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Episode Notes On 29 May 2022 In this episode of the podcast I interview Alex one of the lead developers in the Navcoin project. We discuss what Navcoin is, some problems with cryptocurrencies and some of the future plans for Navcoin. This episode answers a number of questions asked on Discord and the telegram channel. Check out the Navcoin project at https://www.navcoin.org/

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Episode Notes Here is the next episode of my podcast. In this episode I discuss my adult ADHD, take my medication and let you listen to how it takes affect.

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Episode Notes Alicia and I discuss Moccona, a freeze-dried instant coffee we both enjoy.

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This podcast discusses how I decided to get tested for ADHD, my diagnosis and initial experiences. Transcript thanks to Alicia: Welcome to conversations with Kerry: a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions, or feedback, you can find me as @khoath on Twitter, or email me, kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Welcome to the podcast. This episode is entitled ADHD and Me.

Story time: I have recently been diagnosed with adult ADHD, and it was quite an interesting journey to get to this conclusion, so I’m going to cover a little bit of that, in the hope that it may be useful and instructional to others.

Now, as a child, I was always reasonably intelligent, and I did reasonably well at school. But I discovered that I really had a problem with procrastination, and getting me to do homework was like pulling teeth. It never seemed to get done. I always found other interesting and more wonderful things to do. And some would say that’s true of any child, but as the years progressed, I discovered that procrastination was a huge problem for me. I would put off important things even if those things were going to pay me lots of money, even if those things were extremely important, even if those things would negatively impact me if left to chance. And I also noticed that I was having trouble focusing on tasks that I wanted to do. I could hyper focus, I could sometimes get into projects and complete them, but I would always jump from project to project and rarely complete anything.

So it was late last year on YouTube I was watching a humorous video about adult ADHD. And they basically have a comic asking you a whole series of questions, and getting you to mark off the behaviors that you experience. And I realized that the actual examples would occur to sighted people more than blind people. But I decided to try this quiz, and see what I actually scored. And I scored quite highly, which got me thinking. And I wondered over the years how many things at my job I had delegated to other people, and how many things in my job that I hadn’t actually done, and how efficient was I at working. And I came to the conclusion, not very. And I got to thinking that there may be a reason for all of this sort of behavior.

So I started to research, and I discovered that a lot of these traits were, in fact, typical of people with ADHD, although ADHD symptoms could occur in other mental conditions, such as bipolar and schizophrenia. So I decided that this required further investigation. And I spoke to some people on the Internet, and got some personal stories, and decided to go to my general practitioner, and get a referral to a psychiatrist. And I got the referral to the psychiatrist, and booked an appointment only to find out that the appointment was going to be 473 dollars. But I was pretty sure that there was stuff going on, so I decided to put the money aside and go to the appointment.

And I went to see the psychiatrist, who was an older fellow. And he asked me lots of questions about my family. Did I live with my family? How closed was I to my parents? Did I experience abuse? Was I depressed, anxious? Had I had psychosis? A whole range of questions. And I discovered through some research that the reason they ask about psychosis is because some people do experience psychosis when they take dexamphetamines or similar stimulant medication. There are a number of non-stimulant medications for ADHD, but the first line of defense is usually stimulant medications because they work for 70 to 80 percent of people that they are prescribed for.

Now when I was seeing the psych, he asked me if I had any of my old school reports, and that if I did, could I please bring them in to the next appointment, and that he would see me in seven weeks’ time. I have to say that was a little demoralizing. So first appointment down, 473 dollars, got some back from Medicare obviously, see me in seven weeks. So, and fill in this questionnaire on adult ADHD. So I got my support workers to fill in the questionnaire on ADHD, and I also got together the school reports, which luckily my mother had saved for me and sent across to me. And we spent a couple days scanning all of the reports, and getting those into the computer and getting them into JPEG files. And I filled in the ADHD questionnaire and scanned all of its pages into PNG files. And I went to try and email in the documentation for the psychiatrist, and discovered that the system would only accept PDF as input. Not only that, that the PDF’s were limited in size as to how big they could be. And I’d initially sent them a Dropbox folder with all the necessary documents in it, but that wasn’t acceptable. So I ended up getting on to a site called PDF Candy, which can convert JPEG’s into a PDF, and I made a PDF of about 13 pages of the school report, only to find out that it was too big to upload. So, I found three pages of the school report, and put them into a PDF and emailed that through, and discovered that that would actually be accepted.

Now as a case of interest, when we went back through my school reports, and looked at the comments that the teachers had left over the years, many of them said, “If Kerry paid better attention,” “If Kerry paid more attention to class,” “If Kerry was more focused.” And I’d seen those reports over the years, but hadn’t really thought anything of them. I thought well, teachers usually say that about kids and their class. But I took all of those reports into the psych in paper form, because I didn’t trust the technology that the medical systems that they were using was using.

So I had a second appointment, and I was prescribed 30 Mg Lisdexamfetamine. And this is a medication that basically has a Lysine molecule which is um, a molecule that’s attached to the dexamphetamine molecule. And it’s an amino acid, and basically when you take this medication, the red blood cells strip off the Lysine, and then release the Dexamphetamine into your system. And so they had to call the script through to clearing place for scripts, (Medicare clearing place), provide my Medicare number, my script number. And I picked up the medicine on Wednesday afternoon, and discovered that you actually had to get it from the same pharmacy. You had to get the repeats from the same pharmacy as the original medication. If you didn’t do that, they actually had to do a transfer of script form to actually send the script to another pharmacy, because this class of medication is Schedule 8, and is very restricted because of its abuse potential, and people selling it on the streets, and doing all sorts of illegal things with it.

