I’m obviously experimenting with other venues to contribute content to. Just posted an article called: The Changing World Of Technical Writing And Publishing on Buzzed. Enjoy!
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The Second Edition of our Enterprise Mac Administrators Guide Now Shipping
My 14th book, The second edition of the Mac Administrator’s Guide is now shipping. This was a big, big rewrite, given the fact that the first edition was before the App Store, Gatekeeper, and many, many other technologies. You can buy this book here! Also, huge congrats to Bill Smith, for publishing his first book, and most notably for doing so much amazing work on this book! Finally, we’re editing the second and third books I did this past summer right now, so look out for those announcements shortly!
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My First Huffington Post Article On Switch To The Apple Platform
My first article on the Huffington Post is up on HuffPost here. I feel very lucky to have gotten to meet Arianna years ago when I did tech work for her company, publishing, and at her home. She’s a very special lady and, while it’s been a long time, I still recall a few very cool and sometimes odd conversations. She’s not connected to this, but I’m proud to be involved with anything she’s involved with. And, oddly there’s parity: we’ve both written 15 books. Not even remotely oddly, she’s sold far more than I have. I hope this is the first of many articles, helping with tech and Apple and…
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Enable And Disable Permissions On Volumes Using A Script
Someone hands you a USB drive. You put it in your computer and you can’t access anything on it. You are running an imaging lab and you want to backup or troubleshoot a device before you re-image it, but you can’t access certain files. Obviously, you can sudo. But, you can also simply disable permissions on that volume (which, like getting someone to make you a sandwich, requires sudo of course). The command used to enable and disable permissions on a volume is vsdbutil, located at /usr/sbin/vsdbutil. And there’s a LaunchDaemon at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.vsdbutil.plist that interacts with diskarbitrationd so that when a volume is mounted, it is marked as having permissions…
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Quick And Dirty Language Management In OS X
I bet you thought this would be the article where I showed you how to make your computer curse more. Well, language can mean much more than that. In fact, Apple has dedicated a whole binary to switching your default language in OS X, in languagesetup. This command, located at /usr/sbin/languagesetup, is capable of changing the default language used by a system to a number of different languages. There are other ways to accomplish this, but none quite so easy. To get started, note that there are two ways to run languagesetup. The first is interactively, which I mostly use to figure out what I actually want to do with…
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No git Commit Message #tomhardy
Click for lightning. Merge-your-damn-self. But if you commit with a well written message (and not just a period to get past a sanity check), I’m happy. Tom Hardy likes it when you tell me wtf. via GIPHY
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Repair Permissions Using The Command Line In El Capitan
Repair permissions was unceremoniously removed from OS X in El Capitan. This staple of the Mac gurus toolkit disappeared. There was no 21 gun salute, there was no flaming casket sent out to sea and there was no sweet, sweet wake to get drunk at. Instead, there was pain. There was pain, because when the button disappeared, the need did not. Need proof? If you haven’t yet run it, let’s check your system to verify the permissions of the standard packages: sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs --volume / In the above command, we used the repair_packages binary, which has not changed in awhile. We then feed that the –verify option and the…
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Setup A Medical ID To Be Prepared For Emergencies With Your iPhone
I was going through Red Cross training recently, and one thing that was mentioned was whether we have Medical IDs setup on our iPhones. I do. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d set it up a long time ago. I then asked around and no one else had one setup. So I grabbed my testing iPhone and decided to write it up. To get started setting up your Medical ID on your iPhone, open the Health app. From the Health app, tap on Medical ID and then tap on Create Medical ID. At the Medical ID screen, enter allergies, medications you are on, add emergency contacts, provide your…
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Change Banner Times For Notifications In OS X
You know how in Notification Center, how you see a banner for awhile? You can customize how long that lasts. To do so, use defaults to write a bannerTime key into com.apple.notificationcenterui. They should be an integer that shows the number of seconds for the banner to display, For example, to set the banner to 10 seconds: defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime 10 Or 2 seconds: defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime 2 Once you set the time, log out and log back in (or reboot) for the change to take effect. Enjoy
- 318, Apps, Articles and Books, Bushel, Business, certifications, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server, Minneapolis
My 3,000th Post On Krypted
This is my 3,000th post on Krypted.com. The past 3,000 posts have primarily been about OS X Server, Mac automation, Mac deployment, scripting, iOS deployments, troubleshooting, Xsan, Windows Servers, Exchange Server, Powershell, security, and other technical things that I have done in my career. I started the site in response to a request from my first publisher. But it took on a mind of its own. And I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. My life has changed a lot over these past 11 years. I got married and then I got divorced. I now have a wonderful daughter. I became a partner and the Chief Technology Officer of 318 and helped to shape it into…
