• personal,  sites

    100+ New Blog Posts Now Available

    Sometimes I disappear for a bit to work on this project or that. But I tend to always be writing. I’m not sure if I’d classify it as an addiction at this point, or what… But there’s always something silly cooking. Not all productive or helpful, but you know, sometimes. So there should be at least one that’s helpful out of over 100 that I’ve posted over on the Secret Chest blog. Find those here! Random note: Did the same thing when launching Bushel. It’s a blast to think of new product categories and what’s adjacent and worthy of nerding out about! Want more about something specific – lemme know!…

  • sites

    Krypted.com Turns 15

    Krypted.com turns 15 today! It’s been a fun run. The nearly 4,000 posts (around 250 a year on average) here bring a few thousand people by my little corner of the web every day. There are no sponsors or ads (I’ve experimented but never found it worth the hassle but may some day). It’s really just my notes of weird little things here and there. I’ve been very lucky that after reading some of it, sometimes people come back. I’ve been very lucky that my silly note-taking has allowed me to write books, speak at conferences, and start podcasts. If you read this, you’re kinda’ the best! And I’m so…

  • Articles and Books,  sites

    The Take Control Back To School Sale Is On!

    Take Control is here to support you! So through August 24th, you can add any number of our books to your Take Control library for 50% off the cover price. All our books are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle) formats, so you can read wherever, whenever, and on whatever device you like. Use this link to pick the titles you need to stay up to date: http://tid.bl.it/50-percent-off-back-to-school-sale-2015 (We expect everything to work properly, but if our newly redesigned site is overloaded by sale traffic, try again later in the day when things have settled down.) Remember, there’s no need to read a Take Control title from…

  • Consulting,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  personal,  public speaking,  sites

    https://krypted.com/ Turns 10 Today

    Wow, seems like just yesterday I took down the old static page that was just a bunch of links I used to find stuff and went with a full-on WordPress site and published my first article. Doesn’t seem like I’ve been writing that long. But when I look at the over 2,500 posts on this site and the fact that I hit over 210,000 uniques last month, I guess it must be true. I’m so thankful that people want to read this stuff. And I’m really glad that I’ve been able to help a few people over the years. I hope the next 10 years are even better than the…

  • Articles and Books,  public speaking,  sites

    The Day That Macworld Died

    If you go to the official Macworld Expo site, you’ll notice that the conference has, like the Blues Brothers before the movie, been disbanded. MacIT lives on, but Macworld Expo does not, for now. Shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, given the fact that the Macworld magazine has gone through some substantial changes as well, recently. But it is a surprise nonetheless. I have many great memories from Macworld, including striking up friendships with young gurus named Bartosh, Dreyer, Regan, Wisenbaker, Rennich, Welch and many, many others back when Apple was an afterthought. Special thanks to Paul, Kathy and many others for their massive contributions towards making the Apple…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  sites,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Manage Apex Domains In OS X

    OS X Server supports running a traditional bind implementation of DNS. You can define a record for most any name, including google.com, www.google.com, www.www.google.com, etc. You can use this to redirect subdomains. In this example, we’ll create an A Record to point www.google.com to 127.0.0.1 without breaking other google.com subdomains. To get started, let’s use the DNS service in the Server app to create test.www.google.com. The reason for this is that OS X will then create a zone file for www.google.com. If we created www.google.com instead, then OS X would automatically create google.com, which would break the other subdomains. To do so, open Server app and click on the DNS Service. Then…

  • sites

    Permalinks Finally Fixed!

    When you enable permalinks in WordPress, you’re basically converting a link to an article you’ve written from something like https://krypted.com//page=2 to something like https://krypted.com//mac-os-x-server. Doing so makes Google like the page more (supposedly). After my site moved, the permalinks were broken, so I turned them off until I could find time to fix them. I never did. But thanks to the glory that is @sacrilicious the permalinks were magically fixed one day. So do permalinks matter to drive traffic to a site? Well, nothing else changed, same length of articles, same frequency, etc. But when permalinks were turned back on, the answer was in my Site Stats, courtesy of  JetPack:…

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X,  Minneapolis,  sites

    Control the Weather Using Curl

    Wait, did I say control, I meant query… Sorry to disappoint! I am a home automation nerd. Recently I’ve noticed that as it gets closer to warmer or cooler extremes that it takes longer for my hvac system to bring my house to the temperature I want. I’ve also noticed that NEST claims to automatically learn these factors. Not to be outdone by the Griswolds, I decided to look at building this into my system. I had been experimenting with using the weather.com site to pull this data but then someone pointed out that NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) actually publishes this information on their site. I was…