Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
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This guide is out of date.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.
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.