The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 376)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: Hi I am Jacob.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 376!
Late Night Technology Tinkering, Computer Repair, Testing 3Speak & Bob Flies The Coop)
My sleep cycle got rather skewed because I was restless yesterday evening and what started out as me being up late watching some videos about homemade sawmills turned into me tinkering with an old desktop computer to see if I could diagnose what was wrong with it. I was not all that surprised to find myself tinkering with stuff in the wee hours of the morning but I was slightly surprised that by the time that I was done the sky was growing light and the sun was about to come up. As nice as it is to have a small work area in the new storage addition I need to not cave to the temptation to spend too much time in there tinkering on stuff at all hours of the day and night and given how long it has been since I have had such an area to work in it is damn sure tempting to do just that.
The computer itself is an old desktop that one of my fellow homesteaders had given me some time back when they upgraded their desktop and it is that same computer that I mentioned several months ago that kept exhibiting a bunch of anomalous behaviors and wearing through hard drives for some unknown reason until I was like 'whoa this thing is just going to keep killing hard drives' and recommended that the owner just upgrade it. So after it sat around in my storage for a few months I decided to see if I could further diagnose what was going on with it and possibly turn it into a usable computer for a totally different fellow homesteader who has recently been talking about getting their own computer.
Once I got the computer case open and everything wired up and powered it on I noticed that the fan-less video card was getting super hot and that one of the case fans was wired to the same power lead as the optical (DVD) drive which I doubt was a big deal but it made me wonder if a large fan running on the same power lead as a drive (whether an optical or a hard drive) was perhaps contributing to the problems it had been having. What I noticed was that the computer would run for a little while and then it would power itself off in such a way that it appeared that the entire machine was simply losing power and not necessarily crashing or even overheating. So I first replaced the video card with the one I had ordered last autumn (when I was thinking to build my own computer) and although after powering the computer on it would run for a longer period of time it still randomly powered itself off.
When I was moving stuff from the camper the other week I had harvested two old power supplies from some old desktops that I had and although they are low wattage units I figured what the hell and installed the larger of the two (I think it is two hundred and fifty watts) into the desktop I was tinkering with and wired it up to the motherboard. Well, I kind of 'installed' it by just setting it on top of the computer because the wires were too short to have the power supply unit installed properly in the case and also be capable of reaching the plugs on the motherboard. When I turned the computer on after that it started right up and after booting to a Linux distro on a USB thumb-drive it stayed running and did not power itself off so I think that the original power supply was faulty.
I later dug out an old hard drive, got it installed in the tower and installed Linux on it to see if I could mine crypto with it. I mainly wanted to see if I could perhaps mine with that video card that I put in it but I also wanted to see what kind of hash-rate that I could getting CPU mining NIM with it as well. The video card is too old to mine crypto with and I went pretty far down the proverbial rabbit hole trying to find mining software that could utilize it. I eventually gave up on that particular endeavor and switched to mining NIM with it and it does about the same hash-rate as the larger of the two laptops that I have been mining NIM with over the last few weeks. As of right now that computer has been mining for almost twenty-four hours without a single hitch or power down.
I eventually fell asleep a little before the sun was up and slept until nearly ten-thirty before waking up again. After doing my usual morning reading and routine I hiked down to the homestead proper to tell the folks there about my successful repair of that computer and what had been wrong with it which of course lead into a lot of discussion about where we could set it up as a potential mining rig and what new components that it would need to make it more profitable to mine with like a larger power supply and a more modern video card. We even looked up the cost of electricity here per kilowatt hour and did all the math to determine the profitability of various cryptos. We also did the same math for the current NIM miners and all combined they are making around four cents USD a day which is fine given the speculative nature of that cryptocurrency and that I have been doing it mainly as an experimental project for educational purposes.
Later in the day I wound up testing out 3Speak for sharing videos and even posted a few of my older videos from my last off-grid journey at That Old Farm. I know that most folks are not interested in older content but I thought that the videos were pretty illuminating and interesting after finding them on an old phone and reviewing them. I thought about uploading all my videos from That Old Farm in chronological order to 3Speak but whoa that would be a heck of a project especially considering that I have over a thousand videos from that period of my life. What I am thinking of doing instead is to just selectively upload some of those videos and give them titles and descriptions which reflect the content of the video.
As with all of this 'sharing my life' stuff there has to be some narrative thread that 'holds it all together' (so to speak) and what I have noticed with doing things by the number of the Day is that although it works awesome for me it does not always convey what the 'content' of the 'Day' is about as far as topics go. With these writings that is not so much the case because between the title and the tags the 'topics' are pretty obvious but that is not the case at all with the videos or even the writings that I created during my stay at That Old Farm. Personally I do not mind sort of forcing folks to wade through all my ramblings to learn stuff because after all it is also the story of my life and editing personal things out of said story would wholly undermine the positive things that the sharing itself actually does for me. I am about as inclined to 'sanitize' my creations as much as I am inclined to censor myself and that is not fucking much at all because I think that to do either would just encourage me to feel isolated, alienated and ultimately lead me into feeling all too damn combative which are some of the things that sharing my life has countered and helped me cope with and even address the causes of such feelings and grow as a person in a healthy way.
All that jazz aside, I eventually fell asleep late in the afternoon and did not wake up again until three thirty-one in the morning and whoa do I feel rested! Of course I had not fed the dogs, the chickens had not been put up and I had not written my daily post. Yesterday is like this fuzzy memory of having done a bunch of stuff and having been highly productive without much in the way of tangible things to show about it.
I was feeling anxious about the chickens not having their coop door shut and when I looked in there I only saw three of them and instantly started beating myself up about having fallen asleep and failing to wake up before dark to feed all the critters and get the chickens secured for the night in their coop. Thankfully I found the fourth chicken (of course it was Bob the rooster) outside of the dog yard roosting on a log under the bat house. I have no idea how he got out there but he probably just flew over the fence at some point and never found his way back inside so he settled down as close to the coop as he could when night fell. With the dogs all inside the shelter with me there is a good chance something would have come along and eaten him during the night so I am glad that I woke up when I did and carried him to the coop where he happily rejoined the other chickens.
Well, I should probably just wrap this up and get started on my day here. On the bright side of it all I at least got up before four in the morning today and am already off to a rather productive start. Today will assuredly at some point require a nap but I have some projects in mind to work on if the weather holds and I can stay on track with doing them. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
More about me: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
https://peakd.com/hive/@jacobpeacock/hive-survival-guide-sixth-edition