Matthew Miner's Basic-ish BlogMatthew Miner's Blog

Sometimes I might say something

Landscaping is a good job that many people do either full-time or on the side. However, people aren't always willing to pay you for providing them your services after the work's been done. Many landscapers are small enterprises that may not have a great process to ensure payment and may not know what their rights are under the law.

One idea is the possibility of filing a mechanic's lien. These allow people get a security interest in the property for certain work they do on a property. Typicall...

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A Help when Coffee Hurts Your Teeth

PERSONAL PRODUCTS
My wife happy about her new coffee

A moderate tragedy struck my small family recently. My wife began having pain on the left side of her mouth. She found a dentist, and got the problematic cavities fixed, but her teeth still hurt. She tried to be patient, and Sensodyne helped, but she still has pain anytime she eats or drinks anything hot or cold and worse: anytime she drinks coffee.

I wouldn't say she's an addict, but my wife is still a coffee aficionado. She drinks it most days both for sharpness and scrumptiousness. The pain...

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My wife is huge fan of the Nancy Drew games, so since we've been playing through them, which has been quite fun for both of us. However, some of them are rather old at this point, which occasionally causes some problems. I recently bought Nancy Drew: Secret of the Old Clock on Steam. We played it for a few hours Friday night, then went to play it again yesterday, only to be greeted by the following error:

InitDirectDraw(), SetDisplayMode() - DDERR_UNSUPPORTED - Action not supported.

So it says "DirectDraw" in there. That's an old graphic API in Microsoft's DirectX...

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Medial Equipment Sale Scam for Attorneys

SCAMS LAWYERING
The photo of the MRI machine that was attached to the email

My firm received an interesting email yesterday from a Gmail address:

Hello [name],

I have been contacted by Holy Cross Hospital regarding purchasing our Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Equipment. We have been negotiating and I have agreed to sell The 2012 used GE Discovery MR450 MRI Equipment to Holy Cross Hospital, 2701 W 68th St, Chicago, IL 60629. We have discussed and agreed on the purchase price and outlined terms for the transaction. I need your legal assistance to help draft a...

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Bitcoin is commonly known to those with more than a cursory knowledge of it to be a horribly inefficient product. Indeed, its very premise is to use large amounts of energy computing pointless math problems to prevent fraud without having a trusted agent verifying transactions. Yet, if you search about it's energy consumption compared to that of traditional banking, you'll just find tons of copy-and-pasted fluff pieces about how Bitcoin only uses half of much energy as traditional banking. Is this true? How can this be?

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There's a lot of talk about student debt forgiveness. (And not the forgiveness of PSLF for public service.) On the campaign trail Biden promised to forgive $10,000 of each student loan debtor, although this promise has seemingly been broken. Currently he's just extending Trump's pause, seemingly waiting for elections to pass. People who are further left even want a one-time forgiveness of all student loan debt.

Student loan debt is a huge issue. Currently public student loan debt totals...

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