Poster Art by Bud Weather

 

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been keeping busy as the front man for the band Goodtime Hustle. I’m updating Source Passive because I’m excited to announce that my poster art is now available for sale on Society6!

https://society6.com/budweather

I’ve been creating poster art for our shows for quite a while, and now we’re making them available for fans to purchase and enjoy in their own homes.

The band’s poster art is a reflection of our unique sound and style, blending various genres to create a truly original experience. From bold colors to intricate designs, each poster captures the essence of our live performances.

By purchasing our poster art, you’ll be able to relive the excitement of our shows and bring a piece of our music into your home. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or just discovering our music, our poster art is the perfect addition to any room.

We have a wide variety of posters available, ranging from classic designs to more modern interpretations. You’ll find something to fit any style or taste, and our high-quality prints ensure that each poster is a true work of art.

To purchase our poster art, simply visit our  store and browse our collection. Our posters are available in a range of sizes and prices, so you can find the perfect fit for your space and budget.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to own a piece of Goodtime Hustle‘s history. Our poster art is a true reflection of our passion and creativity, and we’re excited to share it with our fans. Visit our store today and start building your own collection of Goodtime Hustle poster art!

Building a Simple Drop Ship Store

I’ve out of work since April due to COVID-19. It’s clear that the industry I work in isn’t coming back soon so I’ve been looking for something to fill in the gap. I’ve taught myself to do all sorts of interesting new things along this journey, and it’s become clear how difficult it is to find a reliable source for the nonstandard gear that I want to buy from China.

Passive Income from Drop Shipping

When researching passive income one of the most common pieces of advice  I’ve found is to “build a drop-ship store“. Somewhere along the line I followed that advice but didn’t have the time or the follow-through to edit all of the product descriptions and to do the fine-tuning needed in order to build a real store with real customers.

My software configuration was pretty solid but the bad descriptions and half-ass follow-through didn’t encourage sales.

I’m not one to hopelessly waste my time if I don’t have to. I like to “reuse” my effort whenever possible. Since I had the storefront kicking around for a while without a customer-base I decided to just start over and to use it as a clearinghouse for all the wonderful space-trash that I’ve found.

What Software to Use for Drop Ship Stores

Let’s talk about software first.

EZ Direct is built using WordPress and utilizes Woocommerce and ShopMaster. This allows me to spend my time focusing on content rather than function.

WordPress handles the heavy lifting involved in content management. WooCommerce takes care of the specialized transactional crap involved in actually running the store. ShopMaster is the perfect final piece, it actually connects your store to the common dropshipping sources.

I won’t waste either of our time with another tutorial on those. Just follow the links above to the official ones. I’m just going to cover the things you need to get a dropshipping store up running quickly.

In addition to the three core components, I’m using a theme from Theme Farmer which is designed to play nice with Woocommerce.

I have also deployed the grip of plug-ins required to do the analytics, sharing, security, and whatnot that you expect from a real store and a real website.

Plugins for WooCommerce and ShopMaster WordPress Stores

Here is a list of plug-ins that I managed to get to play nice together:

  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Badlot for WordPress – Anti-Bot
  • Loginizer – Brute Force Login Preventer
  • Classic Editor (because I’m still not wholly sold on blocks)
  • Cloudflare – Reverse Proxy
  • Contact Form 7 (required by the theme)
  • Elementor (required by the theme)
  • Google XML Sitemaps, Hustle (for the social share buttons and slide-ins)
  • Jetpack (required for tax calculation)
  • Mailchimp for WooCommerce – Mailing List Integration
  • Nextend Social Login – Login with Facebook and Twitter
  • Nextend Social Login Pro Addon – Login with Google etc…
  • One Click Demo Import (required by theme)
  • Redux (required by theme)
  • Site Kit by Google – Traffic Statistics
  • ThemeFarmer Companion (required by theme)
  • WooCommerce Admin
  • WooCommerce API Product Sync with Multiple Stores
  • WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration
  • WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Gateway
  • WooCommerce Services
  • WooCommerce Tools
  • Yoast SEO

Configuration

Configuration was sort of a bitch but if you take it one piece at a time turning on only what you need and understand, it all came together.

