Experimenting with #Ethereum beyond testnet actually requires real #ETH. For me as an engineers it is more appealing to mine than to buy. When a home rig is busy with some Deeplearning research or simply down like today with internet gateway router reporting no egress ethernet carrier signal, I have a small backup: http://genesis-mining.com
How they operate is both a philosphical and technical discussion beyond this post. However what GM definitely suck at is their Dashboard application. To understand your current pending payouts and total accrued balance is the real frustration. I finally sat down and here is a very simple Chrome Extension which will show totals for outstanding and paid balances:
Source code and instructions: https://github.com/hadoopware/gm-payout
It is not without some quirks which are highlighted in README