Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
How I Hired a Freelance Editor for My Blog
A year in blogging
I started this blog in May of last year. I don’t mean to brag, but by last April, after less than a year of blogging, I was pulling in upwards of 20 visitors per day, several of whom were not spam bots. That number reached as high as 50 visitors on days when I made a new post and begged for readers through every social media channel at my disposal.
GreenPiThumb: A Raspberry Pi Gardening Bot
Introduction
This is the story of GreenPiThumb: a gardening bot that automatically waters houseplants, but also sometimes kills them.
The story begins about a year ago, when I was struck by a sudden desire to own a houseplant. A plant would look nice, supply me with much needed oxygen, and imply to guests that I’m a responsible grown-up, capable of caring for a living thing.
How I Stole Your Siacoin
A seedy reddit post
The night was June 9th, 2017. It was a typical Friday night for me. I was watching Netflix and checking reddit partying with cool kids.
Suddenly, I saw this post on the “New” tab of the /r/siacoin subreddit:
If you’re not familiar with Siacoin, it’s a cryptocurrency that allows you to rent out your spare hard disk space or buy space from others. I’ve written about this technology a couple times previously (mining guide, NAS guide).
A Beginner's Guide to Mining Siacoin
This guide is out of date.
This post describes mining Sia with a desktop graphics card (GPU), but custom mining hardware is now available for Sia. The custom hardware has made Sia GPU mining non-viable. This guide will still work, but you may never reach payout, even with a high-end GPU.
Overview
Sia is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network for buying and selling computer storage space.
Users pay for transactions within Sia using a cryptocurrency called Siacoin. Like Bitcoin, Sia relies on “miners” to supply computing power to the network. These miners are paid for their contributions in Siacoin.
Building a Homelab VM Server
Note: This article describes a VM build in 2017.
For the 2020 version, see, “Building a Homelab VM Server (2020 Edition).”
Overview
I do the bulk of my home development work in virtual machines (VMs). My main desktop PC is a Windows 10 machine, so I had always run my VMs from within VirtualBox.
This setup worked fine, but I was starting to become aware of the increasing pain points. I searched and found a post by Brian Moses where he describes building a dedicated “homelab” server for running VMs. I really liked this idea and was inspired to do the same.