Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Day 46 the one with Valentine’s Day and a Firewire card

2018: Day 46 the one with Valentine’s Day and a Firewire card
Word count 122,014 + 1,024 or 123,038 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Things have not gotten back to normal. It is 7:33 PM and I’m finally sitting down to write. Now would be the time to make some progress. You would think this whole writing thing would be like turning on or off a water spout. Sometimes it does not work that way. Other times it works exactly in that way. Today is one of those days that just might turn out ok. My back is still very stiff today for some reason. It probably has to do with the amount of sitting still I’m doing all day. These last couple of days have not been good in terms of achieving my Fitbit exercise goals. Walking at my walking desk could have helped fix that problem. Nothing really stopped me from using my walking desk. Really the only thing that stopped me was my own lack of action.

That is one of those things that you sit and think about. You think about just how many problems a lack of action can cause. Maybe you work on rationalizing all the risks that inaction avoids. You can start to think about all the possible problems or issues that were avoided by sitting in that same old office chair all day. Sure walking on a treadmill does not solve the world’s problems, but a little exercise might help spark the idea that does. Ok —- it will probably take more than one epic idea to solve all the world’s problems. I watched the entire first season of the short lived television show Limitless (2015) on Netflix. Some of the episodes were ok. I pretty much understand how it got cancelled at this point. Even some cameos from Bradley Cooper could not save the plot from breaking down.

My search for a power supply unit (PSU) for my new computer build continues. I read a ton of forums blaming miners from the PSU shortage. That probably has something to do with it. From what I can tell everything over 850 watts is sold out or on backorder. Speculators have bought up a ton of them and are reselling them above retail prices. Based on my computer interests and willingness to wait for retail pricing my entire Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case build is just on hold. Everything is assembled and ready to go. All of that is pending the arrival of one power supply unit. It is on backorder. It might show up sometime soon or it might just stay on backorder forever.

At the moment I’m wondering about using a PCI riser to add extra cards to that build that does not even have a power supply. I mean the case looks good. It seems really nice so far. It has a ton of configuration options. At this moment it is probably closer to being a coffee table than an actual computer given the lack of a working power supply. I’m wondering when the electronics companies that build computer parts will catch up with the appetites for cryptocurrency miners. It appears that all the high end graphics cards and power supplies are just sold out. All the other parts that I want seem to be in stock. The higher end parts outside of those two categories seem to be available.

The new Corsair case seems to be working out pretty well. I have opened it up about three times now to add parts and mess with the cables. I’m still thinking that it will be running Ubuntu Studio as an operating system. Back in 2016 I build a computer and bought a new version of Windows 10 at the time. I have another copy of Windows 7 that was upgraded to Windows 10 somewhere in my office. Finding that is going to be interesting. My new build will be my first computer build without an optical drive. Dropping Ubuntu Studio on a USB stick using Rufus should be easy enough. I’ll get that computer up and running. I checked and the monitor on my desk has two inputs. Without a KVM switch I should be able to run my backup keyboard and mouse and use the extra graphics port on the monitor to get things setup.

Maybe I could use the bluetooth mouse and keyboard to make it really convenient. Those will not work for setup, but it could be the way to go in a pinch when remote desktop is not working. My desk does not really have enough room for a 3rd keyboard. I have plenty of room for mice, but they are not very big to begin with. This configuration is going to end up being very interesting. I’m pretty sure it

Topic 1: My 12th NiceHash miner payment

My cryptocurrency mining adventure continues. This time around with a 12th payment from NiceHash. It seems like the payments have stabilized at around a little more than 0.001 BTC every 3 days. You can imagine that equates to earning about 1% BTC per 10 payments that require 3 days of mining. That means that every 30 days this whole endeavor is resulting in a mining yield of 1% of a bitcoin. That seems reasonable. For some reason it appears that my mining efforts have been shrinking payment after payment. That has to do with a couple different factors. First, I turned down the power to the cards to help control the heat. Second, I had a few crashes that reduced the mining yield.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

12. 2018-02-15 Mining payment → 0.00102799 BTC
11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

Topic 2: Rounding things out

It felt weird only having one topic tonight. I thought maybe dropping this topic in might help round things out. I’m hoping to get back to my normal writing routine later tonight. These short 1,000 word posts are not really pushing things forward.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs


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