Bits N Pizza’s 002 – Bitcoin, car shows and the Google Algorithm.

When there’s not big enough talking points for a full meal but lots of little slices to satisfy any curious content hunger. Also can we roll back the latest Google Algorithm please?

Oh good, Bitcoin’s in the news again

And it’s not the usual doom and gloom story where the price of Bitcoin has suddenly dropped to that of a pretty average cup of coffee. No apparently it’s rising again which is good news for investors or people like me who have a meagre haul and have been wondering for practically forever if the damn thing was going to ever do anything even remotely interesting.

Yes, cards on the table here I do own some cryptocurrency. It’s not much and once upon a time it was worth a lot more than what I have currently (which I think is pretty much everyone’s cryptocurrency life at the moment really.) I used to trade, I used to hunt for profits (as small as they were) and in the beginning I actually turned a tiny profit. But in the last couple of years like the value, my interest has certainly waned. In fact once I learnt about coins that generate other coins through ownership (look don’t get me to try to explain it, I’m not sure I can) I figured why not build up a set and forget portfolio that would continue to grow and I’d only bother to look at it come tax time to work out how much I owe the government.

So while I held some coin that doesn’t really do much apart from seemingly drop in value from time to time (Bitcoin) and the occasional stupid bandwagon idea (Shiba Inu), the rest of the coins have been put to work either generating more of themselves or other coins:

AL’S TINY HAUL CRYPTO LIST

Neo – Generates Gas monthly
Ontology – Generates Ontology Gas monthly
Verasity – Does this do anything? I can’t remember.
Axie Infinity – Generates more of itself daily
Etherium – Just sits there looking smug
Ziliqa – Generates more of itself daily
BNB – Generates more of itself daily
Kava – Generates more of itself daily
Polygon – Generates more of itself daily
MultiverseX – Generates more of itself daily
Cronus – Generates more of itself daily
Cosmos – Generates more of itself daily
Kusama – Generates more of itself daily
Algorand – Generates more of itself daily
Rchain – Died a nasty death, forever stuck in my portfolio as an awful reminder

And in my mind when I switched to mostly generating coins, I pictured my little group of shitcoins to look like this hardworking team:

The trouble is, the cryptocurrency mines over the last few years have been more like the Mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings. You can try to dig for treasure but it’s highly likely something will come out and attack you or worse, possibly bury you alive.

Which means while the amount of coin has risen daily, the value certainly hasn’t. The equivalent of having a pile of dirt when everyone has decided a concrete garden would be far less maintenance.

But hey, Bitcoin’s on the rise again and when it goes up, usually everything else does too. Which means my haul is worth slightly more than late August this year when it tanked. Now all I have to do is hope it continues to grow for the next..uh…decade? In order for me to finally find it worthwhile to sell the whole shebang and move the coin into shares.

Facebook to the rescue?

I just don’t get it. I use Facebook to sell cars previously and always found myself drowning in an absolute sea of assclowns and time wasters. But my recent Carsales experience has proven just as fruitless. With the amount of people suddenly ghosting me mid conversation, I’ve been ready for Halloween for almost six months. Reddit pointed out recently that a car like mine in it’s current condition was nowhere near what I was asking for it and Carsales was probably not the best place to park it for sale either.

And so with no confidence whatsoever, I put it up on Facebook with the barest of details and a low price and surprisingly I woke to three messages the next day. Yes two of them were the quintessential Facebook Marketplace experience ‘Is it still available?’ but the last one the guy read the ad, made an offer and all going well will bring up a trailer this weekend and I’ll be free of my headgasket blues forever.

Six months vs less than twenty four hours. I would’ve thought it would have been the other way around but hey, welcome to car selling in 2023.

33% is not a great ratio

So the new hosts of Top Gear Australia have been announced and it’s going to be Beau Ryan, Blair Joscelyne and Anthony Johnathan LaPaglia. And out of this trio, can I just say that they’ve absolutely nailed the choice of hosts with Blair because it’d be difficult to find someone who loves cars and car culture as much as he does as one half of the quite excellent Mighty Car Mods on Youtube:

Blair (aka Moog) has been doing his fun automotive channel with co host Marty for years and would be the perfect fit for a show about cars and the occasional fun and adventure you could have with them.
The trouble is, unless I’m horribly mistaken here – I don’t think Beau and Johnathan are car guys and if they are, probably nowhere near as passionate about them as Moog is.
Because when you think back to the original Top Gear out of the UK before it fell over and the hosts moved to Amazon to continue their car madness success, the hosts were certainly different to each other in so many ways…but they were all (and forever will be) car nutters.

And I truly believe that’s what created such incredible magic with this line up too – three completely different blokes united by the love of things with wheels (and having a producer that came up with zany challenges certainly didn’t harm things.) And even though they all had different tastes and styles, you could just sense the friendship between the three from the get go and that’s what made things unique.

