• Mac OS X

    Free Space Required for Modern macOS Upgrades

    The amount of free space required to upgrade a Mac has increased drastically in the run-up to and since the introduction of apfs-based snapshots in 2016. The amount of required free space had been growing steadily in the HFS+-era of file systems, but as more elements of iOS (like a modern file system) came to the Mac, and as the Mac transitioned to a fully 64-bit operating system, that number escalated and never returned now that the transition away from things like 32-bit apps and kexts is finished. Sierra (Mac OS X 10.12) had a minimum drive capacity of 8.8 GB but really needed more like 12 GB; however there…

  • Apple TV,  Apple Watch,  Apps,  iPhone,  JAMF,  Mac Security,  MacAdmins Podcast

    Notes from the Underground: Apple WWDC and You

    Apple kicked off the annual WWDC conference yesterday and boy there was a flurry of information. There always is, but for people charged with managing Apple devices and vendors that support Apple devices there were some important releases. Some general themes to think about as you read through this list: Privacy is a thing. This includes securing files in the directories of a user by having the user accept a request to touch them (e.g. My Documents, er, I mean, Documents). This also means apps harvesting user data are doomed. The restrictions continue to flow in from iOS to the Mac. And that’s probably a good thing – as it…

  • iPhone,  JAMF

    Transfer Text In And Out Of The iOS Simulator Using xcrun

    In a previous article, I covered creating, starting, and stopping iOS simulations. macOS comes with a handy tool to interact with the clipboard (aka pasteboard) on a Mac called pbcopy. You can redirect information from a file into your clipboard using the pbcopy command. Here, we’ll simply call pbcopy and then a file path pbcopy ~/Desktop/transfer.txt You can then redirect your text into simctl by doing a pbpaste into xcrun simctl pbpaste booted Once you’ve copied your data, clean up the transfer file: rm ~/Desktop/transfer.txt You can also pull text out. If you write data into the clipboard (e.g. during instrumentation) then you can extract it from that pasteboard using…

  • iPhone

    Screen Time And Setting Limits For Ourselves And Our Families

    Do you know how much time you spend in various apps and on your device? Do you want to gently be reminded of how much time you’re staring at screens and maybe even be limited in how much you can be lost on the screen?  First, let’s Let’s do this limiting the time you can be on the device in the first place, using a feature of Screen Time called Downtime: Open Settings Tap on Screen Time Tap Downtime Tap on and then set the start of Downtime and the stop of Downtime. Tap back on Screen Time in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Now, let’s setup…

  • iPhone,  JAMF

    Using Managed App Config with Jamf Pro

    Hey look, there’s a new category on the Jamf Marketplace, available at https://marketplace.jamf.com/apps/#category=AppConfig,selecting the AppConfig category. The new AppConfig category gives administrators of any MDM that supports AppConfig access to a set of apps that support AppConfig. If you have an app that isn’t listed here, feel free to let me know. What does this mean? Well, AppConfig is a way of sending data into an app. App config allows a customer to deploy settings into applications on iOS devices in much the same way that settings can be sent into a Mac app via the defaults command. This means an end user could get an app installed on their device…

  • Articles and Books

    Ways to work together with your employees to help keep their skills sharp

    My latest inc.com piece is available at https://www.inc.com/charles-edge/your-employees-want-extra-training-but-youre-going-to-have-to-help-them-get-star.html. It starts off like this, if it’s your kinda’ thing: Employee engagement is dipping, according to a new study by human resources consultancy Aon Hewitt, but as an manager, you can make the workplace more appealing through positive initiatives such as employee training and development. Indeed, I’ve often had people I manage ask for more training. My answer is always an emphatic “yes.” But then something funny often happens: nothing. Giving staff approval for trainingdoesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll do it unless you follow up methodically and even micromanage the process. Why does this happen and what does it show about how employers…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Use DNS To Improve Caching Service Discoverability

    Clients discover the Apple Caching service bundled with macOS Server (and in the future macOS) automatically. You can create a text recored for _aaplcache._tcp on your DNS server. That would look _aaplcache._tcp 518400 IN TXT “prs=192.168.50.100” Name: _aaplcache._tcp with a type of TXT and a TTL of 518400 seconds. The prs is the address to be used and is set to a value using prs=192.168.50.100.