October 11, 2020

I have been in the process of installing Gentoo. Though it has been fun and I have learned so much throughout the process, the process itself is pretty long to the point where I had to pause the KVM Virtual machine in Virt-Manager to continue the process sometime later today. The IRC channel for Gentoo on Freenode has been SUPER helpful though, and overall, the process has been so much better than trying to do the same thing for Arch or something. Plus they allow you totally ignore ‘systemd’ which is a backdoor to avoid putting on your system anyway.

Though I haven’t found any Librebooted computers worth getting yet, I still want to move in that direction to maybe score a Thinkpad X60 or Thinkpad X200 on eBay so I can libreboot it for that purpose. In the worst scenario, I could even look into building a computer whose motherboard is Libreboot compatible as well.

I was looking into packet radio, and somehow found the “radio.garden” website, which allows you to tune into radio stations throughout the world. It allows you to move a virtual globe to select any nearby radio stations. They’ve even got ones at “the ends of the earth” including an arctic radio station, which is pretty neat. You can check it out here:

I found this packet radio network where they have created an IP-based digital network for Ham Radio use, but it seems to be primarily in the Washington state area. Though I have no plans at all to move to that part of the U.S., it is pretty neat though. I would do love to run a similar mesh network through the South though, so it’s definitely something to model after:

Sometime yesterday, I was doing a TON of research in credit card churning, and how to go about doing it. I think it’s a pretty valid thing to do, especially since the economy sucks for anyone like me in my generation that doesn’t have any real estate, and is just continuously working week to week to just to pay bills, and get pretty much nothing else in return . Sure, I could blame boomers for basically rigging the real estate market for what it is now to the point where you can’t even fathom how to own a reasonably priced house or even land for that matter sometimes without somehow having to convert a fixer-upper property to make it somewhat affordable.

However, the positive way around that would be to just figure out how to play around those stupid barriers, and rig your current financial system for your own benefit.

Though a lot of what you initially read about the credit card churning subject are articles by credit card companies telling you why its so bad, I have found so many different sources contrary to that narrative to the point where its pretty obvious that these same credit card companies don’t want you doing it in the first place.

Sure, a lot of the deals are primarily based on travel points for flights, hotel stays, etc, so if you’re not really intro travel, it’s not THAT great. However, there are still good intro offers for a lot of credit cards to abuse with the minimum spending limit and to just cancel the card before the annual fee is charged, so if you plan it right and don’t over do it, its not that bad.

I’m not going to link to any credit card churning sources I found, since its really really subjective, and is kind of YMMV (your mileage may vary), so its not for everyone. All I know is that it would definitely work for me.

That being noted, I’m totally going to check it out as it looks like a good way to gain some extra cash on the side to maybe invest in a few stocks. It’s the best I could do before having to becoming some cryptocurrency shill or something. Even people who are into trying to find the next cryptocurrency just irk me because they don’t even use the coin itself, and just literally convert it back to dollars. In that respect, the only reason to ever get into trading cryptocurrencies is to abuse it for some kind of get rich quick scheme. You might as well try one of those pyramid scheme type “Poor Dad, Rich Dad” seminars at that point since both efforts would totally result in failure.

I’m glad that I figured out that people are just into cryptocurrency for that reason alone, so its something to just avoid altogether.

In terms of stock tickers, I found a lot of good links for that purpose, which I might turn into a few dashboards on this site for later use with the help of some Python 3 based webscrapers.

A lot of the stock software I found was primarily Windows and Mac based, but I DID happen to find some Linux based software (thankfully :/).

Here’s a link for any Linux based financial software:

The “JStock” Linux stock software alone looked pretty promising as well, so I might considering figuring out how to use it as well:

Enjoy the day!

~ Sam