So I went into the pharmacy on Wednesday afternoon, picked up the script after my psych appointment. And I found out that Lisdexamfetamine, (or Vyvanse as it’s known), has recently been added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme as of February this year. So I managed to pick up my script for $6.60, and I took the medication home for the night. Frustratingly enough, this medication, due to the way it works, because the red blood cells actually strip off the Lysine molecules to liberate the Dexamphetamine into the system, the medication has a two-hour onset time. So I couldn’t take any of my capsules on the Wednesday night.

But Thursday morning, as in yesterday, I got up, had some food, took my first Lisdexamfetamine capsule, and waited. Now, any of you who’ve been listening to my previous podcasts will perhaps notice that my vocal tones are different than what they were on the previous podcasts. No, this is not some acting or some voice that I’m putting on just for the podcast. When the Dexamphetamine is in my system, I am significantly calmer, more focused, I have executive function, I can plan tasks, I can figure out what I’m doing with my day. I have a lot more patience, slower to anger, and I’m much happier.

So this is the second day of my medication, so two capsules down, 28 to go, until I go to the pharmacy and pick up the refill. I’m not saying that this is the perfect medication. It does have its drawbacks. The two-hour onset time is inconvenient because if I take the medication at eight o’clock in the morning, it does not take effect until ten o’clock. And interestingly enough, the medication wears off around 6:00 PM, which means I essentially get eight useful hours of calm, focus, peaceful brain, lucidity. So that will be something to talk to him about when I go back to see him. Luckily I have not had too many of the side effects listed on the websites. Just one out of ten nausea, and the sort of crash when the medication comes out of my system. But I will be talking to him about options, and whether there are other options I can take that will allow me to have more useful time in a day. Whether there is either something I can do with the current medication, or other medications that would be more suitable. I know that I was given the Lisdexamfetamine because he thought that taking one capsule per day would be simpler for me. And I didn’t have to dose myself or manage dosing, which I have no problem doing. But I understand his point of view.

So for the next seven weeks or so, I’m seeing how Lisdexamfetamine affects me. I’m finding my life so much more peaceful, so much calmer. I’m actually able to get things done, which is why I’m recording a podcast today. You may see more of them in the feed over the next seven weeks. And then when the next seven weeks are up, we look at our options, and see what is possible as far as any modifications to my medication, and things that I can do to make a fundamental difference to that.

So I’ve shared this podcast in the hopes of sharing a little bit of my journey on the way to finding out that I do in fact suffer from adult ADHD. And I would encourage anyone who feels that they may be in the same predicament as me to consider doing the necessary investigation, providing the necessary information, and going through the necessary steps to get themselves diagnosed, if they feel that would be beneficial to them. For me, the diagnosis has been life-changing. And unfortunately at the moment, I haven’t found ways to get hypnosis to help me with ADHD. I have found the medication helpful, but I am also looking at other modalities and things that may be able to assist me, especially if I don’t have any other options as far as the Lisdexamfetamine is concerned.

So I realize it’s been a bit of a personal update this month. Hope people have found this interesting. If you have any queries, comments, questions, @khoath on Twitter, or kerry@gotss.net is the email address. Happy to answer any questions, queries. Thanks for listening, and I hope some of you found this an interesting podcast.

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Episode Notes In this episode I discuss my 486Dx/33 the first computer I owned and my first modem.

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Episode Notes In this episode I discuss how I can fund the podcast, ask for feedback from people on what they want to hear and provide a life update.

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Episode Notes In this episode Derek Lane and myself discuss some of our introduction to audio and a little about the art of choosing a microphone. If you wish to reach Derek you can email: info@lanesaudio.com

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Episode Notes Here is a podcast about TV Dinners, what they are and I cook one live on the podcast.

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In this episode I chat to my mother about the 1976 Pilliga flood and my early childhood as a blind person.

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In this episode Alicia and Doc join me on the podcast to discuss fun and practical demonstrations of hypnosis. They go into trance with me to demonstrate some of the more fun aspects of trance.

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This is an episode when where we hear about Hannah's introduction to Polyamory and how she is doing.Episode Notes Here is the next episode of my podcast.

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Episode Notes This is a discussion and introduction to cryptocurrency and explains why it is becoming more important as time goes on. Transcript: Welcome to conversations with Kerry: a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions, or feedback, you can find me as @khoath on Twitter, or email me, kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

Hello everybody, and welcome to this podcast, which is a podcast where I’m sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee, so I’ll edit out most of the coffee noises. However, I’m going to chat about an interesting topic. What topic is that, you are wondering, as I begin this podcast. Let me demystify you.

Kerry to Alexa: How much is a Bitcoin worth? Alexa: One Bitcoin is about 38,600 Australian dollars. Kerry to Alexa: How much is an Ethereum worth? Alexa: One Ethereum is about 947 Australian dollars.

What is a Bitcoin? What is an Ethereum? What is cryptocurrency? If there is interest, I will do a series of podcasts on all of these topics, but I’m going to start off today with an introduction on cryptocurrency.

What is cryptocurrency? Back in the late 90’s (I believe it was 1998-1999) a programmer by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto began posting on a mailing list that I was a member of, by the name of Cipher Punks. And he was proposing the design for an electronic cash system: An electronic currency that would hold and store value, and allow anyone in the world with the correct equipment to mine, (which I’ll get to in a moment), store, spend, and transact in an electronic cryptocurrency. And he designed this system over a number of years, and I’m not going to be specific about when it was designed, because that’s what Wikipedia is for. Before I go on, I would like to disclaim that no information in this podcast should be considered investment advice, and you are expected to do due diligence when investigating any claims that may or may not be made in this podcast. And past performance isn’t a reliable indicator of future performance. More about that in a moment.

