Posts

Posted on

Write an iso to an external drive from Mac os X

 

A quick cheat!

Running an ios based installer from a hard drive, instead of from a usb can often be faster and is useful if you have a swag of machines to re image and esata is a lot faster than say usb V2. I’ve needed to do this a few times but I often spend far to much time looking for the information. So, Now I’ve written this little cheat!

First run this

diskutil list

This will give you a list of drives and the result will look a little like this

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                                                   *80.0 GB    disk2

As you can see hear the disk attached I want to write to is /dev/disk2
The command to use is

sudo dd if=linuxmint-18.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

This will write the contents of the iso the the external drive

Break down of the command

dd if={path_to_iso_image} of/dev/{location of device you want this written to} bs=1m

Enjoy

Posted on

Detail and old technology

I keep lots of note books, technical one’s and personal. Unfortunately like most people I’m not blessed with a photographic memory, but I can get rather methodical, and that’s useful.

Technical writing – this blogging thing is valuable. But I also like to write things in long hand and in pencil in note books! I know it sounds crazy, because these days we can google many if not most problems. But writing my own cheat sheets, (spells, as I call them ) can help a lot to jog the memory. Often it can be just as quick if not quicker than trying to find that page in google you forgot to book mark 3 years ago!

Not to mention that there is some evidence that a hand written approach to the problem solving process can have a number of positive side effects.

When I’m working on something technical my journal is close buy but I’ll also have the index open that I maintain in a spread sheet. The reason is that it’s a lot quicker to find things via the spread sheet. But I also have a hand written index that is good for if i’m off line or taking things slowly. We live in very fast times but it’s good on occasion to slow down a little, think and reap the benefits.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Posted on

Additional thoughts about AI

Vegetable, Animal or Mineral?

I’ve found an interesting article about AI by research psychologist  Robert Epstein over at Aeon.co . It’s a good read and a breath of fresh air with regards a lot of the noise that is being generated of late, about AI running amok (yes I’m guilty of jumping on that band wagon!).

Mr Epstein’s basic premise is that the brain does not work like a computer – it’s different because it contains 86 billion neurons with  100 trillion interconnections. This big hunk of humanity changes due to each unique experience, and we can’t just reduce human conscious down to a big bag of self learning algorithms. That and the computational model that a lot of people rely on is flawed.

I sort of agree with him on a lot of this, but I am also  still a little concerned about things like people with photographic memories, how studies in childhood development will influence our understanding of the creation of human consciousness, and I’m still worried about self learning. But if you want a fresh perspective on this stuff the article is well worth a read. May be we are not doomed after all!