For the love of Diamonds!

So, it didn't take as long as I thought it would, but I got me some diamonds! Not only that, but I finally rebuilt my house, made it a bit more awesome. That old house just wasn't doing it for me. Not only that, but I got my enchanting going! Now I need to spend more time at the spider farm so I can make my gear epic! Since I've also found at least one more spider spawner, I may try to find a way to work it in with the other one so I get twice the spiders. Of course, before I do that I think I need to first address the issues I'm currently having with my spider farm. But that will be another video.
Video behind the cut!

New footage means new videos!

So, I kinda took a hiatus from Minecraft because of Star Wars: The Old Republic. I've been playing that a lot. I finally got some more Minecraft into my schedule, then found some time to piece it all together and I got two videos for the price of one. I tend to record too much, then try to put it all into one video and it turns out to be really long.
Now, I know that I look like a wuss for running away from the spider spawners, but I feel that since this is hardcore I need to do things smart and keep alive. If I can get armor and weapons that will help me survive, I'll focus on that first.
The thing that bugged me the most about this video was the issues I had with my trackball. Most people prefer mice, but I have always preferred using a trackball.
Video behind the cut!

Bukkit is back!

So, Bukkit has finally released a recommended build for Minecraft 1.0! What does this mean? It means I get to make another Mining with Munchmo video. And boy do I have an idea of what I'm gonna do. Last time I was on that world I went looking for some melon seeds, and along the way found a zombie spawner, which I'm going to turn into an XP grinder. I'm finally going to be able to do some enchanting and such. Look forward to another video soon!

Building a cave spider xp farm

So, after a lot of digging and lots of time, I finally got a working cave spider XP farm going. It took me a few tries to actually get the layout correct, and I think I'm still going to have to modify it a little bit, but for now it works. I'm hoping the water flow is ok, I based my design off the one Etho created. My next video will be exploration of the abandoned mineshafts around the spawner in the hopes of finding useful stuff. Now that I have an XP farm, I need to start enchanting, and enchanting needs an enchanting table! I need diamonds! Video is below the cut.

Marooned E05

The next episode is up, and man did I make a mistake. Turns out that I was wrong about where the spawner was located. So, I had to clear out another area, about half as big as the first, so it didn't take quite as long, but I got down to the spawner, and got a good idea of where I was going to build. Stay tuned for the next episode to get a look at the process of building the spawner and testing it out! Video is after the cut.

Marooned, E04

So, the next episode of Marooned in Minecraft is ready to upload! I ended up having to split it up into two episodes again because I just couldn't fit it all into a length I felt good about. The episode starts off fairly slow until I find a nice little surprise waiting for me! I was completely taken aback when I saw the opening of an abandoned mineshaft right down there in that ravine. And it shocked me even more to realize that I have found such easy access to a cave spider spawner! And, because of that, a new project is underway. One that has already taken me nearly 10 minecraft days, and will take many more before I'm done with it. The worst part is, after all that work I put into it, I nearly died a couple times, which would have totally destroyed the world I was working in. Below the cut you'll find a current map of my world and the video.

Back on Track

So, now that the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta is over, I've got a couple of weeks until I can start playing the game. Of course, I've also still got WoW, and a friend of mine convinced me to check out DC Universe. Oh, and I'm still in the Tribes: Ascend beta. But, even with all that, I'm still making time for Minecraft. I know it's been a while since I've posted or put up a new video, but worry not! I've recorded some more footage, so you can look forward to a new episode of Marooned! This video has me doing some mundane work around the island and some exploring until I come across something really cool, and then I set to work! You'll have to wait until the video is up to find out what it is! I will tell you there was a moment when I was afraid this might be the last episode in that series!

Star Wars is taking over!

Sorry I didn't get a video up this weekend, but I was overrun with Star Wars: The Old Republic! Was the first and only weekend I had to play the beta, and boy did I play! Spent many hours at my PC playing, livestreamed a few sessions at my twitch.tv channel. Of course, after playing the game all weekend long, I decided I liked it and pre-ordered my copy. What does this mean for my Minecraft? Nothing. I still plan on keeping up with my let's plays and such. I am also eagerly awaiting the first RB of Bukkit. I'm excited about getting to enchanting and building my own Xp grinder, so look forward to that!

