Fight Coronavirus using spare computing power

Rosetta@Home calculating...


There are a couple of options to make your PC join the fight against Coronavirus:

1. Folding@Home has seen the most news coverage so far. Maybe you've heard about it. You can easily start by downloading the Folding@Home client.

2. Rosetta@Home is another project that is calculating possible cures to the disease. This one seems to have gotten much less media attention. You can start here.

Both of these projects have been around a long time before the Coronavirus, researching cures for a list of other diseases like HIV, Ebola, Zika, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, etc.

Folding@Home has maybe the easier user interface. For non-technical users it might be the better choice.

Rosetta@Home uses BOINC, which has more features and allows you to specifically define the conditions for using your computing power. For the more technical ones I recommend Rosetta.

You can also earn a little pocket money from calculating Rosetta@Home tasks. A cryptocurrency called Gridcoin is built around the idea of rewarding scientific calculations. This approach avoids wasting computing power to made-up tasks, like calculating hashes in Bitcoin.

The easiest way for a beginner to start with Gridcoin would be to install the Gridcoin wallet and join the Gridcoin pool at grcpool.com. They have released some easy-to-follow videos for beginners.  However, the value of Gridcoin has plummeted and you shouldn't expect this to be profitable at all. Still, in my opinion this is a better idea than to warm up the world by calculating Bitcoin hashes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to install and play Curse of Monkey Island on Android

Image
There are some great adventure games on Android already. I can warmly recommend Thimbleweed Park or The Silent Age for example. But what if you wanted to play an old classic that cannot be found on Google Play? ScummVM is an app that can emulate these games, if you have the data files. And Curse of Monkey Island is one of these classics. Installation Purchase Curse of Monkey Island from gog.com or Steam (costs about 5€) Download and install it with the GOG Galaxy launcher ... Or Steam Locate the Curse of Monkey Island install directory on your PC Copy the directory to your Android phone, either with a USB cable or on the SD card with an adapter Install the ScummVM app on your phone Start ScummVM and press "Add game" Find the game folder on your phone, select it and click OK.  If you have trouble finding the folder, I made a separate guide for that. Now you can start enjoying Curse of Monkey Island! These instructions should also work on an iPhone. Controls The game is or
Read more

How to get rid of coil whine just by tweaking BIOS

Finally. No more ringing in my ears! I had a really bad case of coil whine with my computer. In the end I fixed it just by tweaking the BIOS! The coil whine was at it's worst when the PC was idling or under a light load.  Coil whine is a high-pitched sound that is produced by coils resonating at a high frequency. It is really hard to sense where exactly it's coming from. This is because humans cannot sense direction for high-pitched sounds. At first I thought it was my graphics adapter. So I bought a new used one. But the ringing was still there after the upgrade. Next up, I suspected my PSU was the culprit. So I changed the power supply to a newer 80 Plus Platinum model. I hate changing the PSU. And it didn't help. So it looked like my motherboard was the cause. It's an older ASUS motherboard, P8H67-V.  After googling around a bit, I found people talking about ASUS motherboards and coil whine when power-saving features are on in the BIOS . The so-called "C-state&
Read more

How to fix the weird audio bug in Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Image
  Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a bug which makes the sound come out muffled or like the characters were talking far away or through a tunnel. This seems to be because the game thinks you are using multichannel surround sound. There seems to be no option to change the audio mode in-game. Instead, you should change your audio settings in Windows by following these directions: Press the windows key Type "Choose your output device" and select the search result. Select "Device properties" under the Output caption. Select "Additional device properties" This dialog will differ depending on your audio hardware. Go to the Advanced tab. There should be a selection for the default audio format. You should select something like this: 2 channel 44100 Hz audio. I had my Focusrite audio interface set up with 8 channels 24bit 44100 Hz, and that caused Kingdom Come to think I have surround sound. After changing the channel amount to 2 the audio started working correctly.
Read more

Create a sleep timer for Youtube, Twitch, Netflix etc. on Windows 10

Here are instructions on how to create a Windows 10 sleep timer that will close your browser after a specified time. It's great for those who like to watch Youtube at night. Just copy and paste this into notepad, then save the file with a .bat file extension, for example sleepbrowser.bat. The below script will close Firefox after 60 minutes. You can easily edit the delay in minutes. Just edit the row "SET SLEEPDELAYMIN=60". If you use Chrome, Opera, Internet explorer or Edge, just replace the part 'firefox.exe' with your browser's executable name. This works also as a sleep timer for any other type of program than just browsers. You could make it close Spotify or Winamp as well. Here is the batch script. echo off SET SLEEPDELAYMIN=60 SET /A SLEEPDELAY=60*SLEEPDELAYMIN echo Will close Firefox after %SLEEPDELAYMIN% minutes timeout /t %SLEEPDELAY% /nobreak echo Killing Firefox... taskkill /F /T /IM firefox.exe I use the script also to start t
Read more

Fix the login loop in Xubuntu 24.04

 I had some problems logging into my brand new Xubuntu 24.04 LTS install running on Virtualbox. On the first login, I was booted back to the login screen. Opening some apps would also throw me out of the GUI session to the login screen. Eventually, I got into a loop where I get continually thrown into a login screen. This bug is mentioned on the Xubuntu homepage as a known issue: Xorg crashes and the user is logged out after logging in or switching users on some virtual machines  Seems that this bug also affects Ubuntu 24.04 . To get a terminal from the login screen, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and logged in. To get back to the GUI login, you can press Ctrl-Alt-F7. To fix the problem, I had to remove libva-wayland2: sudo apt remove libva-wayland2  After this, login is possible again in GUI mode (Ctrl-Alt-F7). However, this also uninstalled some apps I wanted. Looks like I have to skip Xubuntu 24.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 for now until this is fixed.
Read more

How to find the ScummVM game folder on Android

Image
Finding stuff on the Android ScummVM app is not the most intuitive process, but it pays out! Finding the game folder on Android ScummVM is not very straightforward, so I decided to write this quick guide. I already wrote a guide on how to install and play Curse of Monkey Island on Android , but didn't elaborate on how to find the game folder on the app. Firstly, ScummVM is an awesome open-source collection of game engines capable of running many old point & click classics . In addition to the first three Monkey Island games, you can play Blade Runner, Broken Sword, Day of the Tentacle, Elvira, Full Throttle, Gabriel Knight, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones, King's Quest, Kyrandia, Lands of Lore, Leisure Suit Larry, Longest Journey, Loom, Myst, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Sam & Max, Simon the Sorcerer, Space Quest, The Dig, Ultima, Waxworks... the list goes on and on! So, you have transferred the game folder of your game on your phone using USB file transfer or by copyin
Read more