Check out the bitparking exchange to trade bitcoin for namecoin!

Recently in 30 hours it went from 0.03 btc to 0.14btc! Exciting times!

To put it simply, bitcoin is a crypto-currency. It uses encryption & massive amounts of hashes to make it work. What’s more, it’s completely decentralized, based on peer-to-peer connections. Thankfully science of cryptography & technology has made this possible. It’s radically different from fiat currency. There is actually a cost to creating new bitcoins (like using the video cards to do lots of hashing to mine new bitcoin).

There’s a lot of potential in this because it is cheaper and more effective for online transactions than anything, even Paypal. It is also great for micro-payments, which is something that people have been trying to get going for the internet, but never managed to get it off the ground.

So there’s lots of upcoming demand for bitcoins and there will be a growth in bitcoins as more services appear around bitcoins. Some rails friends from my IRC channel and I have been looking at doing a real service around that, could be some potential there.

I was messing around with bitcoin trading, trading between USD/CAD & bitcoin, having some fun.. not taking it too seriously. Made $240 in a few days which isn’t too shabby, covers 1 month of rent – that is.. if I can keep ahead of the other traders eh!

Anyways you’ll probably see bitcoins in the news a lot over the next few months, it’s been popping up lately.. There was even a report on CBC radio.

Are you a Canadian that would like to try purchasing some?

Look no further.. The simplest way for Canadians to buy bitcoins is by using their bank’s Interac e-Transfer protocol. It’s a really straightforward setup that allows us to email money to other people’s accounts.

In this case, you can use your Interac e-Transfer to transfer money to a bitcoin exchange, and then purchase the bitcoin you want.

www.cavirtex.com is the only exchange that currently accepts interac funding. It is also a dedicated Canadian exchange.

Enjoy.

The biggest change was the Solid State Drives. The beautiful part is they have no moving parts.

I’ve been doing lots of barefoot running on and off over the last couple years. Imagine running around all the time with an ultraportable laptop. It would be great to be able to run to a coffee store, whip out the macbook air, and get to work.

This would be perfect for a nomad that travels the world and lives out of 1 backpack. With an ultraportable laptop that has SSD, he could run any time he wanted.

Check out Tynan’s blog posts, exactly what I’ve been thinking about
Run, Don’t Walk
Get Rid of Half of Your Stuff
Nomad gear

My main reasons for travel ultimately comes down to geo-arbitrage and experiencing a new environment.

By geo-arbitrage, I’m talking about enjoying a higher quality of life with a lower cost of living.

For example, I can quite easily live comfortably in the philippines or thailand for $500/mo. In the philippines I once was renting a 4-bedroom house for $225/mo. Getting home cooked meals is cheap too. In Bangkok, it is even easier to get great affordable meals from street vendors.

What kind of life can I have in Canada with an arbitrary budget of say $700/mo? You might ask “Why limit yourself to $700?” but my view is that it is a great opportunity to have most of your income go into savings. Then later on, one can be truly wealthy. Food costs for one person in Canada is easily $250/mo if not more. Renting a tiny suite in an exciting location would likely be $450/mo. That’s already $700. Plus the costs for everything else is higher, entertainment, activities, transportation, clubs, whatever. Life is not fun at all with a such a tight budget.

Comparable, in an exciting city like Bangkok, with many expats, and a totally different culture and language in Thai, lots of opportunities, can enjoy life to the fullest with $700/mo most likely. Why not?!

This is the formula of power:
http://www.skyscanner.com/flights-from/(airport code goes here!)

You can use sky scanner to find the cheapest flights from a specific airport to anywhere. This is a huge boon if you are 100% flexible in your travel & you have budget requirements.

Another thing that I also figured out is that finding cheap multi-city flights is the ideal thing to do because these flights can later be converted into extended stayovers at the purchase site you end up at (ebooker, vaya, orbitz, whatever). Basically just choose the multi-city option and re-input the flight details, but stick a few days in between. Probably have to play around with different days, but you can usually get at least 2 day stay overs for free or a few bucks more.

A couple of people asked me about my shoes so I told them I was representing the barefoot faction.

—
We have only been running in shoes with lots of cushioning (and even worse, arch support, etc) for 41 years. Ever since the birth of Nike. Before that, the shoes we had were thin and flat – not much different from going barefoot, just enough to keep our feet warm and comfortable.

That is 41 years compared to the million years of upright walking and running that we have behind us. Homo erectus was fully bipedal and existed 1 and a half million years ago.

Interestingly, there is no scientific support for padded heel shoes. Scientific studies haven’t actually been able to show that injury rates are lower with running shoes, in fact, shoes appear to do the reverse – increase injury rates. Yet we all have unconditionally accepted shoes as being absolutely necessary to run in.

I would call it one of the greatest tragedies of humanity.

I am out to prove that running barefoot or in flats is the best and safest method of long distance running. I want to prove to myself that shoes are unnecessary.

It feels incredibly weird to be a barefoot runner amongst hundreds of other runners. It is so weird to go against something that has been deeply accepted, shoes with padded heels. But I do my best to focus on my own results.

From now on I will recognize my fears and start facing them head on, no matter how scared shitless I might be. I will refuse to cower in the face of my fears.

Last year I faced some of my fears, but it is time to step it up a notch!

Chrome (any version up to 7)
Mac OS X (any version up to 10.6+)
SOCKS proxy enabled in OS X System Preferences.

As a matter of rule, I always leave my SOCKS5 proxy enabled. This is because I travel and use wifi all over the place, it’s much more secure to tunnel all my internet usage through a trusted server. I personally use “ssh -D localhost:8118″ from the command line to get that socks proxy.

Anyways, as a ruby on rails web developer it’s common for me to access http://localhost:3000/. Safari works fine. Firefox works fine. Except Chrome.

Chrome insists on always looking up the domain OR _ip address_. That’s right, even if you enter http://127.0.0.1/ chrome always checks the ip address against DNS. Firefox does the same thing, but Chrome always checks against the SOCKS proxy even for localhost!

Which breaks things.

The fix:

Add ip addresses like 127.0.0.1 to the bypass proxies list in the System Preferences. Also, click the box for the “exclude simple hostnames” option.

I hear that Firefox maintains it’s own bypass list, which is why this behavior doesn’t show up. Chrome doesn’t have this list..

What I ultimately want is to be able to fly at any time, to any location, at a decent speed, but also slow and low enough to understand and enjoy the views and geography, and to be able to stop anywhere I’d like.

How is this achievable? Probably most with some form of personal helicopter or ultra-light. I am particularly interested in Gryoplanes, also known as Gyrocopters. They are much simpler than helicopters, only needing forward momentum in order to hover, they can lift off and hover when going at 30 mph. The rotating blades will also keep rotating when power fails, letting the “plane” float back down to earth safely.

This is probably the ultimate transportation for enjoyable views of the world going just faster than a car, a top speed of 100mph or so, but also can fly as slow as 30mph. Great for flying low and slow.