Author: Tim

I recently set up two ecobee4 smart thermostats in my home. I choose ecobee over nest because of the native Homekit integration. The overall installation was not too difficult since I had existing C-wire’s in both of my units.

One of the biggest features smart thermostats give you over a standard thermostat with a schedule is the ability to know whether you are home or away. They can do this by using the built-in motion sensors which exist in the thermostat and remote temperature sensors or a geofence using your phone’s GPS. Geofence is my preferred method because if someone is home and decides to take a nap, the thermostat could go into away mode while geofence knows your true location and can set the thermostat in Home or Away mode. Read More

When using macOS zip tool from the command, you may want to exclude certain files by name or extensions. I often need to do this when automating extension bundles for a release. Here is the command I use to exclude __MACOSX and DS_Store files that macOS creates.

zip -r deploy.zip . -x ".\*" -x "\_\_MACOSX" -x "*DS_Store"

The -x flag exlcudes files that match the pattern. Here is a list of other options for the zip command line tool.