Adding Products

I’ve taken a unique approach to stock my store with items. I’ve started to go back through my purchases over the last couple of years and started filling the store up with those items in the ShopMaster interface. In that interface, I can edit the item and then import it into WordPress. This is the first of what will be many edits. It never seems that it’s possible to make a listing look right on the first try.

Once the item has been imported into WordPress it’s important to edit it again in order to get it filed in the right product category. I can’t seem to find a way to get this to automatically happen.

Monetizing Product Links

I only managed to get a few listings done when I started to think about what my potential users were likely to do when looking at my products. They were going to do exactly what I do, price-check the thing on Amazon.

I already have an Amazon Affiliate account that I use here and on my other sites to monetize links to products that I incidentally mention. I decided to try something unique. I added native search ads from Amazon to the description of each product.  The result is a built-in comparison tool that also monetizes lost sales. We’ll find out if this was a good idea or not soon enough.

Results

It’s taken me two long days to build the store with 150 products in it. Now it just needs to be promoted. You can take a look at my work at https://ezdirect.org/

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

How To Collect Bitcoin Faucets Quickly

What is a Bitcoin Faucet?

A Bitcoin faucet is a way to earn free bitcoins for visiting websites. Users earn free bitcoin for signing up or signing in. These Bitcoin earning websites allow you to earn free Satoshi or to get free bitcoin for completing simple tasks. I know it’s hard to believe but these sites actually do hand out free cryptocurrency.

How does a Bitcoin Faucet Work?

In order to earn free Bitcoin, users are required to claim the faucet at a regular interval, for example, a site could be offering “free bitcoin every minute” or that you can “get 1 bitcoin free instantly”. Sure it’s possible, it’s a numbers game, but, the vast majority of free BTC sites only pay out a few Satoshis per claim. Good faucets are hard to come by. The faucet operator is paying for your attention and consequently, the vast majority of faucets are chocked with spam and advertising as faucet owners desperately try to make their money back.

What is the Fastest Way to Earn Bitcoin from Faucets?

It would be nice to earn free Bitcoins instantly. Unfortunately, since payouts are paid in Satoshi ( millionth parts of bitcion) and the rate at which you are allowed to collect any particular faucet is limited, a cryptocurrency faucet collector rapidly realizes that if they are going to get free bitcoin fast they are going to maintain a current list of the best free bitcoin sites to visit and they will have to visit those Satoshi earning sites as rapidly as possible. As faucet sites come and go on a daily basis, trying to score one free bitcoin could easily become a full-time job.

What is a Bitcoin Faucet Rotator?

A Bitcoin Faucet Rotator (often called a Bitcoin Crane) is is the most necessary thing for maximizing cryptocurrency income from bitcoin and altcoin faucets. The faucet crane is an aggregator for the best bitcoin paying sites, collecting the links, and making them accessible all on one page. The Bitcoin collector then visits each of the free Bitcoin earning sites and they earn instant Bitcoin. The only problem with this model is that it relies on the owner of the faucet rotator to maintain a list of only legit bitcoin earning sites, updating it constantly to contain not only popular faucets but to weed out malicious, broken, or empty faucets.

How is Metafaucet Different?

Metafaucet is a crowdsourced cryptocurrency faucet rotator. The faucets on our list are community submitted and subjected to both human and algorithmic scrutiny. As people collect from faucets they mark any malicious or broken faucets they find. This results in a list that contains only the best bitcoin sites and ways to earn bitcoin free online.

Rather than just making a bucket list of the top 10 bitcoin earning sites or a classic “free bitcoin sites legit” page, Metafaucet tracks the refresh times and payouts on all the different faucets and directs you to the faucet with the highest available payout at any given time.

How to Earn Bitcoin Daily with Metafaucet

  • Point your web browser to https://metafaucet.com
  • Click the “Collect Metafaucet” button.
  • Once the faucet has loaded in the background, close the Metafaucet modal, and collect the faucet.
  • If the faucet fails to load behind the modal, click the provided link to open the faucet in a new tab. (Some faucets object to the “sandboxing” we apply for security purposes and need to be opened this way).
  • Once you have collected the faucet, hit refresh to be taken to the next available faucet.
  • You will find yourself collecting some faucets more than others, this is normal.
  • If you discover a broken or malicious faucet, please report it with the link that appears on the modal that appears.

