This is just sort of a stream of consciousness, so apologies if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I still remember the first time I realized I was directly talking with someone in another country. It was the mid 90s and I was a teenager, hooked on playing MUDs. When most people in my high school could barely turn a computer on, I felt like a wizard who knew about an entire secret world, and it was awesome. I was playing, every day, with people from Scotland, Denmark, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and so many others I can’t even remember now.

And we talked. I learned so much about other cultures just by talking directly to people. And I remember thinking, in my own young, idealistic naivete, that if just everyone could be online, and could have these experiences, we might actually achieve world peace in my lifetime. We could see that we are all human bothers and sisters, separated only by artificially drawn borders. I believed free information will result in the most educated population in human history. And the Internet would bring the whole world a new age.

I look back on myself then and mourn the world that we could have had. Humans apparently just aren’t ready for world peace and togetherness.

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0. It’s been almost three years since the last release of petfeedd (version 0.2.2), and Version 1.0 marks a new start for this project.

I have been running the beta release on my feeders for the last week and I believe I have smashed all the major bugs.

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.

I’ve had several people write me recently and ask about how to use petfeedd with multiple servos. It’s actually now my most common feature request, so I will definitely be sure that that is added in the rewrite that I am currently working on.

In the meantime, you can run multiple instances of petfeedd using Docker, each pointed to a different servo. I would be sure to offset each servo by a few seconds to be sure you don’t have any voltage drop issues with the Raspberry Pi.

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!