So Bitcoin was invented. There were some people who did some transactions with it. I believe Hal Finney ordered a pizza, which cost quite a number of Bitcoins. Now one of the problems with Bitcoin is that it’s volatility of value is extreme. That is to say that the price of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly with supply and demand, and we’ll get to that a little later as well.

But what is a cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a, an electronic, cryptographically secure, hopefully tamper-proof, method of storing perceived value. Why do I say perceived value? Well, one of the big questions that people often ask when they hear about Bitcoin, (because Bitcoin is in the news at the moment, given its price and its value, at the moment at least), is, “Is Bitcoin worth anything?”

Technically no. It’s the answer to some quite complicated mathematical problems that I won’t get into here, run through a difficulty algorithm, and computed with a lot of computing power, and time.

Now, when you hear about cryptocurrency, you’ll hear the term Blockchain mentioned. What is a blockchain? A blockchain is a special form of database designed for cryptographically storing various data that is applicable to financial transactions. And the reason I’m so general about this is because there are a number of blockchains. Bitcoin’s blockchain is probably the biggest and most well-known. Ethereum’s blockchain is the second biggest.

Now, once Bitcoin came out and once the proof of concept was run, and over the years as things have been ironed out of the network, people realized that Bitcoin was going to be successful, and it was going to hold value to a point. Now when I looked at Bitcoin in 2009, the coins were about $4.16 US a coin. In 2012, they were worth about 33 dollars a coin. In fact, I’ll get to mining in a moment. The value of Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly. Now with Bitcoin up around the 29,000 dollar US mark, possibly headed for 30,000 dollars, people are wondering where is the actual ceiling in the value of Bitcoin. In fact, there are some investors that are saying that if Bitcoin’s value continues to increase, it stands a chance of replacing the world’s wealth store, and will become more valuable than gold.

Now, basically the way cryptocurrencies work is that you solve a whole lot of series of mathematical problems. And in most cryptocurrencies (not all), you solve some complicated problems with a difficulty factor, (some very difficult cryptographic problems), and you mine a new block for the blockchain. And as a reward for mining that block, you are given a reward of currency. So the initial rewards for mining a block of Bitcoins used to be 55 Bitcoins. It then dropped down to 24 and a half Bitcoins. It is now down to 12 and a half Bitcoins. There is an artificial ceiling on the maximum number of Bitcoins that can be mined. You can only mine 21 million Bitcoins, and that should be mined by about 2023, 2024.

The difficulty algorithm is responsible for controlling how fast blocks are mined. And the network is actually configured so that blocks are mined in such a way that they are mined at a specific rate. And the difficulty rate is adjusted over time periods to take into consideration the developments and improvements in computer hardware and software.

When I mined Bitcoins in 2012, much to the initial annoyance of my wife at the time, (with an NVIDIA graphics card), I was able to mine 36 Bitcoins. Because the difficulty was quite low, and you didn’t require a lot of computing power to actually mine coins. Well, the idea that people could get free money by mining Bitcoins was quite popular, and Bitcoins popularity surged. Merchants started accepting Bitcoin. Shops started accepting Bitcoin. There were actual Bitcoin ATM’s for a while. They may come back, given its popularity. And as Bitcoin has gone through various hype cycles and various investment cycles, it’s interesting to note that the actual value of the coin has fluctuated quite spectacularly. When I sold off my 36 Bitcoins at 33 dollars a coin, and made approximately 1,060 dollars on Bitcoin I made. My wife ate humble pie, and apologized, and said that my 140-dollar investment in a video card that paid back 1,060 dollars in Bitcoin was in fact a worthwhile investment, and hats off to me for doing something that made us some money when things were a bit tight at the time.

So I did some mining in 2012, and then I put the whole thing on the back burner because my graphics card wasn’t that powerful, and it was beginning to be a little bit slow as the difficulty increased, and I decided to leave mining for a while. But in 2016-2017, I noticed that the Bitcoin price was climbing quite high. It was 4,000 dollars, 5,000 dollars, 8,000 dollars, 10,000 dollars, topping out, I believe at about 17,000 US dollars at the Bitcoin boom at the end of, I think it was 2018, 2017, 2017. I invested money in a whole pile of graphics cards. I bought about three or four of them, some quite powerful ones, some 4-Gig graphics cards, some 2-Gig graphics cards. I set up with some mining pools, and I mined Bitcoin. And when I was mining Bitcoin, with all of the rigs running, and all of the power being chewed, (and Bitcoin mining uses a lot of power), so they say that Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as the country of Ireland. I was making .001 Bitcoins a day, approximately, and that was equating to about 22 dollars Australian.

So I was making 22 dollars Australian per day, for every day that I mined. I was not the only one that considered the profit in coin mining. And as more people learned that there was money in mining cryptocurrency, more people mined, more people bought specific hardware, more people built mining rigs. There were even custom designed chips called ASIX, specifically designed to mine various cryptocurrencies.

And the top two cryptocurrencies, as previously mentioned, are Bitcoin and Ethereum. And the interesting thing about Ethereum is that it has not only financial transactions on its blockchain, but it has executable code, which is called Smart Contracts. And you can write conditions into this executable code to make it behave in a certain way. And the reason this has been done is to support various financial systems, such as mortgages, loans, interest, borrowing, and lending.

