I'm A Bitcoin Trader

This morning my money transfer cleared into my Mt Gox account. It had taken two working days from the point I instructed the bank. I'm looking to buy 10 BTC, but I've got the maths wrong in the previous post. I'm going to make a first go at getting as many BTC as possible for my 3 GBP and transfer over some more funds.

The price this evening for BTC on Mt Gox is 1.71 per BTC. I'm going to put in an order for 1 BTC at 1.70 and another at 1.30 and see what happens. My 1.70 offer was immediately taken up. The 1.30 sat there.

Next I decided to get my new BTC out of Mt Gox. After my transaction fee I had 0.994 BTC left. I put in my Bitcoin address and submitted the request to Mt Gox. The option that I wasn't aware of was the "green address" This option seems to mean that the receiver can trust the transaction with zero confirmations. As I'm not that time sensitive I decided not to take the option. I fired off the request at 19:10 UK time. By 19:11 I had an unconfirmed transaction in my Bitcoin client. Next I went to the internet banking site, put 16GBP in the Mt Gox account, and then fired off an email to Wuala requesting 100GB of storage for 10BTC. By 19:28 I had my first confirmation of the Bitcoin transfer.

Float Food Trip Disappointing

Yesterday we went with Jess and her boys on a "a foodie, floating, family day out exploring the region's historic waterways". Really disappointing. It turned out to be a much delayed 20 minute canal trip from the Mark Addy to the Lowry theatre. As for the food, the kids got a carton of Vimto and a Chorley cake. Apparently it was celebrating the launch of some book. That passed me by.

Still, we had a nice time wandering around Media City and annoying the pettifogging BBC security personnel: "That is an official BBC prop".

Buying Some Bitcoins

I wanted to buy some backup space on Wuala using their bitcoin offer. As I'd only every dabbled with bitcoin previously I only owned 0.005BTC. How many bitcoins do I need?

Wuala are selling 1GB of storage for a year for 0.1BTC. Looking on Mt. Gox, I can today (12 Oct 2011) buy 1BTC for about 2.60 GBP. That would be a staggering 26 pence per GB per year. I figure I'll push the boat out and try to get 100GB. I've sent a bank transfer of 3GBP to Mt. Gox. As soon as it clears I'll have a go at buying storage with bitcoins.

Power Up Or Run Down?

The Security Now Podcast has just informed me that lithium-ion batteries should be kept charged but nickel-metal hydride ones need to be fully discharged in order maintain battery life.

For my gadgets that means:

• Work laptop - Keep Charged
• Nokia E71 - Keep Charged
• HTC Desire - Keep Charged
• Mifi (Huawei E585) - Keep Charged
• Asus Aee Transformer tablet - Keep Charged

Setting Up A Minecraft Server

#1 and #2 sons are both addicted to Minecraft. In our "Dad and son techie evening" this week #1 son said that he wanted to set up a Minecraft server. It was actually very easy.

1. Follow the instructions from the Minecraft Wiki to get the Java files on to the server
2. I had to reduce the memory footprint as I'm installing it on the Rimuhosting VPS server that is quite restricted on RAM. I went for starting with 500 megs and maximum of 800 megs
3. Set up a white list file with the users we want to allow
4. Kick off the server: java -Xms500M -Xmx800M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

For now I just kept the server running in a screen session on the server. I do have a shopping list of things to tidy up:

• Set it up properly to start at boot time following the Debian init.d approach
• Set up logrotate to manage the log file
• I really must set up iptables or equivalent to give me a suitable firewall

Wuala, Sunk Cost And Backup Economics

Time spent backing up is rewarded in heaven. Hence I was disappointed at the Wuala announcement that they had stopped their P2P backup storage trading. I had managed to get 40GB of backup space available by sharing disk space on various PCs. I need roughly 60GB available for backup at the moment. The Wuala folks say that I can keep the 40GB free for a year which is a pretty large incentive to stay with them. They also sell space using bitcoin. I could buy another 20GB for a year for 2 BTC which at current rates is about 7 GBP. Treating my 40GB to date as a sunk cost I think it makes sense to stay with Wuala for the next twelve months. Reminder to self: start looking for a new backup provider in September 2012.

The Math Book

I've just finished reading The Math Book. Nice book for dipping into with a page per topic on mathematics throughout history. My favourite was audioactive sequences.