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Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

2018-09-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not doing too well keeping up with my reading challenge this year, but moving across a couple states doesn't really help!

This was definitely a very entertaining read!

The writing style took me a little while to get into, but then I got on a roll and really enjoyed it. There are funny "fourth wall" type breaks where the author starts going off on tangents about the typewriter he is using to write the book and things like that. All interjected into an enjoyable story with some pretty flowery characters.

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Dune by Frank Herbert

2018-03-10T17:32:00.001-08:00

Dune by Frank Herbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was good to be able to check off one of the longer books on our reading list! I thought it started out a bit dry, and lots of odd names were thrown around, which I have a tendency to struggle to keep track of. I was lucky that I had some travel this month that gave me some longer periods of time to read. I think this one, at least the first half, would have been difficult to keep up with if I had read it piecemeal as my reading tends to be lately.

It definitely ramped up though, and I got much more into it. It was nice to finally read a very classic sci-fi novel. I believe it is the first in a series, but I don't know if I'll be jumping into those just yet. I still have lots of books on this list to tackle!

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Dayworld by Philip José Farmer

2018-02-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Dayworld by Philip José Farmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a really fun read. The setting is a future world where overpopulation has forced humanity to split up and 1/7 lives their lives in each day of the week. The remaining days, they are in a form of suspended animation. This story follows a "daybreaker" who go against the system to live in every day of the week, with a new and unique personality for each.

It was a fairly easy read, though there were times where I had trouble keeping up with all the names, especially since the main character ends up having 7! The premise was cool, and I definitely enjoyed it. It was a nice book to get back into the habit of reading with and to kick off making better progress on our reading list!

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The Twits by Roald Dahl

2018-01-05T04:31:00.000-08:00

The Twits by Roald Dahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a total cheater book for me. We started our large reading list on January 10th and this year has been so crazy with the growing family that I haven't read a single book! I didn't want to have to log a big goose egg, so I found one of the shortest books on our list and I ordered it, haha.

It was a very short read (like 1 sitting, just winding down at night) and I found it mildly entertaining. Not really sure I'm on board with it being part of a "must read" list like the one we are working from, but it was entertaining enough. More something that I could read to my kids in an afternoon or over a couple of nights.

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2017 Ford Fusion Energi - My First 1000 Miles

2017-02-10T11:51:00.001-08:00

As a (now former) owner of one of the VW cheater diesels, I finally got the paperwork together to go through with the buy-back process. This means it was car shopping time! When I got the Jetta, environmental friendliness was high on my list of priorities (little did I know). That remains true, and if anything, has strengthened! So I began my normal car buying process (spreadsheets for the win!). I focused on hybrids and electrics, though Maricruz preferred a larger car as it would also be serving time as a munchkin carrier. Not many large hybrids/electrics are available, and those either only get good gas mileage for an SUV (Toyota RAV4 Hybrid - 34/30mpg), are expensive (Tesla Model X - $77k base), or both (Toyota Highlander Hybrid - 30/28mpg and $47k base). Given this, I mostly focused on the larger hybrids and settled on the Ford Fusion. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go with the cheaper regular hybrid, or go ahead for the Energi (the plug-in version). I decided to go with the Energi because not only is the battery larger (ability to drive electric-only and longer range), but being a plug-in could give me a bit of a preview if I decided to make the leap into full electric next time we are in the market. It has been an interesting ride so far! It took a few days of getting used to, but I have pretty well gotten into the habit of plugging it in when I get home and unplugging and putting away when I head out. Unfortunately, you aren't supposed to use extension cords (most sites say you can if you get a very heavy gauge one), and our garage doesn't have many accessible plugs. Luckily, I discovered that the garage door opener uses a normal plug and only uses one of the two available. It feels a little janky having the cable hanging down from the middle of the garage ceiling, but it gets the job done. One of the things I really appreciate about the car is the amount of information at your fingertips. There are a wide variety of choices for information display (from "leaves" that grow when you drive more efficiently, to breakdowns of how you are doing with regard to different categories of driving and the resulting effects on efficiency), and I always love information! You can do some customization as well. In addition to dash readouts, there are also displays on the main media console you can pull up, like one that gives a diagram of your car and the current direction of energy flow (e.g. the battery is running the electric engine and cabin components, or the gas engine is running and also charging the battery). I knew pretty soon I was going to have to make a post, because it just felt too geeky not to share! I had initially figured I would write up a post summing up my first tank of gas, but it turns out that was taking too long and I got impatient. So first 1000 miles it is! I found that having all these readouts about how I was driving had a great effect on my driving style. I tend to like to go fast and drive semi-aggressively, but having so much information in my face indicating how negative an effect that was having has reduced me to grandpa-ness, lol. I definitely am much more aware of my accelerations and braking early, and I have realized some benefits for sure. As you can see in the photo, I averaged a whopping 229.6 mpg for the first 1000 miles, and used about 3/8 of my 14 gallon gas tank. I'd call that pretty impressive! Unfortunately, I don't have a good method to determine exactly how much electricity it consumed for charging, but all I have read indicates that electric miles are notably cheaper than gas miles. With my conservative driving, I am getting pretty close to 28 miles in electric-only mode (which well exceeds the advertised 21 mile electric range). Only downside is that, when I have munchkin pickup duties, my daily commute is closer to 29 miles. So I can almost squeeze it out, but pretty consistently revert to regular hybrid mode near the end of the drive. I've explored some options to get that last little bit covered, but so far I haven't seen a viable one. One option I have found is to drive to the nearest free charger (~2.5 miles), but that means I have to use close to a full hour for lunch, plus it seems silly to add 25 miles a week to my driving just to charge. Alternatively, I've been exploring the solar panel option. While it doesn't generate much, I think a solar panel in a Florida parking lot could definitely get me that extra mile on most days. It is just a matter of actually getting the electricity generated into that pesky battery! That or see if I can convince my job to put in some EV chargers ;-) Overall, I've been very pleased. The trunk is tiny, but I don't really utilize it much, and the cabin is more spacious than the Jetta was. Plus, knowing that I am pretty confident that I made an environmentally friendly choice this time makes me very happy too!

