Category: Commentary
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Family Setup for Apple Watch: Some Good, Some Bad
This Christmas, our son got an Apple Watch. This is our journey through Family Setup for Apple Watch, what works and what doesn’t, and a verdict on how useful this tool was for us.
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Manipulating the System Policy Database with Configuration Profiles, Part 2
You’re going to want to read Part 1 of this piece first. It covered managing the installation of packages that are not notarized. This section of the article covers the operational limits of doing the same thing for applications, using the operation:execute verb. There are several caveats to all of this that may make this…
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Apple Updates Notarization Requirements
Notarization is a big topic amongst Mac Admins, as we start to prepare to release macOS 10.15 Catalina to our fleets. Distributing tools, and allowing users to setup their own environments, is a huge part of the Mac Admin life. Today, Apple released some new guidance concerning the requirements for notarization of software packages. To…
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Like the Return of an Old Friend: NetNewsWire 5.0
In the early days of Web 2.0, in the short time after the dot com crash, there arose a common standard for syndicating your blog across the web, into RSS Readers. Google Reader was a big damn deal in those days, but before Google Reader hit the market, there was NetNewsWire. Brent Simmons’ app was…
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Notarization Follow-Up and Video
This summer, I gave a talk at the Mac Admins Conference at Penn State, focused on Notarization, called The Loyal Order of Notaries. It was a lot of work to put together the talk, and I spent more time on it than I have any talk I’ve ever given. I am proud of the work,…
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Go For The Moon
Last night, we braved the crowds and the heat to go down to watch Go For The Moon, a multimedia spectacular in front of the Smithsonian Castle. The experience was like nothing I’ve ever seen, or could imagine. Using the Washington Monument as a canvas, along with a pair of split screens framing the obelisk,…
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With Apologies to the Bard…
Friends, Mac Admins, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Server, not to praise him. The evil that people do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones. So let it be with Server. The noble Mac Admin Hath told you Server was ambitious. If it were so, it was…
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We All Come From Somewhere
This photo, from the Davis Enterprise, circa 1986-ish?, shows me with my third grade teacher, my elementary school principal, my Dad, and an engineer from the University in the town I grew up in. I am absolutely a product of growing up in a University town, with involved parents, with schools that saw the future…
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Complex is not a Pejorative
From Volume 100 of Techno Bits: The existing complexity of DEP, though, gives us choices. There’s no reason we couldn’t setup multiple MDMs for multiple departments within an organization, allowing central management of assets, and separate management of devices at the department levels, allowing for good competition between MDM vendors in the mid-level of the…
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VPNs: A Good Practice
TW: This Post Has Political Content A Summary of the Privacy Problem Congress has decided, for whatever reason they have chosen to represent as to why they’re acting, and frankly, none of them are too well-explained, that your Internet Service Provider can continue building a file on every site that every device on your home…