That’s it! I’m not holding my breath that anyone is going to earn 1 bitcoin per hour using Metafaucet. To be honest 1 free bitcoin per day from faucets is a thing of the past. You can, however, earn satoshi automatically just by clicking a few links, solving a few captchas, and hitting refresh. Happy collecting!

Six Easy Steps to Collect Free Bitcoin

Starting Simple

I’ve been dabbling in small cryptocurrency projects for a little while now and a number of my friends have reached out and expressed their interest in how to get started with cryptocurrency. This is a simple tutorial on how-to create and fund a wallet on a cryptocurrency exchange for free.

Step One – Create a Secure Email Account for Cryptocurrency

To begin with, if you have not done so already, create a new, secure, email address to connect your cryptocurrency accounts to. I like https://tutanota.com/ for this. Having a unique email address dedicated to crypto-projects will make it harder for people to compromise your account by linking it to your identity. Don’t post this email address anywhere and don’t share it.

Step Two – Create a New Exchange Wallet on the KuCoin Exchange

Once you have your secure cryptocurrency email address you will have to go over to the KuCoin Cryptocurrency Exchange. Create an account on the exchange using your new email account. https://www.kucoin.com/

Step Three – Find Your Bitcoin Wallet Address

After you have created your KuCoin account, navigate to https://www.kucoin.com/assets/coin/BTC, and click “Deposit”. You will see your “BTC Bitcoin Wallet address” it looks something like “3Q1p3sW1BPbTvz1BFqhrMg5ipmVC31Kbtx”. Copy that and save it. You’ll need it.

Step Four – Create a Micropayments Wallet

We’re going to be collecting Bitcoin from faucets momentarily. Faucets are the magic money dispensers of the internet. Like most magic money dispensers, there’s a catch, you’re not going to get rich just by rubbing the genie’s magic lamp. Bitcoin faucets pay only tiny fractions of a Bitcoin per payout. In order to transfer these small amounts without losing a significant percentage of the funds to transaction fees, we’re going to create a Micropayments Wallet.

For this demo, I’ve chosen to use Cryptoo.me service to create our micropayments wallet. Funds will accumulate in our micropayments wallet until we have enough to justify the blockchain transaction fees required to move the coin to the exchange.

Take the Bitcoin Wallet address you copied in step three and use it to create a micropayments wallet at https://cryptoo.me. Don’t forget to use your secure email address when creating the account.

Step Five – Collect at Least 100000 Satoshi from Bitcoin Faucets

Now we’re ready to start collecting Bitcoin by visiting faucets. This morning I tested a couple of hundred alleged “Bitcoin Faucets”. A vast majority of them didn’t work. A few of them tried to hack me or spam me in some way. I was able to narrow it down to twenty-five faucets that appear “mostly harmless”. These Bitcoin Faucets worked with Cryptoo.me AND paid out on the morning of June 17, 2020.

Functioning Faucets as of June 17, 2020

  1. https://zadeshare.com/crypto/bitcoin/
  2. https://bitscoin.space/bubbleshooter/
  3. http://vrdbest.co.za/
  4. http://minibitcoins.in/claim/
  5. http://todaybitco.in/faucet/
  6. https://www.mrcrypto.me/speed-racer/
  7. https://bitscoin.space/bitcoin-faucet/
  8. https://criptoservis.site/kran1.html
  9. https://10btc.ru/faucet-2/
  10. https://10btc.ru/bitcoin-fauset2/
  11. https://tsspot.com/bitcoin-faucet-125248/
  12. https://cryptostashs.com/bitcoin-faucet/
  13. https://bitcoinx.ru/
  14. https://binary-btc.space/
  15. https://godsunchained.tk/bitcoin-faucet/
  16. https://bitcoinzadarmo.sk/en/btc-satoshi-faucet/
  17. http://icecolddice.com/
  18. https://satoshimodels.com/faucet/
  19. http://todaybitco.in/faucet/
  20. http://bitcoindevelopment.es/faucet/
  21. https://askpaccosi.com/faucet/
  22. http://mudawarin.xyz/bitcoin-faucet-cryptoo/
  23. https://cryptogate.world/
  24. https://pornfountain.com
  25. https://pornfaucet.com

Step Six – Transfer Funds from Micropayment Wallet to Exchange Wallet

Finally, withdraw your collected funds to your KuCoin Wallet by going to https://cryptoo.me/withdraw/

What’s Next

Next, you’ll start trading your crypto on the exchange, using it for economic transactions, or mining it yourself. As I get time I will explain how to do these things here on Source Passive. Until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tutorial on getting started with Bitcoin for free. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

Full disclosure – Whenever possible, I collect referral rewards on links traffic. My policy of accepting funds from advertisers does not imply my endorsement of their service unless specifically noted.

