2018: Day 68 the one with a new motherboard
Word count 155,611 + 1,041 or 156,652 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

You may have guessed that my new motherboard arrived today. It is like a work of art. My computer builds are sort of a slow process. You have noticed that the new case arrived awhile ago. It is a Corsair Air 740 and it is fantastic. Some time later I found a power supply that met my needs. Now the case has a power supply and a motherboard. The ASUS X299 TUF Mark 1 is an amazing piece of art. It is really nice looking. Installing it was pretty easy. I opened up the door and removed that old micro-ATX motherboard. The folks over at ASUS shipped the motherboard in a nice looking bag and box. Getting the motherboard setup was pretty much a matter of aligning the external port shield and making sure the case has the right combination of risers installed. It looked like the Corsair 740 case had the correct riser configuration installing the motherboard probably took all of 5 minutes. Overall it was a rewarding process to install the motherboard.

You may have already guessed that my computer build is missing some key components. It needs a CPU, GPU, CPU liquid cooler, and some RAM. At some point this year all those components will come together. My computer builds typically are sort of slow one part a time sort of adventures. This is the first time that I have endeavored to build out two working computers at the same time. I typically only have one build going at a time. It is much easier to replace parts one at a time on a build that already is up and running. This time around it seemed like a good idea to just work on building a second computer with all new parts. Some of that was probably sparked by the excitement of cryptocurrency mining. Looking at all of those mining builds on YouTube probably sparked my inner need to build a new system.

My current build is perfectly stable. For the most part I’m running Windows 10 off a m.2 drive. Things boot up and are running just fine. For some reason all of my NiceHash mining efforts have been problematic as of late. I used MSI Afterburner to turn down the power on each of the GTX 1060 cards in my Storm Stryker case. That reduced the heat and pretty much makes things easier. For some reason the NiceHash mining software v2.0.1.11 Beta has not been stable on my computer. Initially my Webroot antivirus software was pretty convinced that the excavator.exe file was a virus. That knocked out several hours of mining based until I manually allowed the file to run on my system. I have no idea why, but the software just stops. It just freezes up and stops mining for periods of time. That as you can imagine makes things even slower. My current payout horizon from from NiceHash is about 5 days. That is how long it takes my 2 GTX 1060 cards to mine 0.001 BTC based on selling hashing power.

My next computer build is going to feature 2 graphics cards from whatever NVIDIA releases next. That is probably going to be the GTX 2080 graphics card. I’m sure it will be epic. I’m going to use it to run models from Tensorflow based on the adversarial cryptography experiment that involved Bob, Alice, and Eve. That line of research caught my attention and made me want to duplicate it on my home setup. Being able to reproduce academic research is a very important part of the process. That is part of my interest in building out that setup. Most of my reasons are probably related to how much fun I think that will end up being. The next generation of NVIDIA cards will probably be seriously awesome at deep learning. That seems to be a pretty cool reason to setup another system. My rationale is pretty simple. I want to have one Windows 10 box up and running and then probably an Ubuntu variant setup on an extra machine.

Topic 1: Watching the University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball team

Tonight via the power of YouTube TV streaming to my Sony Bravia television on a Chromecast Ulta it was possible to watch ESPN. A Big 12 tournament game was on featuring the University of Kansas Jayhawks playing the Kansas State Wildcats in a hotly contested basketball game. I was able to get everything running by using voice commands on the Google Home Mini that I have had for months. This is really the only use I have ever gotten out of the Google Home Mini. it is very convenient to just control the Chromecast Ultra by voice. It is unfortunate that all of that fun will be ending after one month of paying for YouTube TV. Basketball season is going to wrap up here shortly and it will be time to give up on all television based subscributions.

After my YouTube TV subscription ends I will end up paying Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Stargate Command, and CBS streaming. The kids use Netflix enough that it probably does not make sense to cancel it. My CBS streaming subscription is entirely based on wanting to watch Star Trek Discovery. Now that the first season of that show is over it would probably make sense to cancel that subscription. This is the year of trying to minimize ongoing monthly subscriptions to things. That might sound like a pretty straightforward goal to have, but it really is harder to achieve than it might seem.

Topic 2: Rounding out the night

It is already 20:08 and my will to write is starting to falter. It is the weekend and I should be able to round out a full 3,000 words for the day, but that may not happen. It seems like this might be another day with a 1,000 word post. That does not help my overall word count average. It is way more words than usually made it to the blog for publication, but it is not enough to hit the word count average necessary to hit the 1,000,000 word per year mark.

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