And in fact there are two tokens that seem to be reasonably popular at the moment. (The cryptocurrency field changes all the time.) Compound, and maker/DAI, which are used for lending cryptocurrency, and earning interest. Now, the goal of cryptocurrency is to be able to move currency across borders, to be able to allow anyone in the world to hold on to wealth and value. And this is especially important in places like Nigeria, where inflation runs rampant. And also to allow people to transact in these currencies.

Now, the acceptance of Bitcoin has been reasonably slow. But when the price spiked to 17,000 dollars US at the end of 2017, (which we call a Bitcoin bubble), a lot of financial institutes and software companies started taking cryptocurrency seriously. This led to the mistaken belief that you could put anything on a blockchain. A blockchain is a specific type of database that we don’t need to get into here. But sufficed to say that a blockchain has blocks of data that are cryptographically related to the blocks that proceed them, and you have to solve problems to actually put another block into the blockchain.

There are a few hundred cryptocurrencies. Some of them like Bitcoin are worth, you know, 30,000 dollars a coin. Or in Ethereum’s case about 740 US dollars, 741 US dollars a coin. Other coins like Stellar Lumens are worth about 13 US cents. And you can go to various sites to look up prices of these coins: gecko.com, various sites, there’s even a Discord telegraph bot called tip.cc, that will allow you to look at the prices of these various cryptocurrencies. And the trick is to find the exchange that supports the cryptocurrency you’ve got, or to go to a site like changelly.org, and change your cryptocurrency from one type to another.

Now, when you transact in cryptocurrency, there are fees. And depending on the volume of transactions on the blockchain networks, the fees fluctuate to regulate the amount of transactions that are being sent. So in fact when Bitcoin’s chain was very very active a number of years ago, the fees were actually quite high. And Ethereum has a fee called Gas, that is the amount it takes to put transactions on the blockchain. And in fact the higher the fee per transaction, the more likely your transaction will be mined into the next block on the blockchain.

And the interesting thing is that, as well as the cryptocurrency rewards on most blockchains, (not all of them, because not all blockchains use mining in the same way.) You can also get the mining fees on top of the reward for a particular block. So all of the fees in a block add up, and they go to the person that mines a block. Now because mining a block has become incredibly difficult, there are now what is known as mining pools. And that’s where a whole lot of people get together with their computers, their graphics cards, their custom ASIX chips, they mine these cryptocurrency. The mining pool mines the block, and then splits the reward from that block, using various systems between all of the miners. And that is how the miners make money to theoretically pay for their equipment, or at least pay for the electricity that is being used.

Now with Bitcoin so high, mining is big bickies. There are whole farms of computer equipment that are dedicated to purely mining Bitcoin. And there are mining setups with solar panels, to collect sunlight and to harness energy to generate power because this mining is so intense.

Now other cryptocurrencies are working on a lower environmental footprint, so that they can have less of an impact on the environment. But it appears that Bitcoin is here to stay, and Ethereum is here to stay, and perhaps compound, and Maker/DAI, and other coins are also here to stay. There have been cryptocurrencies that have failed, and their chains have been abandoned because they weren’t popular. But other cryptocurrencies stick around, and are still considered valuable, and can still be exchanged.

Should you invest in cryptocurrency? Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. I sold off most of my cryptocurrency at the end of 2017, and didn’t hold some cryptocurrency for quite a while. But as the price has increased, and the cryptocurrency has become more valuable, it’s become a very popular investment target for a lot of people. And I think the advice I would give to people is, the value of any currency, (but especially cryptocurrency) is extremely volatile. It is theoretically possible for Bitcoin to be worth 29,000 US dollars a coin today, and be worth 100 dollars tomorrow, if there was some horrendous market event that caused that to happen. The odds are that the value isn’t going to crash that quickly in the short-term, but any prediction that is made on these algorithms is exactly that. It’s a prediction. It’s the best guess of a whole lot of analysts. It’s the best guess of particular market forces that are at play at the time, and it’s the best guess of people trying to figure out where the market is going to go next, and how the market is going to move. Many news outlets are reporting that Bitcoin could reach 50,000 US dollars per coin.

Now one of the questions you often get from people is “Well I don’t have 50,000 dollars. How could I even think about investing in Bitcoin?” Or, “I don’t have 700 dollars. How could I invest in Ethereum?” Two answers to the question. You could invest in a cheaper cryptocurrency, such as Litecoin, or stellar lumens, or any of the other cheaper currencies. Or you can actually buy fractions of a coin. The smallest currency unit of Bitcoin is a Satoshi, which I believe is .000000001 (point eight zeros and a one) of a Bitcoin. And you can trade in values like milliBitcoins, and things like that to get smaller amounts, and invest as much as you see fit. In fact if you play with a site such as Coinbase, you can decide whether you’re going to regularly buy Bitcoin to get around the fluctuation of the prices. So maybe you’ll buy, you know, 20 dollars’ worth of Bitcoin every week, and build your portfolio that way.

Should you store all of your Bitcoins on an exchange? The answer is sadly no. Whilst storing your Bitcoins on an exchange for short-term storage is sensible if you’re going to invest and trade the currencies, long-term storage is a much more complicated proposition. And there are many methods and ways of storing the information that is required to store your Bitcoins: essentially the private keys that are attached to your Bitcoins. Now the problem is that storing Bitcoins is quite difficult. There have been cases of huge amounts of wealth stolen in cryptocurrencies. Bugs on the Ethereum chain have resulted in thousands of Ether being stolen. Hacking of exchanges and computers has resulted in hundreds and thousands of Bitcoins being stolen. In fact, Mt. Gox essentially went bankrupt a number of years ago, and many users lost their funds.

