Minecraft Running On Old Laptop

I've been setting up the Minecraft client on an old Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop running Windows XP. The basic installed failed complaining that I had a bad video card driver. The solution was to go into Control Panel, click Display, pick Settings, Advanced. Under that menu find Troubleshoot and turn down the hardware acceleration settings. Mine worked at just less than halfway turned on. In order to get the client to run without too much lag I had turn turn the render distance down and turn off other fancy graphics options.

Which Bookmarking Tool To Use

I'm between bookmarking tools at the moment. I've been happy with StumbleUpon for a while, but I've just given up on their new UI. It requires you to remember too much mystery meat to get anything done. I had used Delicious before that. I can't really remember why I stopped using it. I think I liked the old StumbleUpon more. I'm considering using Google's +1 facility, but again that seems a little obscure.

Here are my requirements:

• Save bookmarks
• Work quickly from Chrome or Firefox
• Work okay from the Android browser on a phone
• Support tags
• Able to be viewed as a web page rather than tied to a browser (rules out Firefox Sync)
• Easy way to get my data out again

Suggestions?

"Family Math" - Great Book Of Maths Games

I've just finished reading Family Math. This is a book of games and puzzles focused on giving kids interesting challenges while stimulating mathematical thinking. A couple of favourites have been about an algorithm for palindrome numbers (try 89) and "Ten Card Arrangement" where cards are dealt and shuffled in a repeatable way and you have to stack the deck to come out correctly.

Highly recommended.

We've just done the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch 2012. Here's what we found:

Bird	Max Number
Blackbird	2
Magpie	2
Carrion crow	1
Woodpigeon	3
Coal tit	1
Blue tit	3
Nuthatch	2
Jackdaw	1
Song thrush	1
Robin	1
Chaffinch	1
Great tit	2
Wren	1

Security Scan

This is just a quick list of things I'm going to do periodically to test the security of the systems I'm running:

1. GRC's Sheilds Up utility on all external network interfaces for machines that I can run Chrome on
2. On the server I have no GUI and Shields Up doesn't run in Lynx. Instead I used nmap

First time through with Shields Up I found that my home router had the SNMP port 161 open. This is a BT Home Hub version 3.0. It would appear that it is not possible to turn this off. I'll have to raise a help request with BT to turn it off.

On the server I had a surprise that ports 554 and 7070 were open. Looking in /etc/services it said that 554 was Real Time Streaming Protocol, and 7070 wasn't listed. To find out what was listening on the ports I ran:

sudo lsof -i :554
sudo lsof -i :7070

Both of those returned nothing. Next I tried:

sudo netstat -a |grep LISTEN |grep -v unix

That didn't find anything bound to those ports at all. I asked the helpful people at Rimu Hosting if they knew what was going on.

Update 29 Jan 2012: The Rimu Hosting people came back and said that when they ran nmap against the IP address they didn't see anything on ports 554 or 7070. Strange. I need to get someone else to run the nmap scan from a different location to see what they see.

Minecraft Mod Manager Website Wish

I seem to have become the Minecraft system support person for lots of son #1's friends. The trouble is that they all want mods installed and while not that difficult, you need to be able to unpack JAR files in order to do that. This is well beyond the technical grasp of most Minecraft parents it seems. What I really want is a web site where you can just click a few buttons and it will install the mods. I'm going to see if I can contact the person who writes MineSwitcher to use that as a starting point.

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.