• Alexa,  Home Automation

    Connect Amazon Echo (Alexa) to IFTTT

    IFTTT makes the possibilities practically endless for what you can do with an Amazon Echo running Alexa. IFTTT provides workflows that connect Alexa to many of the most popular cloud services on the Internet. For example, Alexa can make a spreadsheet of all the songs you listen to using your Prime account, Email you a shopping list, sync To-Dos to Evernote, find your phone, set reminders on your phone, extend Alexa to manage your TV using Harmony, run Wink shortcuts, print files, manage a Wemo bulb (Belkin), control otherwise unsupported thermostats, control items within apps (e.g. make all your Hue lights a given color), time things (e.g. turn on the air conditioning for an…

  • Alexa,  Home Automation

    Manage Alarms On Amazon Echo

    One of those fun things that Alexa can do is set alarms for you. I usually sleep around 4 or 5 hours a night, so no amount of alarms is enough to roust me out of bed. Therefore, adding Alexa on my Amazon Echo to the extensive list of alarms I have around my house is welcome. Let’s look at some things you can tell Alexa to do for ya’, when it comes to alarms. First, let’s set an alarm for noon: “Alexa, set an alarm for noon tomorrow.” Alexa will then repeat back the alarm she just configured. Now, let’s setup a repeating alarm for every Tuesday morning at 6am:…

  • Alexa,  Home Automation

    Play Audible Books On Your Amazon Echo

    The Amazon Echo is a great device for accessing content using a Prime membership. But the Echo is also useful for media that isn’t sourced from Prime. One of these is Audible, which makes sense, given that Audible is owned by Amazon. I found that my Audible account was around before it was linked to an Amazon account with Prime. In order to link the account, I needed to open the Alexa website and link my Audible account. To do so, open http://alexa.amazon.com. Then click on Music & Books in the sidebar. Then click on Audible and either you will see your Audible books, or you will be able to provide…

  • iPhone,  Microsoft Exchange Server

    Block Specific iOS Versions From Accessing Exchange

    Exchange Online and Exchange 2010-2016 can block a device from accessing ActiveSync using a policy. To do so, first grab a list of all operating systems you’d like to block. To do so, first check which ones are out there using the Get-ActiveSyncDevice command, and looking at devicetype, deviceos, and deviceuseragent. This can be found using the following command: Get-ActiveSyncDevice | select devicetype,deviceos,deviceuseragent The command will show each of the operating systems that have accessed the server, including the user agent. You can block access based on each of these. In the following command, we’ll block one that our server found that’s now out of date: New-ActiveSyncDeviceAccessRule -Characteristic DeviceOS -QueryString…

  • Uncategorized

    The First Round Of JNUC Sessions Available!

    Nothing says fall in Minnesota like frost on the leaves, refreshing Oktoberfest beer, and the world’s largest gathering of Apple IT admins. While the first two may give you shivers or put a smile on your face, the latter is a guarantee to help you build on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone management skills. To make your decision to join us in Minneapolis this October a no-brainer, we want to give you an early glimpse into some incredible sessions we’re offering at this year’s JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC). We’ve posted nine of the community-led sessions the JNUC is famous for and—new this year—seven of the product sessions JAMF experts will be leading. With sessions for education and…

  • Articles and Books

    Discounts On A Couple Of My Latest Books

    <shameless self promotion> Springer digital is running the two latest titles I wrote for them: Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide (Third Edition) and Enterprise Mac Security: Mac OS X (Third Edition) in a special Kindle promotion on Amazon until May 31st, 2016. For a limited time, the ebooks will be priced at $18.99 in US, Canadian, and Australian markets, and 10.99GBP in UK. Th books are available at http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Administrators-Guide-CHARLES-EDGE/dp/1484217055/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460471210&sr=8-1&keywords=9781484217054 for the Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide and http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Mac-Security-OS-Third-ebook/dp/B016PXSH8W/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1460471152&sr=8-1&keywords=Enterprise+Mac+Security%3A+Mac+OS+X+%28Third+Edition%29 for Enterprise Mac Security: Mac OS X. We are also extending the sale of these iOs titles through the iBooks/iTunes platform also, so stay tuned! 🙂 </shameless self promotion>

  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Manage ActiveSync Policies on iOS Using Powershell in Exchange 2016

    Sometimes you need to manage policies in Exchange ActiveSync programmatically. For example, if a device shows up in a JSS, you can deploy policies to that device at the Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) level rather than using a mobileconfig. To manage these, Microsoft has provided a few pretty easy-to-use commandlets in Powershell. The New-MobileDeviceMailboxPolicy commandlet in Powershell will create a policy based on some attributes that you define. The Get-MobileDeviceMailboxPolicy commandlet in Powershell will show what the contents of a given policy are. The Set-MobileDeviceMailboxPolicy commandlet will set a policy, and has the same structure s the New-MailboxDeviceMailboxPolicy, but applies to existing policies. The Remove-MobileDeviceMailboxPolicy commandlet in Powershell will delete a policy. The Get-MobileDeviceMailboxPolicy commandlet in…

  • Agile,  Java

    Quotes in InfoWorld Article About Careers

    I love being asked questions about career trajectories. I alway preface my answers with the fact that it’s just my reaction to things and I’m weird and maybe not everyone agrees. I recently provided some answers about careers of developers, from the perspective of a hiring manager. Luckily there are others that answered more intelligently than I! So, feel free to read the article here.