As others said, don't open the drive, you're most likely to damage it completely.
If it is still working a bit, you should make a full backup while you can.
If not, you'll have to live with the most recent backup that you made (you do make backups, hopefully?)
Then go and buy a new drive, you will most likely get one that's both cheaper and bigger than the old one.
If the drive can't be accessed and you don't have recent backups, you might try disk diagnosis tools, maybe there's something that tells you a bit more about the cause of the problem. But I would not bother with that when you can recover the data from the drive, it's just not worth the effort.

Onkel Paul

Yup I've seen it when I tried again, but at first this list did not appear - and now it is missing again, could it be a problem with the server?
The app does not give any indication that it's doing something, waiting for the server, musing about an error that happened, or anything else...

Onkel Paul

You're probably fetching the info too often.
You could either cache the result of each call and do the actual call at most once per minute, or you could (preferrably IMO) run your own bitcoin node that you can query as often as you like.

I suppose you're trying to query the balances of addresses that you don't own, right?

Onkel Paul

Great! (although I had to dump almost all other apps from my lowly GT-5500 because the new feature and the google thingies it requires ate too much memory)
Found one minor bug while plyaing with it: When entering a location using the input field, there's no OK button. The cr key on the virtual keyboard just adds a line break. So I can type a place name, but not finish entering it...

Onkel Paul

P.S.: loving the video!

Yup, extrem coole Sache. Bin grad am runterladen und installieren auf mein schneckenlahmes Phone...

Onkel Paul

You're not specific enough.
When do you want to send the coins? Whenever someone enters an address? Once or several times a day?
Depending on this, your payout mechanism might look quite a bit different (directly embedded in your PHP versus running from a cron job).
I suppose that your altcoin wallet is mostly compatible to the bitcoin wallet with its RPC interface, so you will have to prepare a transaction that sends to one or more addresses and uses up the balance of one or more of your own addresses, and send this transaction to the wallet. I've never done this, so in reality it might be a bit more involved than this description, but it shouldn't be really hard.

Onkel Paul

Heh - almost right. Of course it's not the counter circuitry, just the detector tube...
Might be not so suitable after all - for really low radiation, the number of random bits per time unit might be too small, and for stronger radiation, I think they might have some saturation or dead time effect which prevents them to detect events that are too close together in time. But I may be wrong, this is all from very dim memory.
Commercial sources of randomness use thermal or quantum noise generated by semiconductor diodes as far as I know, those are much smaller and less fickle.
But as a fun project, this tube might be just the right thing...

Onkel Paul

My guess is it's a Geiger counter (I swear I did not check Google or anything else)...

Onkel Paul

The program is already installed on your computer.

It's called a browser. Really, the ripple client is just a javascript program runnable in javascript enabled browsers.

The grunt work is performed by rippled nodes, of course. This is very similar to thin bitcoin clients which don't actually maintain the blockchain but only show balances and let you create and sign transactions. That's exactly what the ripple client does.

Taking part in the ripple network as a full node is a bit harder than being a bitcoin node, right. But many people don't do that with bitcoin, either.

Onkel Paul

Within Ripple, for example :-)
Dividendrippler, Bitstamp, Snapswap BTC all trade for around 55k XRP/BTC. Don't know what the order book depth is at the moment, but it should be sufficient for a reasonable amount of XRP.

Onkel Paul

Don't you know that his business has been picked up about 5 years ago by his widow who has been diagnosed of terminal breast/colon/thyroid/brain cancer every second week since then?

Onkel Paul

The thing about proof of work in a cryptocurrency is that it must be expensive to compute, but cheap to verify.
How would the nodes that maintain the blockchain verify that a given render result is in fact the right one?
Another thing is that the process should be random (so that not always the fastest miner wins) and needs an adjustable difficulty. I don't see how such an approach could provide this.

There's a coin that tries to employ useful work in a somewhat comparable approach (gridcoin) but I fear that it can be cheated because it depends on an "observer" testing whether your computer was active with useful work (BOINC work packets in that case).

Onkel Paul

Check the date.
The article doesn't sound impossible, but hackers can probably make more money from pwned devices by using them as spam distribution vehicles, and those pesky hackers are a remarkably economical bunch, even though they don't pay for the resources they use.

Onkel Paul

Sure you logged into coinbase and not into a lookalike phishing site?

Onkel Paul

Ports in IP are 16 bits. The highest unsigned 16 bit number is 65535, so it's not possible to have higher port numbers.

Onkel Paul

Um die 20-30 XRP bei mir (läuft nur ein paar Stunden am Tag auf meinem Rechner zu Hause, plus 100% auf einem Minimal-VPS, den ich gemietet habe).
Dass es ausläuft, ist schade, kann ich aber verstehen. Offenbar gibt es Missbrauch (wie bei allem, wo Rechenleistung anonym zu Geld gemacht werden kann), und das ist in dem Kontext keine erwünschte Werbung...
Na ja, werde dann möglicherweise was anderes mit der CPU-Leistung tun (oder ich bleib bei WCG für die nächsten Badges und geh nur zu einem anderen Team, das mir sympathisch ist). Immerhin hat es RL mit der Aktion auf Platz 3 in allen drei Kategorien der All-Time-Teamwertungen geschafft und jede Menge Rechenzeit für sinnvolle Sachen gesponsert, das ist schon nicht schlecht.

Onkel Paul

You should really look at follow up reports on such events.

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't"

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/03/huvr-real-life-back-to-the-future-hoverboard-sadly-a-hoax.html

Onkel Paul

Dass du es mangels entsprechender Ausstattung nicht kannst, kann ja sein. Das ist aber kein Argument in der Frage, ob Ripple oder OT aktuell zum Senden von BTC geeignet ist. Ich kann auch nicht auf Kraken handeln, weil ich da keinen Account habe, das spricht aber nicht gegen die grundsätzliche Eignung von Kraken als Handelsplattform.
Und dass man Bitcoins von einer Wallet zur anderen ganz ohne Bitstamp, Gox, Kraken oder Ripple senden kann, ist für die meisten hier jetzt keine Neuigkeit. OT als Alternative zu Ripple hast du ja angeführt, daher musst du dir das Gegenargument, dass nur eins von beiden im Moment tatsächlich funktioniert, durchaus gefallen lassen. Oder kannst du Bitcoins per OT schicken?

Onkel Paul

Don't. Your life is probably worth more than 5BTC, even if you consider future increase in exchange rate.

Onkel Paul

Ja, das scheint aber mehrere Faktoren zu haben. Ripple Labs selbst ist es offenbar bis jetzt nicht gelungen, den großen Knaller zu bringen, aber ein anderer Faktor dürfte sein, dass gegen Ripple ziemlich heftig Stimmung gemacht wurde. Meiner Meinung nach steckt da ziemlich viel Ideologie dahinter, das ist im Bitcoin-Umfeld verständlich, zum Teil (wenigstens bei TradeFortress) war es aber wahrscheinlich einfach Angst um das eigene Geschäftsmodell.

Onkel Paul