Now, if I was storing Bitcoin, (and this is just my personal advice), I would look at using something like a Warp Wallet, and storing the coin in a brain wallet, where you have some way of storing away your pass phrase so that you can retrieve those coins at a later date. It’s always best to store your coins safely offline. In fact, be your own bank registered, according to blockchain.info, as you are trusting somebody else’s JavaScript, and somebody else’s coding if you are using web wallets. If you’re using a wallet on your mobile device, you need to make sure you back up the seed phrase if your wallet has one, and put it somewhere safe that nobody’s going to find it. Otherwise they have your Bitcoins. If you’re running a wallet on your PC, you need to safely back up and safely store your wallet. Now, backing up a brain wallet is easier because you only need a pass phrase, and hopefully cryptic notes that nobody else will work out to say what your Bitcoins are. People have lost many, many, many Bitcoins over the years, and many many Ethereum over the years. Bad storage for cryptocurrency has resulted in people losing thousands of dollars’ worth of perceived value. There have actually been people who wanted to dig up rubbish dumps to retrieve hard drives, because the hard drive contains more value than the contents of the rubbish dump. I have no idea whether this person did in fact manage to convince the council to dig up the rubbish dump to retrieve his hard drive or not. Other people have had their coins stolen, malicious trojans, malicious programs to steal cryptocurrency. There are malware strains that actually use your CPU/GPU for mining coins for somebody else, so basically burning all of your spare computer time for somebody else’s profit. There are JavaScript attacks and various other attacks for stealing these private keys that have acquired an incredible amount of value. So, if anybody is interested in a podcast on how to safely store and hold cryptocurrency, I’d be happy to do one.

Has this introduction been useful? Has it been a bit all over the place? What are your comments? Click on the feedback link and tell me what you think, or get a hold of me. Khoath on Twitter, or kerry@gotss.net via email. Tell me what you thought of the podcast. What else would you like me to talk about? What else would you like to know about cryptocurrency, if anything?

I’ve been messing with cryptocurrency now for, I’d say around eight years, and I do not know it all. I’ll be the first one to say so. I have had a fair bit of experience, and I’ve done a fair bit of research on how cryptocurrency works, what it does, and how it’s likely to behave. If you’re getting started on cryptocurrency, do so at your own risk. But you may want to look at sites such as www.coinbase.com Now for Australian users, you can’t sell using coinbase, so you might have to use Coin Jar. Also keep in mind that the tax departments of various countries would now like to know how much crypto you hold, because crypto is becoming so valuable.

And in fact the Australian tax office would like you to declare your Bitcoin earnings on your tax return. Spoiler ATO: I think a lot of people aren’t going to tell you. Now the problem with Bitcoin though is that the ATO can actually go through the blockchain because it is a public record, and extract a whole lot of transaction information, and potentially (if they want to spend the money) figure out how much Bitcoin you’ve got, and how much it’s worth. So be aware of your local currency laws. Only use computing power and electricity and resources that are yours. And consider whether dabbling in/investing in cryptocurrency is a sensible decision for you.

Everybody loves free money, but in my experience, money is never free. You either have to invest effort or time, or a combination of both, and this is absolutely true for cryptocurrency as well. These will be hours of research that I will never get back. So seriously consider if Bitcoin is for you, or if Ethereum is for you, or any of the other cryptocurrencies are for you. Consider whether this is an effective investment, as opposed to shares or bank bonds or whatever. Figure out how you’re going to store this wealth, (if you’re going to store it), and consider whether this is a sensible investment move for you.

I hope this has served as a good introduction to cryptocurrency. Please comment, send me feedback, tell me what you think. Is there anything else you’d specifically like me to talk about on future podcasts if I do more on cryptocurrency?

No, I do not have the secret to the Bitcoin or the Ethereum mining algorithms to be able to allow you to mint thousands of coins. Otherwise I would be living on some amazing tropical island with some nubile women to handle all of my needs and desires in a perfect world. But I do hope this has been informational, and thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll tune in for future episodes.

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Episode Notes This is a little chat on what Christmas in Australia 2020 looks like compared to the rest of the world.

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In this episode I discuss the Keynote PC-Plus a Toshiba T1000SE with added speech hardware I used throughout highschool until I finished in 1996.

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Episode Notes This is an episode about my first computer the Keynote XL and what impact it had on my life.

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Episode Notes In this episode I deep Fry a Chiko roll and discuss the state of access technology whilst the roll fries.

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Episode Notes In this episode, I hypnotize Hannah and demonstrate some simple phenomena. We discuss hypnosis and I ask her about her experiences. If you have questions for Hannah you can reach her as @kezzashannah on Twitter.

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Episode Notes In this episode I discuss and demonstrate a 3.5 inch floppy drive and show the types of portable storage we used to use prior to 2003.

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Episode Notes In this episode I unbox and set up the IdMate Galaxy talking barcode scanner. I show how it operates and how it manages to crash the first time I boot it up.

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Episode Notes In this episode we discuss various challenges faced by those with a vision impairment when they consider studying beyond school.

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Episode Notes Here is the next episode of my podcast. In this episode we discuss the pandemic and how it is starting to affect our lives and those around us.

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Episode Notes Here is the next episode of my podcast.