Turning Problems into Passive Income

COVID-19 Killed My Day Job

With the event industry completely shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve found myself with a little extra time on my hands lately. I’ve been putting that time to use developing my various passive income projects from the safe social distance of my apartment.

One of my projects, Checkered Hat, has been putting on live events in the Seattle area for a couple of years now and we’re making the transition into a more technology-driven format. It could get complicated but, for now, it’s not. One of the first steps is to take the shows and live video stream them online.

In order to pull it off, I’ve had to buy some additional equipment. I’m a production gear hoarder and have dabbled a little into equipment rental, outfitting shows here and there with my own personal collection of mismatched, but serviceable, equipment. It’s always been a fly by the seat of your pants, at night, kinda gig. Consequently, I always just stole numbers off of other people’s invoices and copied them into mine when I needed to determine the rental price of an item.

How Much Should I Charge?

Nobody had ever taught me how to calculate a fair rental price for something. Everything was monkey-see-monkey-do. With this latest batch of purchases, it’s become clear that my collection of gear is, to put it in corporate-speak, creatively varied. Nobody has exactly this same collection of crap. I’m out of my cut-and-paste element. I could see no viable choice but to actually start figuring things out for myself.

Rule 34 Applies

I did what anyone with a smartphone would do. I Googled it. There had to be some sort of free online profit margin calculator for equipment rental. There are a ton of event rental companies offering everything from overhead projectors to ladder rental. It only made sense that they were using a profit margin formula of some sort. I just didn’t know what it was. Search as I may, I couldn’t find a financial calculator that could tell me the gross profit from renting a piece of gear or how much I was supposed to realistically rent it to someone for.

Eventually, buried deeply in a contractor’s forum that looked like it dated from the late 90’s I found the rant and subsequent flames I was looking for. It’s a by-product of Rule 34. Just about every common question has already been asked; answered poorly and debated ad nauseum by people who spend their days obsessing over whatever particular subject is being debated. If it exists, there’s been a flame war on a message board about it. 

I did the painful part for you. I read all that crap. I came, I saw, and I built it into a spreadsheet. Once it was all working, my next thought was, “how do I apply this dynamically to all of my items?” Another no-brainer…

Some People Can’t Help Themselves

I took my spreadsheet and duplicated it in PHP code. I slapped that puppy into a quick one-page website on a subdomain and built a quick API. For a final touch, I added a couple of ads. It needs to create income somehow, and I’d been itching to put that Gaff Gun ad somewhere.

You may be wondering what this has to do with passive income. Let’s talk about that. The actual renting of gear is only partially passive. There’s still significant effort involved. I do production because of my passion for it as much as for the money, I wasn’t really thinking about that.

Turn Problems into Opportunities

This is the process I used to find my niche passive income opportunity. As I tackled my real-life problem, I was forced to look for solutions. Once a solution was discovered my thoughts turned to reduce the effort required to implement the idea. Implementing automation led to a whole different set of problems. Luckily, I’m a Swiss army knife, not a utility knife. I believe that the route to optimum value creation in this case was to apply my cross-industry skills in a creative way to the situation.

We all have strange combinations of things that we know. By identifying where these unique combinations of knowledge and skill reveal unique solutions, we identify opportunities to create value. 

In order to create a production rental price and profit calculator, I needed to understand not only the niche of production equipment rental but also business bookkeeping, a little tax law, and some irritatingly convoluted math.  To implement it, I needed to have some basic coding skills. To make a profit off of it required me to use SEO skills, keyword-focused writing, and marketing. 

None of my skills are all that unique in and of themselves. The combination, however results in a viable passive income project. The project is valuable to a small-enough niche to have little competition while still having organic search traffic. The best part is that I needed to do most of the work anyway to accomplish my original goal of figuring out what a fair price to rent my event production equipment would be. Any income that comes from my production rental price and profit calculator will be truly passive.