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

2016-07-17T13:05:00.001-07:00

The Postmortal by Drew Magary
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A pretty fun read. Written as a journal from a single protagonist explaining what goes on in his life (and the world) as a cure for aging is developed. Not a very uplifting story (lots of kinda terrible stuff happens), but it is an easy-to-read narrative that has some interesting explorations of possible outcomes were something like this to be developed.

It was a good book for me to start getting back into reading more consistently, and will hopefully provide a decent springboard for my next book, which will be a list book!

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Colorizing Bash Command Line Output

2016-07-03T15:06:00.001-07:00

Currently, a great majority of my professional development is in Perl. Additionally, we have had a focus on building more robust unit test scripts for the code that is written. Especially as the tests have started growing pretty large, I started looking for ways to make the test output a bit more readable. Since these are built using existing perl packages like Test::More, I am somewhat limited in my customization choices. When looking for possibilities, most of the answers that I found were code that you could add to your script to do the colorization. Unless I wanted to build custom versions of the packages we use, that wasn't the best option. I also looked into multitail since I had used that for colorizing some log outputs, but it never seemed well suited for taking the output of a single-run script. Not only is scrolling around a bit awkward, but it doesn't tend to like to leave the output available after the run. Multitail does ok if you first redirect the output to a file, then multitail that file, but that is a bit more difficult to swing if you don't want be switching between windows (plus it leaves a file that you'll need to clean up at some point). What I ended up going with was this script. The nice thing about it is that it could be pretty easily tailored for whatever script for which you wanted to colorize the output. As it is currently written, it makes the output of Perl's Test::More .t files a lot clearer and nicer to look at! To use it, I run something like perl test.t 2>&1 | ./colorize.sh which results in output like this. I'm sure that I could do some more customization, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It colorizes the different statements that we tend to have, and catches kill signals so your colors will reset to normal if you kill the run before it finishes. If I do make any updates, I'll add them to the gist (which happens to also be my very first gist!)

This Is How You Die by Ryan North et al

2015-11-01T17:38:00.001-08:00

This is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death by Ryan North
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Another awesome collection of short stories! This is the "sequel" to Machine of Death (if you haven't heard of either I would check out that one first). Not only is it a really interesting concept to begin with (a machine that gives you a cryptic message about how, but not when, you will die), but this second volume really took the concept places I would never have dreamed on my own. While I wouldn't say it is necessarily superior to the first volume, I did feel like it really broadened the horizons of how this idea could blossom.

Another nice aspect is that, because it is a collection of short stories from different authors, if you find yourself reading a story you aren't fond of it will be over soon! Downside is that some of the ones you really enjoy you just want to keep going!

Overall, it is a great read and a stunning exploration of human creativity (and morbidity)!

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2015-09-16T19:23:00.001-07:00

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I hope I have been remembering the Goodreads version of the 5 star scale as I have rated previous books. 2 stars is "it was ok", which I feel sums up how I felt about it. It was mostly easy to read, but the subject matter was boring. Constant blathering about the lives of the rich and worthless. Almost like a good writer created their interpretation of a few episodes of the Kardashians.

This was, again, one of those times where I assume there is some deep underlying meaning that I am missing that is detracting from my enjoyment. Perhaps I need to read some academic summary to understand why this book made it to "classic" status, but for now I think I will be ok. Maricruz and I will likely watch the movie soon since we both read the book, so here's hoping I enjoy that a bit more!