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Episode Notes This is a compilation of 3 pieces of audio, firstly an introduction, recorded today. The second piece is an Audioboo I recorded in 2016 about backing up data on personal computers. The third piece is recorded today giving an overview of how I back up data today. The third section was recorded on an iPhone so happy to get comments on audio quality, and anything else you'd like to say on the podcast. backblaze http://www.backblaze.com restic http://www.restic.org/ scoop https://www.scoop.sh/ rclone: http://www.rclone.org

Transcript:

Hello everybody, and welcome to Kerry’s Chaos, episode 3. This episode is all about backing up data and backing up data effectively on a home user’s budget. The first section was recorded in 2016, and basically gives an overview of some of the options available, and the second section is how I back up in 2020. If you have any queries, comments, etc, you can reach me as kerry at gotss dot nett, or khoath on Twitter.

I’m wondering whether people have trouble with me recording things on the phone like I did for the last section, or whether the audio is of sufficiently good quality, and how people enjoyed the podcast. So, curious on feedback on that, because it is taken from several disparate sources.

Good evening everybody and welcome to this short chat on backing up big data on a budget.

How many times have you heard it? Back-ups are important. You need to back up your data so that you don't lose it in the event of a catastrophe. The question arises: how many back-ups should you have? Where should they be stored? How much do you want to spend protecting your data?

There are a number of options for backing up your stuff. Some people use external hard drives. Some people use CD and DVD media, Blue Ray media, tapes. Some people even print data out to be scanned back in. But let's consider the average hoarding person. You've managed to collect a couple of terabytes of data over the years, because let's face it, you've been on the internet, you've got a reasonably fast internet connection and your hoarding instincts as a person has resulted in you downloading a stack of stuff that is considered highly, highly important to you.

The first thing you need to decide is how much of your data actually needs to be backed up. Yes, it would be inconvenient if those three seasons of Game of Thrones were deleted off your hard drive but you could probably torrent them down again. Not so much the back-ups of your commitment ceremony or some song you slogged four hours out on to work with with a group of friends that are never ever going to meet in person ever again.

So first of all, decide whether you're backing everything up or whether you're only backing the important stuff up. If you're backing up everything, then that's pretty straight forward and we can move on to the people who might be backing up some of their stuff.

How much do you want to spend on storage and how reliable do you want that storage to be? Nothing is ever a hundred percent reliable so you're always working against probabilities, equipment failure and acts of God to decide how stable and reliable your back-ups are going to be.

If you have under a terabyte of data, then potentially one of the online cloud services such as or Dropbox or Box or Spider Oak might be worth looking at. However, it's worth considering: do you trust these services to look after your data and if you intend to encrypt the data before you back it up, how are you going to do that? With what program, what algorithm and what are you going to do in the event that you lose a pass phrase? Google Drive

There are various back-up services that claim to be able to back up unlimited amounts of data for, for example, $5.00 a month per computer and I'm referring here to services such as Crash Plan and Backblaze. A couple of things to keep in mind with these services. You probably want to use the local encryption settings so that your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer so that even if Crash Plan or Backblaze or one of the similar services is subpoenaed for your data, nobody will be able to decrypt it. This is probably important if you've nicked a whole pile of pirated stuff or you've got a whole lot of data on your hard drive that you really shouldn't have; child porn; terrorist bomb plans; the list goes on. (I hope nobody listening to these audio boos has those sorts of things on their hard drives.)

Now Crash Plan claims that they do in fact back up unlimited data but there's a couple of things to consider when backing up unlimited data. How fast is your internet upstream? If your internet upstream is fast enough, you might be able to push one to ten gig of data a day. Still means that backing up two terabytes of data is going to take a significantly long time. You can drop $350.00 on a C drive that they send to you and you fill up with up to a terabyte of data and you ship it back to them. They preload that to your account. However it is still going to take significant time and significant bandwidth, possibly impacting your internet use, to decide whether that is actually worth backing up all of that data over the internet.

If you decide to back it up though, Crash Plan, Backblaze, whatever, will store all of the stuff that you need to store. Do however be aware of the terms and conditions of the plan and read the find print to make sure that unlimited truly does mean unlimited.

Another option for people may be external drives and a lot of people are seeing external hard drives on Amazon for $129.00 so that you can buy a 5 terabyte hard drive. These are probably quite handy and can store a lot of data, but a couple of things need to be kept in mind. As I always say and as many other storage experts fail, it's not if a hard drive will fail, it's when a hard drive will fail. All hard drives fail eventually. Some of them fail within a day or a week or a month of being owned, and some of them are still ticking away for ten years. The probability of hard drive failure is something you can read research papers on, and there can be endless debates as to whether Western Digital or Seagate or insert your other favourite drive brand, is the best type of hard drive. But even that can fluctuate between manufacturing batches, temperature considerations and shock considerations.

So if you are going to go out and buy yourself a five terabyte hard drive, it might not be a bad idea to go out and buy yourself two five terabyte hard drives, so that you've got one that's connected to your computer as hot storage, and a back-up drive that acts as your back-up in case something goes wrong with the hot storage. You'll need a way to keep the two drives synchronised. If you're on a PC platform, I would strongly suggest something like Robocopy. Tera Copy is fine in the GUI and the Microsoft Sync Toy will handle GUI lists of folders that need to be kept in sync. However, I'm not sure what the limitations on Sync Toy are. Robocopy will quite happily copy terabytes from one drive to another and keep the archives in sync. You do however need to be careful with Robocopy however, because you need to specify the /xo switch so that it doesn't copy old information over new information. It's also worth noting that Robocopy is a command line utility and unless you get hold of a friendly geek to help you with the batch file, then you may have trouble automating this. Also, not all batch files are created equal. I've seen a lot of batch files for Robocopy missing the /xo switch. But a peruse of the Robocopy documentation does in fact point out that /xo is somewhat important. You also need to exclude the files that you don't want to back up with Robocopy such as BTSync folders, Dropbox control information, etc.

