Virtual Credit Cards

Well, steam has a 2 account per card number maximum. They will not lift it. This is a good thing I suppose, account security and all that. But, to trade between idle accounts you need activated (read paid) accounts. What to do?

Well, I've used two options,

Gift Cards/Prepaid Cards

Pros: 

• Quick
• easy to get. (7-11, Grocery store, Walmart, etc)
• easily disposed of when done

Cons: 

• Costs $14.95 at a minimum for the non rip-off issuers.
• Some 'value' gift cards (labeled as such) charge upwards of $3.95 PER FUCKING TRANSACTION TO USE. Which means if you spent $13.95 to preload $10, your ONE transaction for $5 at steam will cause a debit of $8.95 effectively screw you out of $1.15 you can never get back. Fuck these blood sucking leeches on society. DO NOT GIVE THEM MONEY. (Well, I learned my lesson. I paid $14 for one account.. at least it had 2 crate #30s ready for me) Double check their fees BEFORE you plop down cash for these things. 
• Cost
• Cost. (I have this thing about companies charging me to spend my money)

If you have no other option, this is your best bet sadly. I lump prepaid visa's from places like Western Union in here. They cost a lot of money to use. Being poor and unable to do math tends to hurt your pocket book.

Multiple Bank Accounts

My best friend is a banker with Wells Fargo. They have extremely high quotes of 'solutions' to get. (Basically, every account they open, option they have, and other oddities in the banking work) Because of this, I ended up with a plethora of accounts opened in my name, all for free. It helps my friend, and now its helping me. Each bank account comes with its very own credit card, which I promptly used for activating TF2 accounts. Even if you don't have a friend in the banking industry that desperately needs 'solutions', your local banker will love you for making their job less stressful, make their quota, their bosses happy AND let them sleep at night. Trust me, I've heard some horror stories, help your banker out.

Pros:

• If your bank account is free, 99% of the time additional checking accounts are. Check first.
• Costs nothing extra. $0. No fees, no additional hidden bullshit. Free.
• Helps your friend/neighborhood banker keep their job. (This helps the PERSON, not the bank. Technically, the bank loses money by you doing this. Go 99%! =)

Cons:

• Slow. Cards tied to bank accounts take time to arrive. Upwards of 3 weeks in some cases.
• Needing to keep the account open for 3 months. (Or whatever the bank needs, ask your banker.) If you close your account early, they don't get credit, and this hurts them. In effect, you've wasted that persons time. Don't do that. (This is bad because your web banking/mobile banking apps can look like utter crap with 20 accounts.)
• Additional mail. I once received, I kid you not, 133 pieces of physical mail from Wells Fargo one day. I counted it. It made for a good laugh, and great fire place kindling, maybe its a Pro not a con?
• 
  

Well, neither of these work for me. Sure I'll continue using new bank accounts to help my friend out when he needs it, but to hell with Gift cards. I'm also impatient, and want my crap RIGHT NOW. (Now that I have 3 desktops running 10+ accounts simultaneously with Sandboxie, and soon to be more, my ready to premium account list has grown quite a bit. So what to do?

Enter Virtual Credit Cards.

Entropay.com

I was recommended this website by an old Eve friend of mine. Seems hes been using it to even further hide his meta gaming exploits (much further than I ever did, thats for sure) on eve for quite some time. Why? Its a cheap virtual credit card system that can 'spoof' or in laymens terms hide your true identity when buying stuff online. Its relatively cheap (4.95% loading fee from another CC, so @ $20 load, its only $1, not bad.) and you can generate numerous cards without hassle, since each card created only costs about 20 cents.

Pros:

• Cheap compared to gift cards
• Ability to quickly generate a plethora of card numbers to activate accounts.
• Buy Anonymously from steam. (Not a huge pro, they know your IP address and can reference it to other accounts logged in from there)
• Use the balance from other websites. (I've bought from several questionable sites using this now, I approve, especially since you can 'destroy' a virtual card basically instantly.
• Their Fee schedule (found here:  https://www.entropay.com/popups/terms.schedule.php) is on par with traditional US banks. Nothing outrageous if you don't get a plastic card. 