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What If? by Randall Munroe

2015-07-29T19:06:00.001-07:00

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The subtitle really sums it up well. Randall Munroe takes ridiculous questions that are submitted to him and does his best to provide scientifically sound, yet thoroughly entertaining, answers. Some examples include whether you could make a jetpack with downward firing machine guns and what would the moon look like if everyone in the world shined a laser pointer at it at the same time. I was familiar with a lot of the questions from his blog, but it had been a while since I read the answers, and it was nice to read some new ones as well.

Definitely the kind of book that I couldn't put down until it was done, and usually the answers weren't too long so I could sneak in a few of them whenever I had a bit of free time. I certainly highly recommend!

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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

2015-07-23T18:32:00.001-07:00

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm sure that this is one of those books where the characters are some metaphor for some global commentary, but outside of that it was just a simple, kinda sad story about (**SPOILER**) a big oaf who isn't understood by those around him so his best friend has to kill him to protect everyone. It was an easy, but definitely not uplifting read. Only real positive was that it was a easy one to knock off the reading list!

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The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

2015-07-14T17:31:00.001-07:00

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a shift from some of the more casual books I've read in the recent past! This was an extremely interesting exploration into the history and origins of the language we use, like why certain words work in forms that similar words don't (one can fill a glass with water, but not pour a glass with water), cross-cultural similarities, and even a chapter about profanity. The only real downside was that it was a very academic read. That is not an inherently a bad thing, but lately I may have preferred something that felt more like a respite than an intellectual exercise. I think many of my more linguistic friends would really enjoy this, but it would be accessible to most anyone. Just be prepared to put your thinking caps on! It is almost like a well-written textbook. Nearly as information-dense, but not nearly the dry read that most of them are.

I started it a while back and made it about halfway through before getting distracted with life. Glad to be able to pick it back up and finally make it all the way through! Looking forward to following this one with something a little more mindless, haha.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2015-07-14T17:21:00.001-07:00

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Short review on this one. I actually finished it back in January, but apparently I forgot to write a review! Given that it is a pretty well known story, there were not a lot of surprises. It WAS interesting to read the original subject matter for which I have seen any number of performance adaptations. Doesn't hurt that it was a short and easy read! :-)

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Angels & Demons by Dan Brown

2015-01-09T18:11:00.001-08:00

Angels & Demons by Dan Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Definitely one of my favorites. While it is fiction, there is enough history described where it almost feels like you are learning something. I would love to read an analysis of the "history" in the book to discover how much was actually based in truth. It is an easy read and definitely the kind of book that I could really delve in and read for hours (not that that is every an option anymore, haha). I also love that Dan Brown uses lots of small chapters so it is easy to squeeze in short periods of reading and still get to decent stopping points.

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My Beautiful Munchkin

2014-08-09T17:51:00.001-07:00

My Beautiful Munchkin I don't usually post mobile pics to my Flickr (I tend to reserve it for my photography), but we were too enamored with this photo not to post it. As usual, I got trigger happy and took a bunch of photos and this one turned out great. I think she looks like a little toddler model. ¡Que linda!

Animal Farm by George Orwell

2014-07-18T18:30:00.001-07:00

Animal Farm by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have read this before, but not since we started our reading list. I can't imagine many people haven't read this, so a thorough review seems silly, but it was a quick and enjoyable read. One thing to note (obviously depending on which version you have) is in regards to the introduction. In the version I have, the introduction basically gives away a huge amount of the plot! I might understand in a foreword, but I ended up skipping the second half of the introduction because it was so full of spoilers. Crazy! Anyway, it was an easy check mark on the reading list so I can read another leisure book.

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Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce

2014-07-15T05:17:00.001-07:00

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Overall it was a fairly entertaining read. It turned out to be a little more about history than I had expected, so I had to think harder and read a little slower, but I made it through ok.

Given the title, I was expecting something a little more along the lines of Why People Believe Weird Things. I should have had a tip-off that the book was going to be pretty liberal-biased when the review on the cover says "A raucous rant against the armies of the right... Pierce is at his scathing, insightful best." It had sections that seemed a little more balanced, but overall it was more of an attack on the right than an elucidation of the dumbing down of America.

This also reminded me of how weird the rating system for Goodreads is. You can give a book 1-5 stars. 3 stars would then mean that it is average, i.e. I would say it was "ok." But for Goodreads, 3 stars means "I liked it." How does that make sense? On a normal scale I would give it a 3, but since Goodreads is my book review aggregator, I'll abide by their system. I thought it was "ok" so it gets 2 stars.

It was interesting, but anything with such a blatant bias, whether or not you agree with it, gets tedious after a while. The last 100 pages or so I was just reading to finish, not necessarily to enjoy. If it had been pared down, or another author had provided some balance, I think it would have greatly improved the experience.