Can they capture that here with the Australia version though? Well the jury’s definitely out on that once considering they tried before and things didn’t work that well.

But I certainly do wish this new line up all the best because of the big boots to fill. And working in the media for a couple of decades now, I can certainly sympathise with the challenge they face in getting themselves over to an audience that still has such a fondness for the original product. I hope Paramount gives them every chance and who knows, perhaps in a years time I’ll be raving about this series as much as I’ve enjoyed the F1 madness of Drive to Survive.

BUT THEORETICALLY IF I WAS PICKING THE TEAM?

I get that Beau and Johnathan have the hosting chops (and a Q rating whatever that is, sounds fancy!) and that’s what producers are looking for to steer the ship with a steady hand on the tiller, people who know what they’re. However if I had the go ahead (and funding) to pick and choose the hosts for this gig then I’d certainly be considering:

Marty – MCM

An absolute no brainer this one because remember my point about friendship with Jeremy, Richard and James from Top Gear above? Marty and Moog have that great tangible connection right there. They know each other so well, they have been working together for years and have a beyond solid understanding of getting messy and having ridiculous fun with cars which is what I’d like to see in any car show really.
(Although the publicity of Moog being part of the new TG certainly won’t hurt the figures for MCM’s YouTube channel at all as plenty of people will look to see where he came from.)

Adam Morris from Redriven

Like Marty, Adam’s a presenter of a super popular YouTube channel. Unlike Marty though, Adam’s Redriven is all about used cars and whether or not certain models are worth looking into. Combined with the super useful review site of the same name (seriously, if you’re looking into a used car here in Australia see if the Redriven team have given it a look over first), Adam has a fantastic and informative presenting style that doesn’t verge into car chat malarkey that’ll have most punters wondering if he just made the terminology up. Plus he’s made a career of working with affordable used cars which to me in any format, is far more appealing than the latest Ferrari.

And the comedy option – The head mechanic from Snakefab (Snake)

‘This shitbox!’ Look I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about this dude other than he’s named Snake and works in Queensland but out of all the junk that Facebook throws at me reels wise (and it’s a lot!) his quirky workshop videos are hilarious. Not to mention creative with some of the seamless transitions from broken to fixed as he quickly takes us through various work.

Yes his swearing would need to be toned down but every true car show needs a slightly mad mechanic don’t they? And this dude would be perfect!

And finally today – please explain yourself Google Algorithm

Now maybe somewhere deep inside Google Chrome there’s an option I haven’t ticked (or maybe I have accidentally?) recently, because in the last month or so everything Google related has gone sloooooooow.

Google Images – slow to load, clicking on the occasional picture doesn’t do anything. Bing images on the other hand? Stupidly quick to load.

Google Drive – Multiple reloads needed to load up just to get my stuff out and this is a service I use almost daily.

Gmail – Either works or doesn’t. Luckily a refresh gets it going again.

Google Adsense – Works…but recent changes have given this one a massive kick to the plums. Which leads me to the next one:

The latest Google Algorithm – Okay yes, don’t bite the hand that feeds you, I get that. But after their latest Google algorithm was rolled out, my visitor numbers both here, Almigo’s adventures and at Driveanotherday came crashing down in a screaming heap. Before the roll out I’d make a couple of bucks from all the ads each month – not earth shattering coin I’ll think you’ll agree but hey, to me it all adds (geddit?) up. Now? I’m lucky if I make a cent a day.
I kid you not. People still come to read what I write obviously but now being harder to find in search engines, not so much anymore. Less people, less ad impressions. Less ad impressions, more disappointment. More disappointment = not just me wondering why Google moved the goal posts even further away from small time bloggers like myself to concentrate on massive sites with huge numbers already. I really don’t want to stop blogging ever, but you’re not making this any easier in crazy years with so many bills to pay. – not when everyone out there is taking SEO steps to be found in the first place. Come on Google and Google algorithm, why not help out the little guy here and inspire us to create more?

Apparently it helps to have an engaging site with plenty of helpful information and lots of back and forth with comments between authors and readers. Which I’d get onto were they to actually happen here and not the spammy rubbish of backyard pharmaceuticals attempting to flog their stuff. (Just on that, a big shout out to the WordPress plugin Antispam Bee to helping to halt that idiocy in its tracks.) But while possibly not informative, I certainly hope what I write here is entertaining and hopefully one day the boffins behind the next Algorithm will consider that as their next focus.

But like my Bitcoin holdings making me a millionaire soon, I’m certainly not holding my breath here on a Google algorithm rollback or improvement anytime in the near future..

Edit: What to do if your Google Chrome is slow to load things and occasionally unresponsive

A massive shout out to Reddit user McFatty7 who provided an instant quick fix for this one:

Turning the memory saver off for me made Google Drive and everything saved in it load up so much faster than usual and it got Google Images fast loading and responsive once again. Try it and see if this easy fix gets things up and running for you too!