Charity Engine – BOINC

If you’re anything like me, you have every intention of being a good person. You’d love to get out there and donate your time and money to a variety of charities and causes, but you just don’t have the time. You also leave your internet connected PC on all the time, despite knowing that it is using electricity. The Charity Engine offers an opportunity to help charity and scientific causes while putting that otherwise wasted electricity to good use. It also offers you a chance to win a prize.

The Charity Engine is a recent development on the long running services provided by BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC uses the CPU processing capability of internet connected computers to process data for a variety of scientific causes that cannot afford to rent time on supercomputers. It was originally developed for use by SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). It has since been used for research on a variety of causes as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.

The Charity Engine takes things a step further, using the same software base. Rather than simply choosing a variety of causes you wish to support, the Charity Engine rents out your CPU power to anyone who will pay, and then divides those profits to donate them to charity and to encourage users to join by giving it away as a prize via a lottery of users based on your production. As you run the Charity Engine, you rack up credits for the amount of CPU usage your computer provides the network, which are then used in the lottery. In addition to those who will pay for the CPU power, the Charity Engine also devotes a small portion of the CPU power to those aforementioned projects on BOINC.

For more information, go to The Charity Engine – How it Works.

Sign up for the Charity Engine and put your computer to work for charity. Use the invite code FRIEND.

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Back At It

After very nearly a year without a post to my blog, I am finally back at it. The reasons for not posting anything recently are the normal boring reasons no one really wants to hear about. I mean, yeah, it’s primarily because of laziness. Also, I finally understand why people with kids never have time to get anything done. It takes some adjusting.

In addition to finally posting a new post, I have also gotten around to updating my WordPress Plugin, WP SimpleWeather. That is the primary purpose of this post.

WP SimpleWeather Version 0.2.2

For anyone who might feel the need to update to the latest version, I would like to apologize. Version 0.2.1 of the plugin saw me add in some functionality to allow for a clean uninstall of the plugin. My intentions were good. Unfortunately, I made a mistake, and set it to perform this clean uninstall upon deactivation, rather than explicitly on uninstall. So, when you update the plugin, you will lose all related settings. I’m sorry. But this won’t happen again. I’ve fixed it in version 0.2.2, and it will not remove the settings on deactivation, but only on uninstall.

At the request of Thomas Nielsen, I have added the capability to change the metric units for windspeed from km/h to m/s. This isn’t a big update at all. Unfortunately, it took a fair amount of time due to my recent lack of time. I had to relearn my own plugin. It felt a bit strange. Any way, I hope you enjoy it. If there are any issues at all, please let me know.

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