I would like to mine lots of obsidian without paying a lot of attention. I was thinking about a 1X1 column of obsidian going straight to bedrock so could look down and put a weight on my track pad button.
What is the best way to make a 1X1 column of obsidian underground? I would prefer if I did not need a huge number of lava buckets. I was thinking maybe something about the redstone to obsidian glitch.
Whether you use lava buckets or redstone to obsidian, my recommendation for the actual mining part would be to get a copy of InfinitiesLoop's controlpack mod.
It contains a couple features which will help, specifically auto-run and auto-mine. With one keypress each you will be able to mine and move without any further input. It's a client-side mod (it'll work fine with your server) and works with mcpatcher.
Also, making a line of obsidian to mine is FAR easier and less time consuming than making a column.
One last suggestion is to consider building molds for your lava blocks wherever you want obsidian and then cooling it in place instead of making it somewhere else, mining it, and then placing it. Forming it in place with molds saves me a lot of time when I'm building obsidian structures.
Since this is tagged with "bukkit," I'm going to assume you can install third party plugins. If this is the case, I would suggest looking into the powers available through WorldEdit