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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

2014-06-27T11:53:00.001-07:00

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the reasons that I enjoyed this book is likely its ease of being read. Written in a storyteller style, and obviously aimed at a younger audience, in combination with its length made it easy for me to finish up with it fairly quickly. While I know it to have some religious undertones, it was still a kind of interesting little story.

And little story it was. I know it is part of a series, but there really wasn't a whole lot of substance to it. This DID make it easy to read, but also felt like a bit rushed to get through the storyline with as little detail and development as possible. Overall, it provided a reasonably enjoyable few days of reading, but I look forward to delving into something with a little more substance.

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I Hope They Server Beer in Hell by Tucker Max

2014-06-21T06:24:00.001-07:00

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you are the kind of person who tends to like jokes that a lot of people think are just wrong, you'll probably love this book. There are definitely some hilarious (though vulgar) moments, but Tucker Max is definitely a total ass with little regard for other people. I had first discovered his stories from his website, and unfortunately, this book adds very little content. I haven't checked the site in a while, but you can just as easily read a great majority of the stories there. Still, definitely some entertaining and totally mindless reading. It was a great followup to Great Expectations for sure, haha.

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2014-06-08T17:59:00.001-07:00

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I finally finished it! I started this about 16 months ago (apparently things were so easy with our 3 month old that I decided to get back into casual reading), and I finally finished it!

In general, I think I would have given it 2.5 or 3 stars, but the Goodreads definition of 3 stars is "I liked it," and I wasn't prepared to go that far. There were periods that I found pretty interesting, and there were sections that I was lucky to get through 2 pages before I was falling asleep. Overall, it wasn't a bad read for a classic, but felt a bit long-winded at times. It also had a lot of text where people were speaking and had weird accents that made it extremely difficult for me to read.

So glad to have finally conquered another "classic" and ready to read something a bit more enjoyable!

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My foray into cryptocurrencies

2014-04-30T19:54:00.000-07:00

The other day I had skimmed yet another article about Bitcoins when a buddy of mine sent me a message asking if I had ever done anything with them. I said I hadn't, but soon started to get interested. I was more interested in the technical aspects than looking at it as an investment. I definitely didn't want to buy any cryptocurrencies directly but was interested in mining. From what I've read, the basic gist of mining is that there are block chains that must be maintained for sustaining the currency. If you calculate the next block (a computationally complex task) you are rewarded with Bitcoins. This process is called mining. Most of what I read indicated that, at least for Bitcoin, it isn't really worth getting into mining unless you are going to seriously invest in a large mining rig. If you are are just running some things on your own computer, it is likely that every block you calculate has already been calculated by someone else. In this instance, you are not rewarded the coins. Additionally, people have made great strides to create hardware specifically for the task of Bitcoin mining. This has made it even more difficult for casual miners to get involved. One alternative is to use pools. As the name indicates, a group of users "pool" their resources to try to calculate blocks. There are different ways pools distribute, but the basic idea is that everyone works to calculate a block, and when it is calculated, the resulting bitcoins are distributed to the pool. Depending on the distribution system, this can be a handy way for someone to get into mining that doesn't have a lot of resources at hand. Another avenue is to mine alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins). There are a large number of other currencies similar to Bitcoin that have been created and new ones are constantly being announced. Some are very similar to Bitcoin. Others use different algorithms to make it more difficult to use specific mining hardware that is popular for other coins. As I started perusing them, I noticed Rubycoin. How can I pass that up!? :-) I looked into solo mining, but decided to just start out with a pool. I can't remember how much I looked around, but dedicatedpool is a site that has pools for various altcoins so I went with their Rubycoin pool. As I was just starting to play around, I kind of alternated between CPU mining with CPUminer and GPU mining with either cgminer (on the machine with an AMD graphics card) or Cudaminer (on the machine with an Nvidia graphics card). As I explored different currencies, I had to find nuances (after 3.7.2, cgminer no longer did GPU mining, sometimes I got a specific build for my OS or for a specific coin, etc.) Anyway, back to Rubycoins, it didn't take me long before I was approaching 1000 Rubycoins. It might sound kind of impressive, but current market value says that is equal to about $1.43 haha. I've gone back and forth with this pool occasionally, but I still just thought it would be cool to have Rubycoins so I'll probably hold on to those. Next I tried out a Litecoin pool, but I got impatient (probably because Rubycoins are currently easier to generate so I saw results much sooner). Litecoin is one of the most difficult (though valuable) of the altcoins, but seeing my balance just sit at 0 for so long got a little frustrating so I started to look around a bit more. I went on a wallet downloading spree and was actually surprised that many of them wouldn't sync. If you recall the blockchain I mentioned earlier, you have to sync with the blockchain to know the status of the currency. If you don't know the status, you can't mine or make transactions. Numerous wallets I downloaded wouldn't even begin to sync (Windows seems most supported, followed by linux, then OSX is trailing), but I ended up with about 8-10 different wallets that did work. I haven't done anything with most of them, but figured I would keep them on hand for the time being. By this point, I had only been playing around with my CPU and GPU for mining, but thought it might be interested to check out an ASIC miner (used for Bitcoin and those that use the same algorithm). An ASIC miner is an example of the specialized hardware I mentioned earlier. As an example, I can typically calculate about 230 khash/s with my GPU. This ASIC miner calculates 2.4 Ghash/s, or about 10x as many while using much less power than a GPU. I was able to find one on Amazon, and since I had become sufficiently interested, decided to keep a little better track of how things went (once I was sure everything was up and running properly). Obviously, one little miner is not going to be enough to do solo mining so I decided on BTC Guild as my mining pool. Here's my first experiment. Bitcoin mining with 1 Antminter U2 ASIC miner