Cons:

• $6.00USD Account 'closure' fee. Fuckers.
• Dormant card fee. If you don't use your cards every 6 months, you'll be charged.
• Doesn't really put the fee schedule up front when you open and load your first account and card.
• Entropay is located and operated from the UK. Additional restrictions may apply based on your local laws. 

I've been using the service for a week now and have funneled quite a bit of money through them for everything from normal pure caffeine purchases, to idle accounts, and even my new shoes (comes tomorrow! Woohoo!) I highly recommend this, though long term remains to be seen, so far they're everything I could hope for.

Amazon App Store - Android Market

I've been having an issue with my cell phone lately (Samsung admire). I have no space left. None. It also started to run like complete crap. I keep close tabs on the goings on inside my phone, manage the space quite well, make sure nothing stupid is there...

Then one day, I noticed my disk space was slowly being eaten up. Little by little, 250k here, half a meg there. Nothing seemed to of changed (no new programs installed, just updates to current ones). Finally, it got to the point I had 2mb left.

Long story short, seems Amazon's android app store does NOT properly clean out downloaded files. As a result this seemingly poorly written application has a 'memory' leak of sorts regarding disk space. A quick clearing of its data and BAM. My phone was LITERALLY LIKE NEW! (all 200mb back, and the phone lag went away)
Nothing is free, and in the case of Amazon's free daily app, seems your android device's resources are what it costs...

TF2Idle Program

Since I've been using Sandboxie lately (I can run 10!! 10 freaking instances at once without a single hitch!) I ran across a small utility called TF2Idle. It was written by a guy named Moussekateer and posted to the facepunch.com forums here. It automates the idle account launching via Sandboxie in a novel way.I was working on something similar, but his is much more advanced than my own. After checking the source, I tried it out. So far, my impression is, its great!

However, setting the thing up is difficult, as theres zero documentation on how to do it.. So here are some screenshots to help out. Since I'd rather be burning spies and reflecting rockets i'll just leave these here.

Also a quick note, It crashes after 30 accounts.

Don't forget to get your steam API from here.

Using Sandboxie for Idling

I've been rather unhappy lately using virtualization to idle TF2 accounts. My frustrations have been building as I run into more and more problems.

My laundry list..

• Tedious setting up each VM/Account.
• Lack of responsiveness in the host computer while running numerous accounts.
• Memory issues in x86

Its really the second problem that irritates me the most. I've been limited to 2-3 VMs running in the background when actively at my computer, and only 2 max if I want to play a game. This is slightly unacceptable.

Enter, Sandboxie. A windows sandbox utility similar to Solaris Zones, or FreeBSD jail. In short, it allows you to run a program inside it's own environment in such a way that it cannot interact in a meaninful way with the rest of the operating system. In TF2 terms.. you can run multiple copys of Steam and TF2 without the overhead of a Virtual Machine.

If you've worked with sandboxing, vms or anything similar this should come easily to you. Just think of a sandbox as a virtual machine and you're golden.

Quick setup guide:

1. Copy/Paste your steam folder. You'll need all the TF2 GFCs and relevant files. (One copy per account you want to run at a time. If you want to run 3 at a time, you'll need copies.
2. Create a new sandbox in Sandboxie, name it easy to find. Make one per account for bookkeeping purposes  (idle1, idle2, idle3, etc for example)
3. Go into the sandbox settings, Resource Access -> File Access -> Direct Access and add the Steam folder you just copied over. Like this...
   
   
4. Right click the sandbox, run program windows explorer.
5. Navigate to the Steam folder you just copied and run Steam.exe
6. Allow steam to update.
7. Add proprieties for idling in the game settings.
8. Launch TF2.

Pretty simple no?

Sandboxie can be useful for other things as well, including web browsing, and running suspect programs/games without needing a VM. (VMs are still safer in this regard)

Time

Time. It goes fast, it goes slow, sometimes too fast. Looking at my yield data, i noticed the accounts wern't always getting every possible item, I was killing them too fast and going on to the next one. So the question comes up, how do I fix this?

http://www.timeleft.info/windows-xp-timer.html

Its a simple WinXP timer, you can setup a quick timer and keep an eye on it, allowing for the full 12 hours of item drops.

I was working on a perl script that would do the same thing, but also kill and restart the server every 5 hours (total of 15 hours in the cooker) but I couldn't get it to work quite right... Perhaps at a later date.