I make a new friend

So, part 4 is uploading now and part 5 is queued and ready to go. I felt it necessary to split the last recording up into two parts, and in doing so I've made you wait a bit for an updated map, but the time has finally come! For those of you who haven't watched the video yet, I don't want to spoil the surprise about who my new friend is. I haven't come up with a good name for him yet, but I'm sure in time I'll give him one.
As you can on the map after the cut, I spent a lot of time sailing to find another landmass. I did come across a few smaller islands on the way, but they didn't have anything that looked worthwhile to stop for. What's really great is if you look closely enough, you can see the spot where I got knocked out of my boat and I built a little tower in the ocean to craft a new boat.
Also on the map you'll find Herobrine (which I've been told has since been destroyed) and a giant creeper. I'm just glad that the kids are being creative in creative mode instead of just lacing the whole world with TNT and blowing it to kingdom come. Of course, they are riddling the world with new caves as they dig around looking for god knows what.

Putting it all together

So, I'm in the process of editing the fourth episode of Meandering together. I start by taking a look around the world that's already been explored and finish filling in the map that I created previously. After that I take a nice long boat ride to a whole new area of the world. You'll get a quick look at some of the stuff that the children have built on the server. This is the first video of this series that I recorded outside of the initial livestream I did when 1.0 was released. The video turned out to be a bit longer than I would have liked, compared to the other three in the series. Turns out I got so much footage I ended up splitting it into two episodes. Unfortunately that means you'll not get a new world map from me in this post, but you'll get one next time.

Meandering E03

The third video in this series is up. Unfortunately, it turns out I somehow played for over an hour during the livestream without actually recording any video locally. To cover what you might have missed between Episode 2 and 3, read on. During that time, I had a couple people join the livestream, who eventually joined me on the server, Kschwizzle and Pawbuttox. I found a nice little village with some interesting things nearby! If you want, you can see the entirety of the broadcast on my twitch.tv channel. You might notice a distinct difference between the first and second segments of my video here. Remember that I was playing for about 3 hours straight, so my excitement and energy were kinda wearing down. After the cut you can see what's happened with the world. My son and his cousin decided they wanted to play creative, so they built a whole bunch of stuff around the spawn.

Meandering E02

Video two is up! This one takes place immediately after the first. You can see it below the cut. This was early on during my livestream, cut down to a bite sized piece. If you want, you can view the whole livestream on my twitch.tv channel. I won't be posting a copy of the world map here, because it didn't change much between these two videos.

Minecraft is released!

So, in honor of the Minecraft release, I posted a quick video showing off my BC/IC world. I had that one uploaded as the livestream of the Minecon opening ceremonies were going. Then, just as the game was released, I updated to Minecraft 1.0 and started up a new vanilla server with a fresh world and livestreamed for like 3 hours! The livestream is available in my archives at twitch.tv and I've also begun cutting up the footage into more interesting little videos as part of the new series I'm doing for youtube. As I write this blog post I'm uploading the first video. I'm going to try to make these a bit shorter than my other videos too, but we'll see how that goes. After the cut, you can see find the first part of my new youtube series and also a map of the world as I left it after the livestream.

My plans for Minecraft 1.0

So, I've got my vanilla server setup and ready to go when I get the Minecraft 1.0 server Jar. And I've already got my plan in place. Once I get the server started, I'll be recording myself with fraps to put together a new Let's Play for my youtube channel and livestreaming on my twitch.tv channel.
I've also decided on a few things I'm going to do differently in this series than what I've done before. For one, I'm going to explore. I want to see as much of this new world as I can, which means no settling down and cool creations for this series. So, what I plan on doing is only taking things with me that I need, and leaving all the junk behind. Nomad style, with one exception, anything I place I can't pick back up. Gotta make a workbench every time I need one in a new place. Gotta gather more wood all the time for new beds and chests (if there's anything I feel I want to keep, but not on my person at the time). Need a furnace and no villages around? Gonna have to craft a new one. You get the idea. Other normal blocks I can always break and move or whatever, but I'm gonna live off the land and explore as much as I can.

More automation in minecraft

So, I've not posted here in the past week or so, but I figured I'd give you an update on what I've been up to. Saturday was the Far Lands or Bust livestream. I spent all day listening to that while working on my Buildcraft world. I've begun the process of automating what I do in there a lot. After clearing an area in the ocean I started my base underwater. So far it's going pretty well, but I've still got to get my logic down on how to deal with the raw materials and such. One problem I have is, one of the chunks I'm building in spawns slimes, so sometimes I'll go down to the lowest layer and there'll be a nice big slime waiting for me.
I'm really excite about Friday. I'm going to do a livestream myself at my Twitch.TV channel of a new world I'll be starting in the newly released Minecraft 1.0! I'll be starting just after I get home from work and going till I can't stay up anymore. I've got a new plan for this world on how I'm going to play. I think I'll also be recording it to turn into a shorter video for my youtube channel.