2014-04-17 11:45 starting balance : 0.00023823  2014-04-21 11:45 ending balance : 0.00087594  Total time: 4 days  Total BTC generated: 0.00063771  At time of completion, 1 BTC = $499.80  Total amount of US dollars generated: ~0.32 or 32 cents  US Dollars generated per day: ~0.08  Cost of ASIC miner: $22.87  Assuming uninterrupted usage and stable bitcoin value, time to recoup costs: ~286 days

Obviously, that doesn't exactly sound like a major profit generator. Assuming all things remain equal, I could recoup costs in about 9 months. Afterwards, I would be making about 29 dollars a year. Due to the nature of how mining works, there isn't a linear increase in output if you have more miners. If you think about the most extreme case, I could set up a bunch of mining rigs such that my computer power was 10x greater than what exists now. In that case, I would be much more likely to get a great majority of all the blocks. Likewise, if I have very little computing power, it is likely that every calculation I finish has already been done and I could never earn anything. Because of this, I decided to try out adding a couple more miners and see if my computer power is still so small that it appears linear or if I could actually see an appreciable difference in gains. I ran into a couple of issues during testing of the additional miners, so I decided not to do a full test. I'll still have them running so I may do a recap, but for now I'm not going to spend time on it. As I've mentioned, mining has varied degrees of difficulty. Right as I was trying to test using multiple miners, it appeared the difficulty either increased or the number of people in my pool increased causing my mining to be less productive. Obviously a long term test would be needed to really iron out some of these results. I also had some weird issues with running them on OSX. I can't really overclock them, they run hotter than normal, and after a while they just cut out (could be related to the overheating). Hopefully, I didn't damage them in the process of testing, but it is obvious that there is room for improvement when it comes to using these miners on OSX. While I was doing these experiments, the same buddy I had talked to earlier mentioned a pool called Middlecoin. This pool does what is called "hopping." Basically, the manager of the pool looks at what altcoin is most profitable to mine and diverts resources to it. When that coin becomes difficult, the resources are then diverted to a less difficult currency. People who are really into mining a specific currency kind of frown on this, but from a profitability standpoint, it does make sense. So the Middlecoin pool operator manages which currency is being mined, then converts it all to bitcoins. The only downside so far is that there isn't much feedback. Since it doesn't require registration, it doesn't keep track of your different "workers" like many pools do. I have found this kind of handy, especially because I have been in and out of mining with Middlecoin, and since I haven't kept track very well, it is hard for me to give an estimate about how much I am earning vs. the resources I am expending. While I usually have multiple things working with Middlecoin, I figured I would isolate a worker and use them for the profitability study later. I also was interested in seeing if there were any altcoins that might be worth mining solo. While it may not be as profitable, it seemed like a logical extension of my exploration. I referenced CoinWarz many times throughout this process, and I used it to find a coin that had a low difficulty. I ended up deciding on GPUcoin. While they aren't worth much, the difficulty was low enough that I figured I would at least have a decent chance of actually mining some coins. For this I used my primary graphics card, a GTX 760 which maintained a hash rate of approximately 117 khash/s (the algorithm used for GPUcoin makes this number about half of what you would expect if you were mining a scrypt-based altcoin, which most of them are). My block finding went as follows. GPUcoin mining locally with GTX 760

2014-04-22 22:37 - Started mining  2014-04-23 2:42  - 4:05 hours of mining  2014-04-23 12:26 - 9:44 hours of mining  2014-04-23 19:36 - 7:10 hours of mining  2014-04-24 2:34 - 6:58 hours of mining  2014-04-24 3:27 - 0:53 hours of mining

I'm glad I left it running as long as I did because the last block I completed was a great example of how there really is an element of luck, along with varying difficulty levels, in the mining process. Obviously, this variance makes it a little difficult to calculate profitability, but here's what I have (excluding power consumption)