The Finished Production Rental Price and Profit Calculator

You can take a look at the finished product here:

https://rentalprice.sourcepassive.com/

Do you have an idea of how this solution can be implemented into one of your projects? I have built a simple API for the calculator to make integration easy.

Email me for access: [email protected]

A Bunch of Hot Air?

I started college in 1995. When I stepped into the computer lab for the first time I discovered a nubile internet and I was ready to absorb as much of it as possible. It’s worth questioning whether it was endless sleepless nights waiting for the 14400 modem to download blocky, blinking websites to my 386 DX 40 running Slackware or my incredible cannabis consumption that had a greater effect on my poor attendance. The world may never know…

After my brief bout of college, I immediately teamed up with a local serial entrepreneur and did what everyone did at that time, I started a dot.com. Rootnet.net started life as a network solutions provider for business. The stated goal was to connect legacy equipment to modern networks. It sounded like a good idea at the time. What we actually wound up doing was revolutionizing the world of domain squatting. 

The internet was the wild west. Anything was possible; buying leerjet.net for $100 and turning a profit on it for example. 

Inlandwaterhouseboats.com maybe wasn’t as good of a deal…

Regardless, it was boom and bust. I made a million dollars. Everything was in my partner’s name and I had been working on a handshake. When I started to get flakey, he folded the company and took the profit. I’m incredibly grateful to him. It wasn’t until then that I truly understood business.

Over the years I’ve had a few other tech businesses. There was that one time I got slashdotted… But that’s another story. I think I had a point around here somewhere. Oh yeah, I have always been enamored with tech. I have big ideas, forget to start small and bite off more than I can chew. Lately, I’ve been obsessing over the potential of blockchain, P2P networking, and IoT technology, I went so far as to map out a peer to peer network concept that pays participants in a cryptocurrency.

I guess I don’t get out much.

Turn’s out it exists already. The project has already raised $51 Million in funding. It’s called Helium and it’s “LongFi” wireless network debuted in Austin, Texas this June. Helium has already partnered up with the Lime company to control the nonsense associated with the endless armies of rideshare bikes. The evil giant Nestle has plans to use it to track water consumption from its ReadyRefresh coolers as well.

The $498 price tag is a bit of a turn-off but, if as advertised, 200 or less of their devices could blanket a city in wifi, the cost could be well worth it. Once again, as with Pi, the actual value of the cryptocurrency is somewhat dubious. The idea itself though is cool as hell. I wish I had thought of it first.

I’m not quite ready to shell out $500 to own one but if you’re considering it, follow this link: http://fbuy.me/nATFy  because I’d love to give it a try when it rolls out in Seattle and if enough people buy one through that referral link, I’ll get my chance.

I Hate to Work or Theory of the Greater Pi



I am beginning to realize that I hate having to work. I don’t so much hate the work itself as I hate being required to do it. I have given it a lot of thought and I believe that my options fall into two broad categories:

  1. “Suck it up Buttercup!”  – Work, save, strive, and slave; so I can retire old and tired and comfortable.              OR…
  2. Find another way.

The first one sounds very noble. I come from a Midwest, working-class family. They could appreciate that. The only thing is, I’ve always been sort of the black sheep of The Family. 

Have I mentioned how I feel about work? 

Therefore, I am left with number two. If you happen to know me IRL, you may have noticed I have a little bit of an OCD thing going on sometimes. It really comes into play when I go down the rabbit hole with a new idea. One thing leads to another until…

Here we are.

I once read an account of a man who traded a paperclip for a house. This blog will chronicle my journey to do something similar. I’m starting with a moderately normal job and a moderately normal life. I want to quit my job and run away to join the circus. Or something like that…

My very first shenanigans to be featured here will be a seriously dubious cryptocurrency called Pi. It has a pyramid scheme feel but, I can’t quite find the angle. You put an app on your phone, click on it once a day, and you start collecting the crypto. There is limited data on what’s really going on and everything has that cut and pasted tagline sort of feel.

The marketing message to data ratio seems high and you’re encouraged to invite people to the app to increase your daily earnings. This I believe is actually a good thing. This is probably a sh*tcoin but if there’s a lot of interest suddenly, there’s maybe an opportunity to make some money off of it somehow. C’mon, it’s apparently “being developed by a group of Stanford PhDs.” What more could you ask for?

To join Pi, follow this link https://minepi.com/budweather and use my username (budweather) as your invitation code.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

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