The other thing you probably want to keep in mind is if you're on a Mac or a Linux box, you may want to consider Rsync for backing stuff up. Rsync is handy in the fact that it is quite flexible, can handle thousands and thousands of files and can be fired off from chron jobs relatively easily.

So you have two hard drives. One primary, one secondary. You went and ponied up and got two five terabyte hard drives. It's up to you whether you switch the hard drives around on a weekly or monthly basis so that the spare becomes the regular one and the regular one becomes the spare. But there's another thing that you need to keep in mind. Even storing data on hard drives has a probability of failing. Drives have an uncorrectable bit error rate that means that occasionally they're not going to be able to pull back a sector that was written to them. This doesn't happen very often but it does in fact happen. What is the guarantee that all of the data that you have written to your drives is actually uncorrupted?

I would strongly suggest finding a utility that will generate SHA1 sums or MD5 sums of trees of files. Make lists of the files on your hard drive with their MD5 or SHA1 sums and scatter the manifest and catalogue across a couple of cloud services so that if you do need to run a test on a hard drive to see if indeed it is failing, you consider pulling back the SHA1 sums and running it against the data to catch any differences. At least that way you will be able to tell which of your two drives is good and which has gone bad.

The other thing to keep in mind is that all of this takes some time and some ingenuity to actually set up. You'll have to find the right utilities; you'll have to find the right batch files and you'll have to be disciplined enough to actually carry out this back-up plan on a regular basis. Things like Carbonite, Crash Plan and Backblaze make it easy because services run in the background that back this data up to the cloud or your external hard drives or your friends' computers. Now it's worth mentioning that if you do use Crash Plan to back up data to your friends' computers that you'll be using their hard disk space and you'll have to negotiate with them but also keep in mind that the data is in fact encrypted and your friends don't get access to your Crash Plan data.

If you are going to back up data to locally connected hard drives, you may wish to consider whether the data should be encrypted to protect it from prying eyes. But the SHA1 sums are certainly worth considering.

So some of you were going to ask me, “Well how do we even know if hard drives are going to fail? Is there any warning that a drive is on the way out?” Well it turns out that in approximately 70 to 80% of cases, there is actually warning that a drive is going to fail. The technology that tells you this is known as SMART: Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. There are utilities for Linux, MacOS and Windows called SMARTMon Tools that can run in the background on your system as a service and can provide you with information about impending drive failures. This is fairly good for connected drives that are directly installed in the computer. But some USB to SATA bridges don't pass through the SMART Inquiry commands in a standard method. You may have to do some fiddling to actually get SmartMon Tools to check these.

Other external drives such as the WD series of drives and some of the Seagate drives do come with software that is meant to monitor the health of the drive, and warn you potentially of an impending drive failure. It's possible that the warning will not come in time though, and a mechanical fault that stops the drive from powering up or stops the drive from spinning will give you no amount of SMART warning even if you do choose to use this technology. So SMART is one of those things that just makes things a little bit safer and a little bit more informative. It has allowed me however to replace failing arrays in RAID arrays.

RAID. I suppose I should mention RAID. A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk drives. If you have multiple copies of data, then it's less likely that you're actually going to lose the data. This is a pretty simple idea. RAID 1 is an exact mirror of the data. Two drives contain exactly the same data. It's fast to write data to both drives identically. It actually doubles read speed if you're using both the drives but it does halve write speed. So RAID cards with caches and stuff can be useful so the operating system can dump a bit under a gig of data at the drives and the drives can get on writing it to the array. Be aware though there are pitfalls to RAID.

Most people consider that going out and building themselves a RAID 5 array in a home NAS is probably going to be a good way to back up the three or four terabytes of data they've got. A couple of things with RAID 5 arrays that I have learnt from painful experience. When a drive fails in a RAID 5 array, it is imperative that you replace the failed drive as soon as possible. That is dash on down to the computer store the day the drive fails or have another drive as hot spare. There is however a problem with RAID 5 and that is that once one drive has failed in the array, it is potentially possible and in fact more probable than you'd think, that whilst rebuilding the array onto the spare drive that you've just replaced, one of the second existing drives will fail. If two drives fail in a RAID 5 array, you're essentially left doing block level restores and dragging as much data off the arrays that appears readable as possible with tools that may break your brain. RAID 5 does use a fair amount of CPU. So for example some of the home NAS's which vary in accessibility such as the QNAP, etc, they'd use a 1.2 GHz arm processor and a cut down version of Linux with maybe 256 or 512 meg of ram, will read and write to the RAID drives fairly OK but will burn a fair bit of CPU doing it. These home NAS's will take anywhere between two and four devices and are fairly quiet and fairly low power and have iTunes servers and all sorts of other stuff in them. The question you've got to ask yourself is how accessible are the web interfaces, are they in fact usable, and are you going to pay for the extended tech support who will help you rebuild the array in the event that it fails or are you an MDADM ninja and can SSH into the thing like I usually do and rebuild the arrays by hand provided that they're willing to be rebuilt? RAID 5 is a nice option because it is n -1 drives. So if you have four two terabyte drives, (so that's eight terabytes of actual storage), and you put them in a RAID 5 array, one drive is used or the amount of storage for one drive, because in RAID 5 the parity is actually plexed across all of the drives. One drive's worth of data is used for parity redundancy information, which means that with four two terabyte drives, you will end up with six terabytes of usable storage minus a little bit for administrative overhead in RAID 5 array. RAID could probably have its own discussion, and I could do an entire boo on RAID, and that may happen another night.