Total mining time: 35 hours  Total coins generated: 120,000  Approximate GPUcoin value: $0.00000511  Total amount of US Dollars generated: $0.61  US Dollars generated per day: $0.42  Annual generation: $153.49

So that actually doesn't sound too bad. It still assumes a non-fluctuating market value and a coarse estimate of rate generation. To actually know how that translates to the real world, I'd have to get some power consumption values. Additionally, there doesn't seem to be good data on how pushing your hardware this hard can affect its life. Obviously, having something run full throttle makes it very hot and wears out the components faster, but I haven't seen much about hard numbers. Annual generation is kind of silly to calculate if running the card that hard will likely make it die in 6 months. Also, it really doesn't make sense to calculate profitability without incorporating electricity costs. If I decide to get into it further, I'll do more rigorous testing, but since I just picked up a Kill-a-watt to measure energy usage, why not run a few numbers? I didn't really want to spend a long time testing (and for the peak running I didn't want to stress my computer too much) so I just did some short tests.

Computer running mostly idle (avg over 13 hours)  0.1294 kwh  Running both GPUs for one hour  0.37 - 0.1294 = 0.2406 kwh over idle  Running all 8 CPU cores for one hour  0.22 - 0.1294 = 0.0906 kwh over idle

Now to calculate costs fully, I would have to contact the City of Tallahassee. The rate listed on their site is $0.06682 per kwh, but if I back calculate from last month's bill I get $0.1247 per kwh. Since I don't really know the reason for the discrepancy, I'll look at both. I'll also look at the difference over idle to see the effect of mining with my current computer vs. building a dedicated mining rig. Since it is a rough calculation, I'll just assume 30 days per month.

Full usage  CoT rate  GPU: $17.80  CPU: $10.58  My calculated rate  GPU: $33.22  CPU: $19.75

Over idle usage  CoT rate  GPU: $11.58  CPU: $4.36  My calculated rate  GPU: $21.60  CPU: $8.13

Definitely enough of a difference that I would really want to ensure my rate before I knew what I was getting into. So if I take these numbers along with the GPUcoin and middlecoin numbers, I can do a rough profitability calculation. Now I only used my primary GPU for generating GPUcoin, so the monetary generation is actually a little low, but the primary GPU accounts for 77% of the khash/s so I can adjust it accordingly.

Profitability for solo mining GPUcoin full cost  Calculated revenue per day: $0.545   Calculated revenue per month: $16.36   GPU + CoT rate profitability: -$1.44   GPU + MyCalc rate profitability: -$16.86

Profitability for solo mining GPUcoin over idle  Calculated revenue per day: $0.545   Calculated revenue per month: $16.36   GPU + CoT rate profitability: $ 4.78  GPU + MyCalc rate profitability: -$5.24    Middlecoin estimates  Time from start to first payout: 10 days  Average hash rate: ~250 khash/s  Payout: 0.01080921 BTC = $5.00  Calculated revenue per month: $15.00  GPU + CoT rate profitability: -$2.80 (full) or $3.42 (over idle)   GPU + MyCalc rate profitability: -$6.60 (full) or $6.87 (over idle)

Now we see why the electric rates in your area should really be incorporated if you are looking to get into any kind of mining. Obviously, this ignores the possibility of the coin increasing (or decreasing) in value. I was pretty surprised with the middlecoin numbers. I'm sure that there is the same disadvantage since I do not have a powerful miner, but I would have expected that hopping from coin to coin would have been more profitable that a single coin, especially when the single coin was done with solo mining. No matter what, even the most profitable prospect was pretty minor. While it isn't profitable now, it may eek across the line depending on how much the usage would increase if I would to upgrade my second GPU to something more powerful. Also, there is the possibility that it turns into an investment (albeit a risky one) since the value of any of the cryptocurrencies can change quite a bit. It also doesn't look too good for a dedicated rig. Even if I could increase revenue around 5 fold and bring in $75 a month, it would be a pretty large initial investment that would take about a year to recoup and that's without factoring in the additional power costs. No matter what, it doesn't look like I'll be mining myself into a millionaire just yet. ;-) Currently, I'm getting my BTC Guild account high enough to request a payout, then I will probably focus on Multipool. It was apparently one of the first hopping pools and seems interesting to try out. One of the main things I like is that it accepts scrypt (altcoin algorithm better for things like CPUs and GPUs) as well as SHA256 (algorithm for coin like bitcoin, used by ASIC miners). So I can have one site to check to see how any miners I have are doing. I don't know if it will be the most profitable, but I like the cohesiveness of the experience. I may still occasionally solo mine some GPUcoin or mine some more Rubycoin, but we'll see how Multipool goes for the time being. It has been an intriguing exploration thus far. The ASIC miners don't really have much of a purpose other than mining, so I will definitely keep them going. It is interesting to be sure, but I don't think I have confidence in the cryptocurrency market enough to really invest much money into pursuing it. One that I will definitely keep an eye on is Gridcoin. What sets them apart is that they are incorporating the BOINC protocol into their mining. BOINC is used for large distributed computing projects like Folding@home, a project to study protein folding. Instead of a researcher investing in computing hardware, they create a BOINC project. Then any user can install the interface on their computer and contribute to the calculations (often having it run whenever the screensaver is running or something like that). It is a kind of cool way to contribute to large, complex computational problems. I really like the idea of incorporating that into the cyrptocurrency, but they are just getting started. Currently, they don't even have native wallets for anything but Windows and using wine (the program they recommend) I can get it running but can't update the block chain (rendering it pretty much useless). I'll definitely be keeping an eye on them as they progress, but until then it will likely stay a pretty small little side project. I have also been surprised at the number of places that claim to give away cryptocoins. The main one I'm keeping my eye on is Qoinpro. They claim to "deposit" a very small amount of bitcoin (and other coins) into your account daily. Then referring people is supposed to give you a multiplier. I haven't received anything yet, but I haven't found a reason not to try things like this yet. If you want to give it a try, use my referrral! :-) And if anyone is already into cryptocurrencies and wants to reward my oh-so-thorough write-up, below are all the currencies I have wallets for if you want to send some cryptocoins my way.