Marooned in Minecraft E03

So, after a weekend with no uploads, and over a week of no updates to this blog, I've got a new Marooned in Minecraft for you. This video covers days 7, 8, 9 and 10. I decided I did not like the style of narration on this series, so it's no longer in-character. I had a hell of a time gathering the animals for my pens, but I'm glad to be able to breed them. I didn't get quite as much done as I would have liked, but for now I think the area around my house is mostly safe. I do fear that I got hit with the peaceful bug, since I didn't see a single hostile mob while I was playing, so next video I'm going to have to make sure I start with a hard world before I go into hardcore and start recording. Next time, I think I'll also have to start punching grass to gather more seeds, cause that wheat field is taking an awful long time to grow.

Catastrophic outcomes!

So, over the weekend, I had some bad things happen in my IC/BC world. Some of my BC engines exploded. It wouldn't have been so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that in the process I lost a couple of refineries (4 diamonds each) and a few teleport pipes (1 diamond each). Took me a while to recover from that, but I'm mostly back in business. I ended up moving my engines to an area over the water and I'm protecting my teleport pipes with obsidian in case there are any more explosions. The unusual part of it all was the reason why they exploded. They ran out of water. Under normal circumstances that wouldn't be strange, but they ran out of water because my infinite water source completely drained. I had been running 4 pumps off a 4x4x1 water hole for a long time, and it never drained, but now I can't even keep the water from disappearing from 4 separate 2x2x1 infinite water sources (1 per pump). I'm not exactly sure what it is that's causing this to happen, but I suspect it has something to do with the teleport pipes, and the way they cause chunks to load or something. It's allowing the pumps to take in water, but the water isn't filling back in.

Melon Time!

So, I finally got a new video up. Sorry it took so long, but I don't get a ton of time alone to record, however my schedule at work just changed which will allow me free time daily to record more often. In this episode of Mining with Munchmo I explore the world in search of an abandoned mineshaft so I can get some melon seeds to setup an automated melon farm. I won't go into a ton of detail, but it turns out my server was running on easy, so I kinda got screwed by the poison spider experience. I have since turned the difficulty up to hard, so in the future I'm sure to get poisoned.
I did come across a couple of dungeons as well, which I lit up, but did not destroy the spawner, so I might try to use those (or at least one of them) to make a dungeon grinder or maybe just a single mob farm. I would just have been happier if they had been skeletons instead of zombies.
In the video I made reference to Zombles, which I've picked up by watching Kurt J Mac's videos, and for those of you unfamiliar with him, check out his channel on youtube.
I also noticed the last couple videos I uploaded had black borders and I couldn't understand why, but I finally fixed that so this video should be sized right.

Micromancero's auto melon farm tutorial

Let's Play!

So I got a bit of stuff recorded yesterday for my next video. This one will be Mining with Munchmo. During the making of the video, I noticed something odd, cave spiders weren't poisoning me. After some investigation, I found that the server.properties file now has a difficulty setting, and by default it was set to easy. Needless to say, I changed that to hard right away!

Sorry :-(

So, I know I said I wanted to get a video made this weekend, but I didn't, and I'm sorry. I had a fairly busy weekend, and didn't find any time to myself to actually record anything. I'm going to try to get something done this week. Maybe even two videos to make up for the missing one. I will make myself have free time to get it done. I did have time to play a lot of my modded buildcraft world. I might do an intro video into that in the future, but for now I'm sticking with the two series I've got going now (until another update where I'll start a third, unless I die in Marooned). Buildcraft did just release another update, hopefully the SMP portion will be more stable.
Just had a new user join the Bukkit server, my son's cousin. I haven't been on that world in a while, so we'll have to see what's new there when I record Mining With Munchmo.

