: specify the number of shaders in your unit. (notice two --)
-w flag: set worksize. usually 256 seems to work best on all cards.
-v flag: set to 1 to use GPU vectors for speed boost.

CUDA miner flags:
-H flag: Set to 1 to borrow some CPU for 10% mining boost.
-C flag: set to 1 to use texture cache
-l flag: specify kernel and warp configuration. Just use auto.

At the moment, my mining rigs are as follows:

GPU's:

185 kh/s: GTX 660 (Gigabyte factory OC'd)
90 kh/s: GTX 550 TI (Gigabyte)
144 kh/s: Radeon 7750 (Sapphire fanless)
96 kh/s: Radeon 7750 (Gigabyte with fan)
198 kh/s: Radeon 6790
198 kh/s: Radeon 6790
283 kh/s: Radeon 6870
30 kh/s: BeaverCreek APU
30 kh/s: Caicos APU

CPU mining (XPM):

0.044 chains/d :AMD 1100T (0.050+ idle)
0.020 chains/d :AMD 960T (1 core disabled, too hot)
0.022 0.008 chains/d :Intel Core Duo
0.010 chains/d:AMD A6 APU

0.002 chains/d:Celeron M

Update: It appears that when you find a prime higher difficulty prime, you get a bigger share unlike regular mining. Awesome :D

Also, check http://www.letslearnthis.com/cryptocurrency/how-to-solo-mine-primecoin-xpm for solo ming tips

Torchlight II Robot Parts Locations

While playing Torchlight II, it can be difficult to complete one side quest: Robot Parts. It may seem a minor quest, but in fact it's the longest quest of the game, spanning over almost the entire game. The Robot is made up of 5 different parts, all located in 5 different areas/quests. When you've collected all the robot parts, a bot shows up, named Trillbot, who will send you on a final Robot quest: to kill the Three Sisters. Once you've done that, go back to Trillbot to collect your Unique Item reward. It's usually always something useful.
Here you will learn where all the Robot Parts are located, so you can collect them all.

Part 1 - Robotic Drum
Quest: Little Lost Ones

• Take Crow's Pass to The Widow's Veil
• The Drum will be at either Location A or B

Location A

Location B

Robotic Drum Part

Part 2 - Robotic Arm
Quest: Tower of the Moon

• In the Ossean Wastes, locate the Tower of the Moon 

Part 3 - Robotic Pipes
Quest: Shadow of the Skara

• In the Salt Barrens, locate Swarm Point, then locate the Brood Hives (after hitting all the plungers)

Part 4 - Robotic Body
Quest: The Cave-In

• In The Blightbogs, locate The Abandoned Sawmill

See the little skeleton hanging on the post ?
Click him and all like him to access the robotic body.

Part 5 - Robotic Head
Quest: Cacklespit's Realm

• In the Sundered Battlefield, locate Cacklespit's Realm

The wood and stones come together to form a path as you approach it.
It spawns in a different place every time.

Part 6 - Assemble Robot, talk to it
Quest: Three Sisters

• Wait until the Big Robot beside Professor Stoker goes through the door, then talk to Stoker again.
• Then, talk to Trillbot, next to Professor Stoker
• In the Sundered Battlefield, locate 3 Sisters

After you kill the three sister, return to Trillbot for unique item reward.

Optimizing your system with a RAM disk and SSD

RAM and SSD disks, how to use them?

Installing an SSD disk in your system is probably the best thing you can do to upgrade your PC, except for installing more memory into a system with rather little of it.

If you have 8 or more gigabytes of memory or more; adding a RAM disk to your system can increase performance quite a lot, as well as decreasing the wear and tear on your SSD(s) and other drives.

In addition to the raw speed of the SSD it self, the RAM disk boosts you another 200-300 megabytes per second, on top of the SSD speedup if you configure Windows and other cache-heavy appsto host it's temporary files on your RAM disk.

Host the RAM-disk image on the SSD for optimal speed when loading and saving the RAM disk on system restart. The RAM disk loads very early in the boot sequence so any apps depending on your file structure on the RAM disk will not have any problems starting up or shutting down.

My setup:

• 80 GB Intel 320 Series - With Windows 7 x64 installed. User directory not moved.
• 120 GB Kingston SV300 Series - Installed 2 years after
• The free version of AMD Radeon RAM Disk. (4 GB limit). This RAM disk is loaded and saved to the second SSD on each boot and shutdown.
• System memory is a comfy 4x4 GB DDR3 at 1600 MHz, so 16 gigabytes of RAM.
• A Lexar USB 3.0 stick. Doesn't perform any better than USB1.0! Shame on Lexar!
• 160 and 320 gigabyte SATA 2.0 disks. These are used for non-system critical applications, like painting and music programs
• Two 500 GB Hitachi SATA 2.0 disks, 5 Gbps in RAID 0 configuration on onboard Marvell controller. This RAID was my earlier 'fast' drive.

Checklist:

Steps to take assuming you have a pretty full primary SSD, a second SSD to use, and a RAM disk:

• Ensure that your SuperFetch service is running. (Vista,7,8). Look in Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services
• Move the Windows tmp and temp variables to RAM disk
• Move your various programs\ different temporary folders to the RAM disk, especially your browsers cache and/or temporary folder data!
• Move your Windows swap file to the second SSD, or disable it altogether if you are confident that you have enough RAM.
• If your system SSD is getting small, you can move the User directories over to another disk.
• Install all your favourite portable apps on your USB stick. Don't forget that this may confuse your portable apps or any other app if you fail to move everything back in case you uninstall the RAM disk.
• Re-install everything Java-related. (JRE and JDK), to the second SSD. Confirm with Control Panel->Java->Java.

The Java control panel shows you where it loads the JRE or JDK from.

Other Programs

This is programs where I have confirmed that you can configure custom paths for one thing or another.
 I will grow a list here of apps that you can re-configure:

1. WinMerge - Difff temp folders
2. PSPad - Backup files directory
3. uTorrent - Torrent files.
4. VLC - Encoder temporary files
5. Locate32 - The database file 'files.dbs' database can be moved.
6. ImgBurn - Log, project files, misc.
7. SeaMonkey - Cache
8. 7-Zip - Temp folder
9. Putty - Log files
10. GIMP - Temp files
11. WinRAR - Temp files, also for non-removable drives
12. Audacity - Temp files