2021 Posts

Here’s a quick article about how to make a multiboot USB stick under macOS. These are useful in a lot of situations - such as for doing system installs or system rescues - because you can boot a wide variety of live OSs from a single stick. There are a lot of guides out there for doing this on Linux, and a lot of software for automating it on Windows, but not a lot of guides for doing it on macOS. Fortunately, it is pretty straightforward as the instructions will be broadly similar to doing it on Linux.

My mailbox - yes, my physical mailbox where I receive actual mail - is one of the things that has stubbornly resisted my attempts to automate it. I’ve tried a few different solutions. Third party proprietary chimes. A Z-Wave tilt sensor on the door. But nothing has worked long-term.

Some things are as reliable as clockwork. The moon and tides. Death and taxes. Politicians lying. And out-of-touch Silicon Valley tech millionaires and billionaires descending from their gold-plated PCB thrones to bestow upon us us, the unwashed masses, their most brilliant wisdom and thoughts. Today’s myopic missive is brought to you by Sam Altman, of Y-Combinator fame. On Sunday, he opened up Twitter and blessed us with this thought in the middle of an otherwise interesting thread:

So the good news is that things are stating to get better. The pandemic is starting to abate now that vaccines are widely available in the United States. Hopefully they will continue to be effective against the new strains that are emerging, and all evidence suggests that they are. Hopefully things will continue to improve around the world as well. Also equally good news is, with the pandemic abating, we can start to return to a more normal state. But many of us are emerging into a new world, one where it is basically impossible to buy a house because demand for houses is outpacing supply and where the costs of many things are going up due to scarcity. One of the interesting things I have noticed is that some businesses, and this seems to be predominantly fast food and restaurants, are having a hard time hiring people. Some have even shut down because they can’t find employees. What is happening here?

In the year 2021 there are a lot of things that you just take for granted. Remember when you used to have to use jumpers to set things on your computer? Or worrying about IRQ conflicts? Or whether you could get the the drivers you needed to work? These are all parts of the “bad old days” of computers that I don’t miss very much. These days if I plug things into my computer - any of them - I expect them to “just work.” And very often, surprisingly, this is the case. Especially common, well supported things like network cards. So it is notable when I encounter something where that isn’t the case. But first, let’s back up a little bit.

So one of the downsides to corporate life can be dealing with the deluge of email. While Slack is the new hotness for communicating inside companies, when dealing with outside people or organizations email is still the lingua franca of communication. But the downside to that is that you sometimes have to deal with repetitive emails. One in particular I have noticed over the last few years being more and more common is people reaching out to me wanting to get content on DealNews, or in some other way work with our marketing or business development teams. It is starting to get so common that I get it several times a month, and the reply is always the same: I don’t have editorial control over what content appears on the website, please reach out to these web addresses. But typing this out every time is annoying. There should be a way to automate this. After all, anything worth doing twice is worth automating.