RAID 6 is a little bit nicer because we run the array with dual parity drives. This means that you can handle the loss of two drives in a RAID array that is in RAID 6 mode. You don't really win much though if you've only got four drives in your RAID. Four minus two is two so if you've got four two terabyte drives, you only end up with four terabytes of fairly reliable storage in RAID 6. RAID 6 however does start to make sense if you have six or eight drives. If you have eight drives in RAID 6, you lose two drives for redundancy, which means that if we have 16 terabytes of storage, and we have eight drives, we subtract two drives for storage, and we end up with 12 terabytes of usable storage. Which means that the storage ratio is more efficient the more drives you have in RAID 6. However, don't think you're going to go out and build a RAID 6 array with 27 drives. Unfortunately, the more drives you put in a RAID array, the increased chance of failure that one of the drives is going down for the count and isn't coming back up again. In fact, I could probably do an entire boo on the failures and shortcomings of RAID.

But that will give you some idea as to how safe your data may or may not be. For the technically apt, you could potentially store your data on cloud services such as or Amazon S3. You will however have to be fairly competent with command line tools and web API's unless you're going to use something like Amazon Back-up for S3 or Amazon S3 Explorer, which are two of the almost accessible apps for Windows. There are of course command line tools for the Linux and Mac users such as S3CMD that will put and retrieve objects from buckets on Amazon S3 including multi-part uploads etc. Amazon S3 however does cost, and you'll have to look at their pricing page. Essentially three cents a gig a month to store last time I looked in the US West 1 region and nine cents per gig to actually retrieve the stuff from Amazon S3. You can store the data for 0.01 cents a gig if you push the data off into Glacier, which is to say that when you push data off into Glacier, the storage costs reduce amazingly. However the restore time jumps to five hours; three to five hours if you restore an Amazon Glacier batch. Also if you store more than, (I believe), 25% of your data, there are extra restoration fees for Glacier. Somebody's probably running around in a data centre somewhere jamming tapes into tape drives. I have no idea whether this is actually true and if anybody has any information about how Glacier actually works, I'd be happy to hear from you. Google Drive

Google is playing with a new set of technologies which is currently in beta called Google Nearline Storage. The ability to back up piles and piles of data to Google services with the correct web API's with a three to five second restore time. I don't know whether that classes as warm storage, but if the technology matures and becomes reliable, it could be quite useful for people running a blindy radio station. Back up a couple of terabytes of music that you've got for your radio station on the Google Nearline Storage, and have a jukebox application that allows you to pull back a song in three to five seconds from warm storage, whilst the other song is queued and playing, or you're banging on about what time it is and how many friends are tuned in.

Look guys, if you have any questions about big data and big data home storage, I'd be happy to hear from you, and I'd be happy to answer them. I don't know whether this talk has been useful to anyone or instructive. If there are any things people want me to talk about specifically, I'd be more than happy to put some posts out there to inform you guys about how to handle big data storage and stuff like that. If you've listened this long, thank you very much for listening. Goodnight everyone.

So we are essentially four years on from the big data on a budget post. I think that file was generated in 2014, and it is now 2000, no, 2016. It is now 2020. So, four years on. And I suppose the big question everybody would have is “How am I backing up my data in 2020?” I do have backups, and I have those backups of all different sorts of computers and things.

For a start, on my main desktop I’m using Backblaze, because I feel that five dollars per month for my primary computer (five dollars US), is a bargain, and that backing up that sort of data is sensible to a Cloud destination. And it has satisfactory encryption and things to keep that data safe. It means that I can use the Backblaze app on iOS to restore the data, or I can actually generate zips of the data and restore it onto the computer, downloading it from Backblaze, or you can pay them a fee and they will send you a hard drive.

I also, however, have on-site backup. So as well as having Backblaze, I have a utility called Restic. And I may do a complete podcast on Restic, because it’s a very awesome utility. It backs up a tree of files, and it uses data duplication, and it saves snapshots of the file system at various points in time. And because it saves backups at various points in time, I have a Restic job that backs up the key files of my computer to B2 Cloud. Now B2 Cloud is a cloud storage system that is half a cent per gig for storage, and I believe one cent per gig for retrieval. And you can retrieve that data from B2 Cloud and restore it to your computer, so I have snapshots of the key files on my computer stored.

I also have local hard drive copy of data which is backed up to a 4 terabyte Seagate external drive. But because I know about the reliabilities of external drives, I have about three or four other hard drives that have the 453 Gig backup set from my Restic backup jobs stored on them.

I also have Restic backups of other computers like my primary Dell in the bedroom, and the Dell on the kitchen table. And that way, I feel that I have satisfied my backup requirements, and I have multiple copies of my backups should the worst ever happen and a drive fail in my primary computer.

So, that is how I’m currently backing up my data in 2020, and I’m always open to suggestions, input on other things I should be doing, and I think I will do a podcast on the actual ins and outs of Restic as a backup tool.

I also use Rclone to sync a whole stack of file trees to cloud storage, Rclone being the Rsync Swiss army knife of cloud storage. Talks to about 60 different backends, or 30 different backends, very powerful utility. May also do a podcast on that one.

So, hope that has answered some of the questions about how I back up big data on a budget.

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Episode Notes This is the realtime preparation of Fish and chips in my kitchen, with only small edits to remove the wake words for my assistants and tidy up a few ums and ahs. Chips were made in a Tefyl deep fryer with 4 litres of vegetable oil and the whiting fillets were baked in the gas oven at 200C for 30 minutes turning once.

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Episode Notes This is the initial pilot episode of my podcast to gain interest and see if I get any subscribers. I discuss possible topics for my podcast and make a coffee in my Brevil smart kettle.