Bitcoin (BTC) - 1LiA2hkQ7aUuQHuGE9VtnpcGqf1ee1BwjF  Rubycoin (RBY) - Rs8TtxCyfS1QoYrdExPGP3Mc9akuUCJDx6  Digitalcoin (DCG) - DL13tcpiuP7Tx8Hes87FypGJgXVZsfFVT3  Quark (QRK) - QQQtNiLdSviVKXhVi8V8VBGSqHxumhNxaz  GPUcoin (GPUC) - GPSY2dDVRC3XkZTApHAUuQWAMxusKZ1Lyn  Peercoin (PPC) - PEcopdSQVSy547hQZXXzN8TntkoNFHT958  Fedoracoin (TiPS) - ER2nLBEcEDjqLNWRBJ5wnXqHND2jjJb4E5  Litecoin (LTC) - LgP8o7uic7bwgw6HcoFi6PhZFY95Sa6sMy  Betacoin (BET) - B73kCkoawsowwZhf1yoq16kBF7QduyEfDv  Teslacoin (TES) - 5jprXpFPQ81zFxHVvU6DhzMm4YJgcVERtd

Golfing: Southwood 2014-02-08

2014-02-22T20:43:00.001-08:00

I got back out on the golf course again, and I think it may have actually gone worse than last time! At this stage in my game, I should probably start keeping track of balls lost and mulligans because those stats are still the most relevant to how my game has been going. I definitely had plenty of both this time (though I spent a lot less time in sand traps), but I still managed to squeeze out some fun ;-) Hopefully I can get out to the range a few times before my next round and actually make an improvement! I actually was slightly better on the front nine, but I completely lost it on 12 and 18 of the back nine, which really killed me. Mayhaps I should also get some new balls since I have literally been knocking the color off the ones I have been playing recently ;-) [caption id="attachment_1764" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Front Nine[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1765" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Back Nine[/caption]

