Open Thinkering

Menu

Month: June 2011

Special Delivery: a letter to my children this Fathers Day.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Wreck This Journal-Doodling Back of Envelope

Dear Ben and Grace,

At four years and five months old, respectively, you’re both too young to be able to read this by yourselves. But I hope one day when you’re a bit older and have a little more understanding of the world that you’ll stumble upon this and reflect upon it.

First of all, I wanted to say how proud I am of you both. Whilst it’s hard to be proud of the actions of a five month-old you, Grace, manage to give me big, beaming smiles just at the right time to help me forget your impressively-piercing crying ability and tendency every now and again to fool us into thinking that you know how to sleep through. I’m also mightily impressed at the way that you’ve managed to surpass even Ben in the putting-on-weight front. Above the 99.6th percentile? Impressive.

With you, Ben, it’s easy to quantify and express the ways in which I’m proud of you. As I keep saying, I’m proud of you because you try so hard. Never stop that. You’re going to come up against challenges in life which are completely unfair and which, in the main, will seem to be the result of ‘the system’ rather than the individuals comprising it. Don’t let that put you off. You can change that system. Your Daddy spent his first thirty years on this earth believing the half-truths people told him about qualifications and job titles mattering. They don’t. Carry on doing what you do now: focus on relationships, focus on happiness (your own and other people’s), and try your best to be as good as you can be at the things you enjoy doing. Everything important flows from these things.

I can’t predict the future, but what I can predict is my enduring love for you both and for your Mummy. I don’t know where we’ll be living next year never mind by the time you come to read this, but I do know that how we live is a lot more important than where we live. So I’m sorry for the times when I’ve neglected you both due to work, a selfish mood or an undue fascination with technology. You’re both so important to me in ways I only realise when you’re not there.

Much as sometimes I feel I’d like to, I can’t be around to protect you all of the time: not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually too. Both of you are going to come across narrow-minded and shallow people. You’re going to struggle to understand people who trade authenticity for material possessions and their hopes and dreams for status. Don’t be tempted by that road. Strive instead to follow the path less travelled, the path where your first response to “What do you do?” isn’t simply repeating your job title. Although it will scare Mummy (especially)and Daddy to death, I implore you to go travelling at as young an age as you can. It really does broaden your outlook on life. And although this isn’t a “avoid what I regret” letter, never stop being creative: draw, paint, play musical instruments, speak foreign languages. Cultivate as many different ways of understanding the world as you can.

Most of all, my message to you this Fathers Day is that life can be whatever you want it to be: take risks! Ben, I’m trying to do that as much as possible with you now, which means you get into some scrapes; Grace, I know that I’m going to find this so much more difficult with you. Forgive me. Parenting really is the hardest job in the world sometimes (but I wouldn’t have it any other way).

Love,

Your Daddy, xx

Image CC BY-NC Deborah Leigh (Migraine Chick)

Project Reclaim: backing up to local network storage

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Learn about Project Reclaim here.

Netgear Stora

As, seemingly, most of the rest of the world, I’ve got a (50GB subscription to) Dropbox. I use it in place of the ‘Documents’ folder on my MacBook Pro and, at work, instead of the ‘My Documents’ folder in Windows. Everything is kept in sync between the machines and it’s all backed-up in the cloud.

That’s all well-and-good, and three places to store data is obviously a good situation to be in. However, given the recent Amazon EC2 outage (Dropbox uses EC2) I’d like to have a local backup solution. Until 2009 my wife and I used to do this with the use of an Apple Time Capsule, but the incremental backups used to slowdown our laptops so much that we eventually sold it. Every now and again I’ll backup to a 2TB external hard disk, but that’s only when I remember.

I wanted something better.

After looking at our needs and the options, I settled on a Netgear Stora* and two 2TB hard disks in RAID1 configuration**. This means that data is written to both disks simultaneously – i.e. a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It came in at about £170 all-told, which isn’t bad at all – especially when you consider that it’s got secure web access to the files it contains and is extremely easy-to-use.

Once you’ve spent 10 minutes getting the Stora up-and-running, you need a way to get files onto it. That’s as easy as drag-and-drop if you want it to be, but I want a more robust solution. As with Dropbox, after the initial backup I only want to transfer the files that have changed. Enter rsync – or, more accurately, arRsync (Mac only). The graphical front-end is simple and effective. I refused to pay $40 for the privilege of the (admittedly widely-acclaimed) ChronoSync.

*Other NAS drives I looked at have bittorrent functionality. This can be enabled on the Stora by looking here or here.

**This isn’t a techie post, so if you want to read about RAID, I suggest this post on Wikipedia.

Giving my visitors some (virtual, P2P) cash.

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Bitcoin

Background

In 2009 Wikileaks started publishing data. Whether or not you believe their actions are justifiable, one thing became clear: you are not in control of your money.

What do you mean?

For convenience, for safety, and to earn interest, we store our money in bank accounts. We also use credit facilities and numbers-as-currency services such as Paypal to purchase goods and donate money. Using the latter facilities makes sense online because they’re safer.

The trouble is that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal stopped people from using their services to donate money to Wikileaks. That’s a form of censorship.

I’m not a big fan of censorship.

Enter Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name also refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software.

…
Unlike other digital currencies, Bitcoin avoids central authorities and issuers. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can be spent only once per owner and only by the person who owns them.

…

The peer-to-peer topology and lack of central administration are features that make it infeasible for any authority (governmental or otherwise) to manipulate the quantity of bitcoins in circulation, thereby mitigating inflation.

More info

The Deal

Bitcoins can be ‘mined’ by using spare CPU/GPU cycles to solve complex problems. Done alone, this isn’t exactly a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s best to work with others.

This is an experiment.

BitCoinPlus is a way of mining Bitcoins using your browser. In fact, you’re doing it right now! (unless you’ve scrolled to the bottom of this page and clicked ‘Stop’)

Let’s go 50/50.

If you visit this site and don’t press ‘Stop’ in the widget located in the footer, you’re mining Bitcoins. I’ve configured it so that 50% goes to me and 50% goes to you. Unless you reset your browser, your share will be transferred into an account when you set it up.

But why?

  • Because it’s interesting.
  • Because it’s possible.
  • Because there’s got to be a better way.

Let me hear what you think in the comments below!

Update: experiment over, applet now removed.

css.php