IMTI

(I Make Things Interesting) Architecting, Developing, nixCraft, DevOps, AI/ML, Blockchain

Formatting Drives on MacOS

A stack of old drives, a terminal and diskutil.

I have had this collection of old external drives hanging around for years. There was a time I was having terrible luck with hard drives. It turned out I managed to amass a collection of about eight drives from one terabyte to four terabytes. Fortunately, I keep copies of nearly all my files on cloud drives, split between Amazon, Google and DropBox. I had a sneaking suspicion that the discs themselves were ok and somehow my Mac was communicating with the RAID controllers in a way that caused them to fail.

rSync Files on Interval

Sync media to Raspberry Pi or any ARM SoC.

A recurring requirement for my IOT projects involves keeping a set of files synced with a central server. Many of these projects include media players, kiosk systems, or applications that need frequently updated configuration files, all while entirely unattended, and in most cases unreachable through firewalls. I have one project that alone has 2000+ devices pulling media continuously from an rsync server. Many of these devices are on doggy wifi networks.

Burn SD Images on MacOs

Use the command line to burn SD cards, easy and fast.

Use your terminal to burn images fast and easy with dd. I do a lot of professional and hobby development for projects using devices such as Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Libre Computer, Tinker Board, etc. I run across a lot of tutorials with people downloading and using big GUI apps with clunky drag and drop interfaces to burn images. It’s one command in your terminal. Technically, it’s three, but I don’t count listing and unmounting as the final act of burning.