Hackintosh

2013-11-18T13:20:00.001-08:00

I have recently noticed that I am starting to have a few issues with my current iMac. My hard drive is nearing full (and it is a pain in the ass to replace with a larger one) and my optical drive died (I have been using a cheap external). Since iMacs are not very upgrade-friendly, I decided to check out the offerings from Apple. If I got a new iMac, it would cost quite a bit for (what I consider) a pretty marginal upgrade. The new mac pros that were announced look pretty awesome, but dadjum are they expensive! I started looking around and found that I could get something with more than enough power for less than half of what I would pay for a mac pro so I decided to go the hackintosh route. I started with this guide from lifehacker, and tonymacx86 has been an amazing resource. When figuring out what kind of hardware I wanted, I pretty much stuck to the list provided by tonymacx86 since most of those components had been tested so I would be less likely to encounter incompatibility issues. I hadn't build a computer since the media server, and that was the first one I had built in many, many years. Thus, there were several times that I'd forget the order of a few key things (e.g. I always forget to install the little coverplate in the back before I install the motherboard), but otherwise it came together fairly easily. Since this was a larger build, I decided to put the basic components together to test them before I installed them in the case, and sure enough something wasn't working! The motherboard would just power cycle and never boot even to BIOS. First I thought it was the power supply, so I picked one up at Best Buy to try and it gave the same result. I tried with varying numbers of RAM chips and still nothing so I assumed the motherboard was bad. After I returned it and received another one, I had the same thing happen. Initially, I thought it was the processor, but I decided to test the RAM a little more thoroughly and, sure enough, one of the ram chips was bad. Doh! So I got that return processed and then I had working components, and it was time to put this bad boy together! [caption id="attachment_1720" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Getting things hooked up and tested[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1721" align="aligncenter" width="600"] RAM looks so much cooler than it did back in the day[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1723" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Video cards are also ridiculous behemoths compared to those when I started building computers[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1724" align="aligncenter" width="600"] More testing[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1725" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Getting the main hard drive situated[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1726" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Getting everything in place[/caption] [caption id="attachment_1727" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Nice removable hard drive shelf helps with installation[/caption] For the most part, the installation of OS X went according to plan. I had to tweak one graphics setting that was keeping it from booting up, but otherwise it pretty much went as the guide described. Gotta love it when things just work! I left a partition on the main drive in case I want to dual boot. I'm thinking about throwing linux on there for now, then switching it to Windows so I can try out some PC gaming. [caption id="attachment_1728" align="aligncenter" width="600"] And we have OS X liftoff![/caption] [caption id="attachment_1729" align="aligncenter" width="360"] Way more badass looking than any mac I've ever seen ;-)[/caption] The next thing I have to tackle is how I want to set everything else up with regard to my hard drive. Since I have both an SSD and a traditional hard drive, there are a number of ways I can set things up to best utilize them. One option is to just change the location of my home directory to reside on the hard drive. This would mean applications and system files would all be on the SSD, and I would have the large drive for all my music, movies, etc. The downside to this approach is that any applications that use temporary storage would use a directory in my home directory and would, therefore, not utilize the speed of the SSD. Another alternative, the one that I have chosen, it to leave my home directory on the SSD and have my large directories reside on the hard drive. This is fairly simple to set up because you just delete the folder (e.g. Movies), create a folder on the hard drive for all the files, then create a new Movies folder in your home directory that links to the one on the hard drive (e.g. ln -s /Volumes/BigHardDrive/Movies ~/Movies). Because programs don't differentiate between an actual directory and a symbolic link, all application behaviors should remain unchanged. The other downside to this method (that wasn't mentioned in the first descriptions of possible setups) is that you can't use the Migration Assistant in the same way. Typically, I would use a Time Machine backup and import all my files and settings to the new computer. When you try to do this, it won't let you merge the imported user with an existing user. Therefore, any symbolic links that you set up won't be utilized when the data imported. Because of this, I can't import because my SSD doesn't have nearly enough space to hold everything, even temporarily, so I can set up the directories again. Additionally, what I have read indicates that you don't want to try to copy files directly out of a Time Machine backup. The organization isn't the same as just regular files. So I had to use an external hard drive to copy over all the large directories (in a couple of batches because the hard drive isn't that large). It is a bit annoying because, had I known this was the approach I was going to have to take, I could have started transferring things a while ago and had them ready to load up as soon as the hackintosh was built. Live and learn I guess! :-) It is looking like I may also use this opportunity to upgrade some of the iLife applications I have been using. I suppose another downside to building your own hackintosh is that the iLife suite isn't automatically loaded. Now that OSX is free, there is definitely no chance of a bundle. I haven't updated any iLife apps since 2009, apparently, so I imagine some improvements have been made in the past 4 years :-) I'll probably just start with iPhoto then look into iMovie when I have some movie editing on the horizon. I debated just switching over to Aperture for all my photo organization, but my version is also at least 4 years old and a new version is like $80 vs. $15 for iPhoto. Luckily, the newer versions of these programs actually share a library, so what I have read indicates that switching to Aperture in the future would be pretty seamless. Here's hoping! I figured I would put together a little spec sheet. If anyone stumbles upon this and has questions or wants more specifics, feel free to contact me. Just wanted to give a basic overview here.

Quad Core processor
32 Gb RAM
240 Gb SSD as primary drive
4 Tb storage drive
Video card with support for up to 4 monitors
bad ass ATX tower case

So far, I am not seeing much that I feel like I will be missing out on with the hackintosh approach vs. traditional mac. There are a couple of tiny things I won't have (camera, everything built into my monitor, etc.), but a couple of things I have gained (multiple easily accessible usb ports, easy modification/upgrades in the future, etc.) Yes, putting it all together was more difficult than just ordering a mac, but if you only choose proven hardware, it was pretty straightforward. Now the only real thing I have to be concerned about is any future OSX or application updates being incompatible with something in a hackintosh, but I think that'll be pretty unlikely (or I can just not upgrade anything for a while, haha).

Another test

2013-05-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

please go to Faceboooooooook

test post

2013-05-29T17:56:00.001-07:00

Let's see if FB stuff is working.