In my previous blog post I mentioned that mining Bitcoins alone probably wasn't worth it, and suggested investing Bitcoins in a contract mining service such as Pyramining as an alternative. Pyramining is an organisation that has a very efficient Bitcoin mining infrastructure, that you can pay Bitcoins to use. Basically, you invest money and effectively borrow some of their mining hardware. Over time, that hardware earns Bitcoins via mining, and you recover your initial investment, plus a bonus. 

Bitcoin is a digital currency that is designed to work like cash. I first heard about it in the June 2012 edition of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. The idea of a digital currency that was not centrally controlled and worked like cash intrigued me, and the fact that it appeared in the primary magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers added credibility. So, I decided to check it out.

If you have a digital photo frame from AVLabs (or some other company) and it simply shows "initializing" when you insert an SD card, and switch it on, try a smaller card. I came across this problem recently when my sister bought a digital photo frame, and a 4 GB SD card. Unbeknownst to both of us, a 4 GB SD card, is in fact a 4 GB SDHC (High Capacity) card, and the SDHC standard is incompatible with the SD card that it is based upon.Yes, that's right, despite having SD written on the front (with HC in a different font), and having the same physical size as the original SD card standard, only SDHC card readers can access the data on 4 GB to 32 GB SDHC cards.

I have just spent a ridiculous amount of time setting up a satellite TV system for receiving Freeview, free satellite TV for New Zealand. A lot of this time was due to my own lack of experience, and the difficulty in knowing whether something is really working, or not aligned. Here are a few tips for anyone else wishing to set this up themselves. This is not a complete guide, just some ideas that should save time. It assumes that you are installing a Ku band dish for digital TV, but a lot of the advice applies to any satellite dish.

New Zealand is on the Pacific rim of fire, and so has volcanos and periodically experiences earthquakes. This geological activity has shaped the stunning scenery that New Zealanders (and visitors to the country) enjoy. It also occasionally makes you jump when a strongish earthquake hits the local area, as happened recently. Eruptions of molten lava, ash, or just boiling mud happen once every several years, which can close airports due to the danger of fine ash clogging up the jet engines.

Recently I noticed that Google's "Googlebot" was using this website's search engine. This is not exactly surprising since a website's search engine may be able to find pages that are not well linked to by others. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how the Googlebot performs its task. Here are some entries from the log (truncated so that its easier to fit into the page):

Yes, I have finally graduated from graduate school with a Ph.D. (i.e., Doctor of Philosophy). In New Zealand, graduate studies are called post-graduate studies (because they occur after graduating with a bachelors university degree), but they are one and the same. This has taken five years from starting in a Masters program at the University of Toronto through to graduating with a doctorate. It is great to finally be finished.

Anyone viewing either the home page, or this blog will probably notice a distinct lack of updates to this website during this month. The simple truth is, I've been really busy. Not only have I been working on a humanoid robot for a colleague, I will also be moving back to New Zealand shortly. As a result, the list of things that had to be done just inflated over time, and this website suffered as a result. 

Installing Google's new Chrome browser reminded me of something that really irritates me that more and more software installers do; installing things without my permission. It starts with small things. For example, I like keeping my desktop mostly free of icons, so, I do not like installers that think that their software is so good that it deserves a spot on my desktop. A large number of installers put their program icon on the desktop without even asking for permission. Even those that ask, usually have it as the default option.

In true ironic form, a few days after posting a commentary about blogs copying blogs, that very commentary has been copied by another blog. On closer inspection, the blog in question appears to simply copy posts from blogs relating to cell-phones. Compare this post from PhoneDONE, with this one on Waiguoren, as an example. It is almost like the blog is run by a bot that collects blog entries from various sources. The commentary that I wrote linked to one of the sites that Vaiguoren (yes, the blog is titled, Waiguoren, but the poster is Vaiguoren) copies from.