An update of sorts

For anyone interested, I really haven't been doing a whole lot in minecraft the past few days. I've mostly been playing in my Industrycraft/Buildcraft world. I've got a giant quarry setup and have an oil deposit (it's really big) way off in the distance. I'm about to the point where I want to install Additionalpipes to deal with the distance issue, but I don't know if it would really help. There do appear to be some other pipes that might be fun or useful though, so I probably will anyway. See, the oil field is so far away that the oil only moves in segments. I can pump the oil from the deposit to a holding tank at the edge of the viewing distance, then I can pump it from there to another holding tank, and pump it from there to my home. At this point though, I have already collected so much oil that my tanks at home are full and refining (slowly, only one refinery so far), so I'm not in a huge need of oil. Plus, I've only got the one quarry, and it's using the fuel so slowly that it's not a big deal. I have noticed how nice quarries work with fuel though, super-efficient. I still haven't delved too much into the Industrialcraft stuff, I've got the basic setup going and even have a matter generator setup (thanks to work from The Boy). But I don't see much of a need to get into the nuclear power situation yet. I'll throw a map of my Industrial/Buildcraft world after the break.
In other news, Batman: Arkham City came out this week, so my Minecraft playing has been put on the back burner while I play that. I do still hope to get another video out this weekend, I'm going to continue the Mining With Munchmo series. I hope to add a little excitement to the series, less building more exploring . . . So I can build more!
ETA: After watching Yogscast's most recent video I decided I liked their ideas and want to experiment with Zepplins!
Zepplin Mod
Also Extrabuildcraftpipes

Marooned, E02

So, I'm encoding the second episode of Marooned as I type this. I have to admit, I'm still not exactly sure where I'm going with this series, but the second episode wasn't nearly as harrowing as the first. A lot less chance of totally losing it. I did film this in two segments (although, only a very small portion was actually filmed in the second segment). And, if you pay close enough attention, you can see that I did update to 1.9 pre-release 4. I'm getting a little bit more comfortable with the narration style, but I'm still not sure if I like it.
I've decided that this series will be more of an exploratory series. Since I've been talking so much about finding out where everyone is, and where I am and what happened to me as the character, I have good motivation to actually explore the world. Also, with it being in 1.9, it'll give me a good reason to go places I might not otherwise, to see some of the new content out there. I figure too, since I'll be exploring I can keep posting and updating the world map on this blog so people can share in my adventure, and maybe they can also post and give me direction in what they'd like to see.
Video and map after the cut.

Not liking my alternatives

So, after getting everything setup and working on my existing world in Buildcraft/Industrialcraft, things went horribly wrong. It seems that any time I place any block there's a chance it will crash my minecraft. Now, I'm not at all sure what the actual cause is/was but from looking at everything it seems it's related to buildcraft. So I posted to their sourceforge page, and have been eagerly awaiting their response. I've made sure everything is up to date, all my files match what they should be, etc. But, during my testing, I also started a new world to see if that would affect anything, and it did. At least, I think it did. So, in a new world (same seed even) it appears to work ok, I placed blocks randomly, put everything where it should be, all that stuff, and it seems to not crash, but it might also be that I don't have all the same stuff going on in the world. So I've decided I'm going to leave it with the new empty world, and give myself some starting resources (a quarry, some iron, etc) and hope the problem doesn't keep happening. I would love to keep with the existing world, but it just doesn't seem like it'll work for me.

New server up!

So, with all the playing of Industrialcraft/Buildcraft I've been doing lately, I decided it would be soooo much cooler to move my world onto the server so that all the mining and stuff would keep going while I wasn't there. It would be so nice to just setup a miner, and come back later to a chest full of goodies. The big problem is, I just finally got my first quarry setup in the SSP world I setup, so I didn't want to lose all that progress. I went through all the steps, setup the server and WHAM! crash. Buildcraft wasn't happy. I was running my SSP in 2.2.0 and the server in 2.2.1, not sure if that's the problem, but trying to move my SSP over to the server as the world there just didn't work. Java errors every time I started it up. As a test, I decided to just start a new world with the same seed. World loaded up fine, no crashes, so I jumped in it, and the world was totally different. I have a feeling that the world gen code portion of one of the mods is different enough to completely change the world. Now, in a new world, none of the crafted stuff for buildcraft is there, so it's possible that as soon as I try to get a setup going like I had in my old world, it'll just totally crash again.
As an added measure of testing, I updated my SSP game to 2.2.1 and loaded up the world and it came up just fine, so I'm at a loss as to what I should do. I did see that according to SpaceToad, 2.2.1 is still really buggy, so maybe an update or two will get it so much world will work, but I think I'd rather start over in a fresh world on the server than keep playing my existing world, and lose it to move to the server at a later date.

