Coined For Money: Round-Up Jan. 14-20, 2013

Customizable is this week's keyword. I made this blog to talk about the low value coins I often find. Now the world is catching up with ATMs that dispense more than just $20s and popular shows talking about small change. Before all that goodness I made a custom heat map of my world coins finds which I hope to upload for everyone to use, eventually.

Heat map of coins I own, the darker green shows the most and white means none or less than 1% were found.

Heat map not including the U.S. or Canada, the percentages change so more countries are visible. Still Africa has the most gaps.

A Chloropeth map is a shaded map that shows the most and least of stuff. In my case I used Microsoft Excelto alter an existing map with the amount of coins I own.Since the amount of U.S. and Canadian coins are so large it throws off the map so removing them properly shows every country in my collection. A useful visual tool I hope to perfect and share.

Finally the banks are rolling out ATMs that give out $1 and $5 bills and soon will also give out coins. I have been needing this for years and hopefully this will improve my currency finds.

Great quote from 2 Broke Girls sums up why I started blogging:

Caroline: Max, have you seen my phone? I wanna take a picture of this bad tip and put it on Instagram. Getting loose change used to be so depressing, but now I can share it with strangers.

Now if you can find an ATM that spits out $10 bills then keep an eye out for this key 1999 $10 star note.