My 2021 Amazon order highlights

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As usual, I’ve reused and recycled way too many Amazon Prime packages this year. I’m going to #thread my top 10 purchases in 2021.

These are items I have actually purchased with my own money during 2021. Photos are of the actual items in my possession (I may go back and add obvious stock photos later for the items I didn’t catch in action). .

No seller or manufacturer has asked for a review, provided any incentives, or otherwise interfered with these orders or this post. If you buy through my links here, I may receive a commission.

In no particular order….

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Turnkey Chia farming with Evergreen Miner, and making your own compact farmer

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Disclosures at the end, as usual

The Evergreen site and product line have evolved since this post was made in late 2021. I’m planning to update the coverage soon, but don’t be surprised if product names and prices have changed since then.

In the mean time, I have (as of January 2023) joined the Evergreen Systems Co. affiliate program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to the partner site. If you’d like to buy some of their gear, use the link https://evergreenminer.com/?ref=g2vkXM2BkDi2m or use the referral code ROBERTNOVAK and I may receive a commission.

A few years ago, a turnkey desktop container/VM platform from Antsle came along, and I thought “this is cool, but I bet I could make one myself.” You can read about that here on rsts11.

Earlier this month I saw a low power Pi-based project similar to the Antsle Nano (which I did build on my own) come out for Chia farming. The project, Evergreen Miner (evergreenminer.com), is the brainchild of a young geek named Dylan Rose who’s worked with Amazon and other companies and has begun an interesting forward-looking Chia project to really bring Chia farming to the masses.

I’ve written about building your own Chia system, and lots of people (tens of thousands at least) have done so. But some people aren’t up for the space, expense, time, tuning, software building, and so forth to make a node and farm.

However, a lot of people could benefit from the technology and platform and even more into the future as the ecosystem matures. So the idea of a turnkey platform that’s relatively easy to build and maintain and expand, even without plotting on your own, sounds pretty good.

Think all of the functionality and potential of Chia, with the ease of setup and management of a typical mobile app, and of course the power draw of an LED light bulb or two. No hardware or Linux or filesystem or SAS knowledge required.

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Titanic, Hindenburg, and My Management Mindset

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As some of my readers know, I’ve taken the last year off from the corporate world. I’ve done some things on my own, sold some things on eBay, and worked as a contractor for a mining pool. Now that I’m back into interviews, one thing I get asked more than ever before is about my management style.

I prefer to think of it as a management mindset, as the style would adjust to each minion’s needs and “work language” for lack of a better term. And despite relatively little formal management training, I’ve come to a coherent and occasionally appreciated position.

You can only be as good a manager as your manager is to you.

A large part of team management is proxying in both directions between the people who report to you, and the person or people you report to. Your reach and control is probably limited — you can’t usually spend more than the budget allows on salary, or eliminate 7am calls for your west coast team because a manager three levels up wants 10am meetings from his east coast office.

But on a more granular level, if your own manager isn’t supportive of what you need for your employees, there’s only so much you can do to make that happen. This is often because your manager’s manager is limited, and on up many levels.

This can be an uncomfortable maxim to present to a prospective or current manager, as some will take it as a personal affront. But good managers (leaders) will understand that it’s reality, and they can’t do more for you than their manager permits (generally speaking). They probably know it even if they haven’t specifically thought about it.

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Tying cloud provider orchestration, security, performance, and cost management together with Prosimo AXI at Cloud Field Day 12

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Disclosures at the bottom as usual.

At Cloud Field Day 12 in San Jose, Prosimo joined us to explain how they are “more crazy than you guys think we are.” We got a good introduction to the problems they are working on solving, some of the problems they’re not focused on, and yes, we did learn they might be pretty crazy. But it just might work.

Prosimo was founded in early 2019, the second startup for many of the team (hence their CEO Ramesh Prabagaran’s crazy quoted confession above). The connection I didn’t make at the time is that his first startup was Viptela, who were acquired by Cisco in 2017. So after developing an SD-WAN solution, Prabagaran and his team moved up (or down) a layer to address another element of WAN in the clouds. Maybe we could call it CAN, or Cloud Area Networking. Or maybe not.

To get to the good stuff… Prosimo focuses on multicloud transit (the third lozenge pictured above), an element between the users and edge networks and the applications a customer has in any of the three major clouds or their own datacenters/private clouds.

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How not to embarrass yourself when writing about mining (or anything else)

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Disclosure: I work with Flexpool.io but I am not writing in any official capacity or with any proprietary knowledge. You should mine with Flexpool, but it’s not mandatory.

Disclaimer: Hashrate rental can be expensive and unprofitable if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do know what you’re doing and can manage your risk, check out Nicehash and MiningRigRentals and maybe you too can embarrass the tech media. (Referral links may earn me a little bit.)

This morning, some “news” pieces came out in some of the tech press. Not the big names most people have heard of, but venues with some reach and some expectation of basic knowledge.

The headline from notebookcheck dot net

The “story” was that some unreleased and possibly even non-existent GPUs were mining to Flexpool, the number 5 Ethereum mining pool in the world This sounds pretty amazing, even unbelievable, although after the April 1, 2021 Captains Workspace reveal video on the “RTX 4090” you realize some people will believe anything.

The evidence? High hashrate and workers named “4090TI-Overclock-Test,” “RX7000-Control-Test,” and “RX7000-Overclock-Test.”

The “story” got a lot of coverage, starting at wccftech, spreading to Notebook Check and Digital Trends, and later with a bit more justifiable incredulity from Windows Central and TechRadar. Also seen at TweakTown after this was originally posted.

A couple of these mention later in the article, after breathless references to the scale and/or specs of the cards named and the vast amounts of Ethereum that could be mined by these farms, that it’s unlikely.

How could this happen?

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