ETA: Wow, not sure what happened, but in the end after all the playing with everything I connected back to the server and it's the same world! Empty, yeah, but the same, which is really cool, cause I LOVE the starting place for that seed.

Marooned in Minecraft

My new series has started! I was able to record it all yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to put it together till today. Took me three tries. For some reason, it hung during the encode the first time, so I had to put it all together again, and then left a whole bunch of extra footage I didn't mean to. The third time it was finally ok.
This is my 1.9 PR3 Hardcore survival series. Right now, it's just about surviving, but as time goes on (as long as I don't lose) I'll need ideas and suggestions as to what you the viewers would like to see in this series.
Video behind the cut

Industrialcraft Take 2!

So, yesterday I installed Buildcraft with my Industrialcraft installation and started my world over again. I never really got too far in the world when I first started, so it wasn't a big loss. I decided since the world I got randomly seemed so good I'd just use the same seed again recreating the world with Buildcraft in there. The world is awesome! I got really lucky with the random seed, so I'm gonna cover the basics again. It spawns you on the edge of a swamp, so there's tons of trees around, and there's even a grove of rubber trees there with you. The swamp is on the edge of a desert, so there's sand galore for all the pipes you are gonna make. And also, in that desert there's a village! Tons of crops ready for harvest on day 1. There's even two oil geysers on either side of the village. But the best part, right next to the spawn, there's a little hole in the ground, that leads down, and down, and down! The thing connects to a ravine, and in that ravine, there's abandoned mineshafts! I came across a dungeon in there too, and I found 4 diamonds! I'm halfway to the number of diamonds I need to build a quarry!
So far I've gotten most of the Industrialcraft level 1 machines setup, and I got a couple miners setup for buildcraft. Had a pump working on one of the geysers, and sucked it dry. The main problem I have had so far is these machines (at least the buildcraft ones) all disappear when I try to move them. I think I might be using the wrong tools to break them though, I'll have to play with it to see.
Links and other information after the break.

Industrialcraft

So, last night I started a new install of Minecraft to play IndustrialCraft. Took me a while to actually get it going, installing all the pre-reqs and such. I did have issues with no sound, but got that fixed. Started playing it, but didn't have a whole lot of time to really test it out. My spawn (random seed) was in a swamp on the edge of a desert (makes perfect sense, right?) and just over the horizon, A VILLAGE! I immediately made the village my home, saving myself the time and energy needed to build a place to live. Luckily too, the spawn point was surrounded by rubber trees! I moved a couple trees into the village, plan on doing that more, make the village an oasis. I didn't get too far along since I didn't have much time to really play. I got a tap made and picked up some sticky residue, but that's about it. Need to delve into the nearby cave and find some resources.

Full of fail

So I tried to start my new Hardcore Survival Let's Play series last night, but it was horrible. I used a seed I had heard about as being a good survival island seed, but I ended up spending the first 10 minutes swimming from island to island looking for one with trees, and that does not make good video. I think this is for the best though, cause my commentary sucked anyway, and because of that I came up with a new idea I'm going to use for this series. I can't tell you what it is, but I hope to get some video tonight. I can't promise to be great, but I can promise to try to be!

Hello again

I threw this together last night as a possible introduction for my videos and wanted to see what people thought. Please leave a comment below or on the video.

E05 - Working for a Livin'

Just got done putting together another video, in the process of uploading it now. This video actually turned out longer than I hoped it would, and I had to cut it up more than I was originally planning. In the video I added 3 farms, one chicken, one sugar cane, and one wheat. Designing the actual farms turned out to be harder than I expected. I'd previously made them all in one way or another, but doing it underground actually added another level of complexity to it. I had to work around the other rooms and make them all fit within the area I was working with.

Coming Soon

Just want to share with you guys what I've got coming in the future. It appears they've put out a second pre-release of minecraft 1.9 so I'm going to start a survival series in hardcore mode (bugs and all) in that. Once the official release happens, I'll obviously update to that (and beyond probably). I've also got the idea of doing a couple other series. One would be survival island (maybe I should do the hardcore mode, as the survival island? It would make it even more hardcore!) I also want to do a series on a new world (SSP probably, or a private world in my SMP server) just walking, exploring the world and finding nifty new places. I think I'm going to wait to make that my official 1.9 world though. Ok, so that's what I'll do, we'll have the official 1.9 world on the server be the start of my new Meandering with Munchmo series. Keep the Mining with Munchmo series in the world in 1.8. And create a 1.9 (PR2) surival island hardcore world. What should I call that one? Any suggestions?

