Hardware 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.

So here we are in October. COVID-19 is still with us and I am still working from home. Meanwhile, summer has quickly changed to autumn. The leaves are falling as are the temperatures. My house was the model home for our neighborhood, and what would have been the garage was finished in and used as a sales office. So when we bought the house, I was like, perfect, a perfect spot for an office! But the problem is that, because it was a garage, it’s not connected to the house’s HVAC system. In the summer there is a mini-split that keeps the whole area cool. But it’s kind of loud. However, I do have some of these DeLonghi Oil Radiators to use in the winter which provide abundant, silent heat without using very much power. But the downside is that they take awhile to warm up. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could have them turn on an hour early and “pre-warm” the office? Well, to get the obvious part out of the way, yes, there is timer functionality, but that is not nearly as cool as tying it into the rest of my smart home. But it has a remote. What if I could find a way to use Home Assistant to send IR commands to the heater? Turns out you can!

In my last post about building the pet feeders, I alluded to one of the limitations of the Raspberry Pi has: it lacks a real time clock. This is an understandable omission. They take up extra space and cost, are not needed for a lot of applications and can be pretty easily added if they are. One of the limitations I found is that, if there is a power outage that lasts a significant amount of time - long enough for the UPS batteries that keep the wireless up go dead, for instance - that the Raspberry Pi’s may “lose” track of time if they can’t reconnect to wifi and, thus, sync up by NTP.