@bigd
reg. plotting and mining, i have had luck with windows and using wplotgenerator to plot (using cpu) and at the same time using jminer to mine (using gpu). i think jminer can also just use cpu, but it might be a little slower at getting the results, so if you have a deadline of 8 seconds, you might not be able to announce it until after 30 seconds, so it counts as 30, and if someone announces a 25 before you, you miss out on a block you would have gotten if you had been able to read the plot fast enough.