E05 - Slime Time

My first large project is complete! I'm in the process of putting the video together as I type this (final check of the recording to make sure it's not completely horrible). I spent many hours over the last few days digging out tens of thousands of blocks to make a slime farm. The process went through scores of pickaxes and shovels and was a lot of work. I ended up gathering multiple stacks of iron, gold, and coal, plus a ton of redstone, and about 20 diamonds. Overall, I ended up with a lot more materials than what I started with. I didn't use as much glass as I was expecting, but I decided to not create a complete floor for the viewing chamber. The most interesting thing to note is the shadowing. If you watch carefully you can see how things keep getting darker as I got closer to the bedrock. I'm not sure what caused it, but the area where I first hit the lowest level (where I dropped the ladder) I could get a full view (as you can see from the viewing room) of the area. However, if I were to step about 5-10 blocks in any direction the darkness would close in. Once I got down to about level 12, I started having to contend with the slime spawns and fought them off as they spawned. I ended up with about 25 slimeballs from that. Once I got into digging out the trench I had some lighting issues and had a few endermen, zombies, and creepers spawn, which is why I ended up putting torches around the edge. After I put the water in, there really wasn't any worry about them, but decided to leave the torches there.
In case you're interested in doing something similar and want to know how to figure out where to dig, I used the Minecraft Slime Finder to pick the best place to find slimes. All you have to do is put in your seed (found by pressing F3) and then your coordinates, and it'll draw you a map of the surrounding area with the slime chunks highlighted in green.
ETA: Even though I cleared 9 chunks for this slime farm, only 5 of them are actually slime generating chunks.
After editing the video together and watching it, I see that I am going to have to be careful in the future to watch the things I say. Seemed that every time I started recording I said "Alright minecrafters." I'm still pretty new to this whole video thing, so I'm hoping you guys will stick with me while I get better at this.

Mining with Munchmo SP02

I'm in the process of posting a new Mining with Munchmo special. This one is about the stuff contained in the 1.9 pre-release. Some interesting facts about this video, I actually had to record it twice, because the first time, I didn't get any audio. Not sure how it happened, but the second time was the charm. Other things, I spent a LONG time trying to find a village the first time around. I also flew through the nether for what seemed like an eternity to find one of the structures in there. And, on my very first go through, the world I created with a random seed literally dropped me in the middle of the ocean, as in, no island. I was just there, sinking in the water. It was really odd.
You can download the "leaked" 1.9 pre-release here.
Video is after the jump

Just another update

So, Bukkit finally released an updated version to work with 1.8.1. I've got my server updated and moved the new world into it. I've started feeling better, so less coughing and sniffling. I am planning on doing another video tonight, but I think it might have to be another special edition since there is already a pre-release of 1.9 out! I'll likely throw together a single player game and run around in it giving my impressions of the updated content. Once 1.9 (and for that matter, 1.10) is officially released, I'll probably start a new world again for it. Because of that, the current project I'm planning on undertaking in the new world that was created for 1.8 might be put off until we're not expecting a major update soon.

My world so far

Welcome one and all

I decided to setup a Mining With Munchmo blog where I can talk about the things I've done and the things I plan on doing. I'm ready to record another video, but I've been sick the past few days (as you can tell from my last couple videos) and don't want to subject you guys to all the coughing and sniffling I'd be doing. For now, I'll take this time to discuss what I'm doing in the world.
I currently have two different Minecraft servers setup. The first is my worlds in 1.7.3 housed with Bukkit which I'm waiting to update to 1.8.1 when Bukkit has a recommended build for it. The second is a 1.8.1 vanilla server that I am running because I got impatient while waiting to play 1.8 for the Bukkit update. Once Bukkit gets an update released I plan on moving the world from the vanilla server over into the Bukkit server and turning off vanilla until the next time I need it. Currently, all my worlds are using whitelists because I don't feel like having to deal with permissions and possible griefers. The server is housed on a computer I put together. It is running Ubuntu 11.04 on an AMD Phenom II X2 565 with 16GB of ram and approximately 3TB of storage. I not only use this server for Minecraft, but it also serves all my media for watching over the home network (Xbox, PS3, etc).
As you probably saw in the first video, my thirteen year old son also shares the world with me. Just yesterday he invited a friend from school to play on our server, so in future videos you may see them running around.
I think for now, this is a good enough introduction, so please feel free to drop me a line and ask me any questions you have.