Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
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This guide is out of date.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.
Adventures in Outsourcing: Cooking with TaskRabbit
Overview
For the past few years, I’ve been outsourcing tasks from my daily life whenever possible. I tend to be more limited in time than money, so if paying $30 can save me an hour, I consider that a good deal.
I recently started experimenting with the keto diet, which focuses on low carbs. I’ve had good experience with the diet, but it limits what food delivery I can order, as BBQ, deli sandwiches, pizza, etc. do not fit the diet.
Automated Prosper Investing with ProsperBot
Overview
I started investing in peer to peer lending in 2014 through a site called Prosper. I thought peer to peer lending was a neat idea and could potentially earn lucrative returns.
When I began, I chose each of my loan investments manually, but over time, I have automated this process by building a lending bot called ProsperBot that invests for me automatically.
In this blog post, I’ll give a brief overview of peer to peer lending and walk through the process of building ProsperBot.
Testing Ansible Web App Roles with Selenium
Overview
Ansible is an excellent tool for deploying web apps. Ansible allows us to define web apps in terms of the different “roles” that compose our web app (e.g. web server, database server, application server). As our roles and the interactions between them become more complex, we need appropriately stronger ways of testing our roles to verify we’re deploying our web app correctly.
In our last post, we used Ansible to deploy a web app called ClipBucket, a video-hosting web app. In that post, we included automated tests to verify that the web app installed correctly, but these tests did not exercise application functionality very rigorously.