Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I tried leaving this as a reply to Jesse Anderson’s A Few More Million Amazonian Monkeys but the blog comments are broken:

This is fundamentally pointless–there are only 27^9 (a-z and a space) combinations to run through. If you can do maybe 1M/s you can do them all in ~62 days. A better question is why, unless you hate the universe and want to spend our computational power producing entropy?

If you have a Best Buy giftcard, you might be wondering what to do with it. You could spend it at Best Buy, where they frisk you like a thief as you exit with your purchase, sell you overpriced goods, or force their “optimization” service on you when you try to buy a laptop. Or, you could try to convert your near-useless Best Buy giftcard into another currency. While cash is ideal, Amazon.com giftcards are almost as good. One way to do this is to sell your card to Cardpool, which take a 10% cut for the service:

Yeah, don’t do that, you’re literally throwing away your money. (OK–if there’s no Best Buy near you, maybe you have no choice…)

Did you know Best Buy sells Amazon Kindle gift cards? They do! Look for them in the accessories for e-readers section, near the Nooks, Kindles, Sony readers, and Kobos. At the Best Buy I tried out, they had both $25 and $50 denominations, making converting my $150 gift card a cinch. Even better, at least in NYC, there’s no sales tax charged on gift card sales–they’re treated as cash equivalents, I suppose.

So don’t trade your BestBuy.com giftcards in online for a 10% discount or sell them on eBay, etc. You can convert them to Amazon credit by simply going into the store and buying Kindle giftcards. The credit doesn’t appear to be specific to Kindle books–you can use it for anything sold on Amazon.

An interesting bit of German scenery from Google Maps, if you go forward one step, you go suddenly from a summer view:

To a Stark-cold winter one:

This serendipitous discovery (more discussion at Reddit) brought delight.