Living and Breathing in the modern world

Just by uploading images to certain websites, it's possible to make a fair amount of money. But it's not to any old website, the images must be uploaded to specific sites. Some websites offer the opportunity to design products, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like. Your role is uploading a picture to put on the product, and then promoting the resulting product. Their role is to manufacture and ship the product.

Buy low, sell high, that's the key to successful business. In that light, many folks are buying and selling domain names in a money-making quest. Over the millennia many have gotten rich through knowing when to buy and then when to sell things. It's called investing in many circles, and domain names are just the latest in a long list of items folks have invested in. Let's take a look at some strategies for domain name investing, or domain flipping as others call it, as well as several domain name marketplaces.

Application authors need reviews in the app marketplaces to goose their sales. Would you buy the application with no reviews, or the one with 20 reviews? Several services exist where one can "buy" reviews, meaning to pay someone to write a review, which means these services need to hire reviewers.

Yesterday I wrote about making money by charging Bird scooters, but Bird is not the only scooter sharing game in town. Lime Scooters also offers a similar gig arrangement, so let's take a look at Lime. The basic customer pitch of both Bird and Lime is covering short range "last mile" travel, and the basic pitch to workers is to earn a significant amount of money by picking up, charging, and dropping off electric scooters.

All kinds of businesses, youtubers, podcasters, and more require fast accurate transcriptions from audio or video. It may be corporate training, shownotes for a podcast or youtube video, etc, the common requirement is text corresponding to the video or audio. Among the make-money-online services, REV.com allows you to work in the transcription/captioning industry and make some money. They pay out rapidly through PayPal, and handle booking clients for you.

Browsing Craigslist an ad caught my eye: "Earn $100+/night - Pick up and charge scooters on your way home." That sure caught my eye, unfortunately the reality of freelancing with Bird Scooters to recharge their scooters does not quite match up with the promise. It seems possible to earn that much a day, but you'd be scrambling to do so. Bird Scooters offers ad-hoc electric scooter rental in several cities around the USA, and is rapidly growing. It is one of several such companies, where the idea is to serve "last mile" transportation for folks who take a bus or train and need to get from the station to their office or whatever.

UserTesting is a leading service for companies hoping to evaluate their website user experience. User experience testing is about validating -- as the phrase suggests -- the user of a product or service has a good experience, or not. What UserTesting does is to match up potential testers with requests from paying customers. It is easy to sign up, and the teaser is UserTesting pays $10 for 15-20 minutes of your time, and therefore a tester will earn a solid $30/hour. But, it's not quite that simple.

Using 2nd factor authentication with online accounts, like PayPal, can keep you and your money safe. A criminal might crack your PayPal password, but logging in requires a second thing like your cell phone, the criminal is stopped cold. "Second Factor Authentication" simply means requiring a second query, like sending a text message to your cell phone, to verify the person logging in is actually you. But what if you cannot receive a text message? Reading text messages while traveling in another country is tricky. What if you need to access an online account, like PayPal, but are locked out by being unable to answer the 2nd factor authorization step?

Thanks to growing population (we're over 7 billion people and growing fast), living spaces are at a premium. With mega-cities, the question is where will we put all the people who want to live in each city? Micro-Apartments are one answer. Sized at 200-400 square feet per apartment, they're smaller than typical building codes, while allowing more people per building. Designing a livable micro-apartment is an architectural challenge, and draws on the design for living spaces on boats. A well designed micro-apartment has furniture (like beds) that can fold away, and spaces that can serve multiple purposes. High ceilings can give a feeling of more space, and ingenious use of vertical space can implement storage space even in a small apartment.