Changing Interconnected Smoke Alarms

Apparently you are supposed to change smoke alarms every 10 years.  Ours lasted 18.  We did have to change the batteries about once every 2 years.  We also had to blow dust out of them after calling the fire department because they wouldn't shut off after we had them for about 10 years.

The final call was the alarms going off even after we replaced the batteries.  When it came time to replace the alarms, I realized how little I knew about them.  I knew they were interconnected and that they ran off house power when it was available.

When it came to ordering them, I knew we had FireX but they were bought out by Kiddie.  I was concerned about the connector.  I could see that you could buy an adapter from FireX to Kiddie but it was about $3 compared to the whole price of an alarm which was $12 making it relatively expensive (times 7 alarms in our house).  I researched and decided to go with First Alert since it was a little cheaper and seemed to match the FireX adapter.

• Unfortunately when I got the alarms, the adapter was narrower and did not match.
• Fortunately, the alarms came with an adapter with bare wires.  
• Unfortunately, I had to turn off the power to the circuit so I didn't shock myself and I didn't know what circuit provided power for the smoke alarms (turned out to be the master bedroom).  
• Fortunately, there is a green LED that tells you if there is AC power and my daughter watched until I flipped the right breaker and the green LED went out.  
• Also fortunately, the old adapters were wired in with existing wire nuts so I only had to strip the interconnect line on the new adapters.

I had to replace the mount on the ceiling by loosening the screws that held the old mount.  Also remember that the ground for the AC power is also the ground (white) for the interconnect so make sure you have that wired properly or the interconnect won't work (like the last alarm didn't work for me).

Mount Veracrypt encrypted system drive

I encrypted my laptop (a Lenovo Yoga 700) with Veracrypt because I was to cheap to by the Windows 10 business version.  Later, the laptop died (display problems). I should have read the "print these instructions" better.  I bought a SATA M.2 (which is the "hard drive" which looks like an old memory stick) to USB adapter and plugged it into another computer with Veracrypt installed. 

I tried to mount it with long waits and screens that say things about "incorrect password" and "not sure this is a volume".  After playing with VMs to try to boot off the rescue USB and worrying that I would never see my data again, I tried to recreate the problem by encrypting a Windows 7 VM.  In the process, I read the "print these instructions" window. 

It says quite clearly to open Veracrypt, select the device, select a drive and select 'System' > 'Mount Without Pre-Boot Authentication'.  Then enter your password.

The real page that talks about this is here.