264: On The Road With Joe Saponare

Topics:

-Joe is reporting from the streets of Boulder Creek, CA #vanlife

-Joe talks about the unglamorous life of living in a camper (down by the river)

-He actually references Marco Arment discussing camper stories on Accidental Tech Podcast: http://atp.fm

-Cellular difficulties creep up as Joe discusses using his cellular modem

-As a board member of a non-profit, Joe discusses his ability to score an unlimited data plan with Sprint: mobilecitizen.org

-Joe's transition has been surprisingly smooth after going on the road, largely due to his staff at PsiMac

-The disasters of Kerio / GFI are brought up once again

-Both Joe and Jerry have hosted CrashPlan PROe for clients.  Joe is slowly migrating his users to BackBlaze.  Jerry has decommissioned his PROe server.

-Since the root level Library is excluded from BackBlaze by default, Jerry provides a solution to use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the data to the Documents folder, which would then be backed up.

-Joe's MacBook Pro had a bit of damage when purchased from a client.  Now it is reporting "service battery".  After deciding to send it to depot for repair, he shares his dealings with the process.

-As Jerry comments on Joe's name dropping in California, Joe recalls the SNL sketch called "The Californians" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jIBZjL8G5s

262: How Would A Normal Person Do This?

Topics:

-One of Jerry's local clients needs assistance with updating the OS.  He ends up working on it off-site and doing his magic to bring it back to life.

-The guys discuss working off-site vs in front of the client's eyes as well as keeping equipment like external monitors on hand

-Sam talks about setting up Ubiquiti equipment in his office to be in his comfort zone and coming to the client with a fully configured Wi-Fi setup

-Sam realizes a downside to having an office...spending money on lunch!

-The topic of nutrition comes up again, when the work day gets away from you.  Sam likes the Clif Bars and Jerry is a fan of the Lara bars.

-Jerry loves the podcast How I Built This and interestingly enough, they had Lara on to talk about how she started her business.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

-Right up to the start of the show, Sam was working on an iPhone with water damage with a good friend of the family.  An odd situation came up with relation to iCloud backups.  Jerry has a suggestion based on an old trick to resolve Time Machine backups.  Stay tuned to the next show to find out what happens!

-A pet peeve of Jerry's is when he might shave off some time to be nice.  A client pays and then keeps you around to enter information in the register, delaying you even more.

-Sam recalls that awkward moment when a client was opening a safe in front of you and trying to make sure you aren't able to see

-As Jerry is running, he listens to podcasts.  He shares another pet peeve for playing sound effects that scares the heck out of you while running on the road.

-Working with SonicWall is nothing new to Sam but he had a moment of frustration setting up the SSL VPN client on Windows 10

-While on the Windows topic, Jerry has problems with a computer that ended up being Windows Home Edition

-The dreaded employee or friend that gives a client bad advice that makes them second guess you

-Jerry deals with Windows 5?? (Windows NT) and trouble with UPS

-Sam shares a funny story about hanging out with Adam Rice at ACEs and learning that Reachability actually does exist on the iPhone X!  Chalk that up to something he should have known.

-We have probably all been there before: Jerry talks about a client that swears that a feature existed before when it actually didn't.

259: Nana's Got A Bunch Of Reds In Her Basement

-This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting.  FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

Topics:

-Sam starts the show by discussing a recent rate increase he is introducing

-Jerry discusses timing of rate hikes

-While on the topic, Sam shares a story about tough negotiations with a particular client

-After an announcement from CrashPlan ending PROe Server for Mac, Jerry has to take steps to keep his server up and running for clients using Parallels and Ubuntu

-A brief talk about storing data in the cloud and FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)

-"All my data is gone" - Sam recalls a story where a client fiddled with equipment and caused a minor scare for herself

-After replacing macOS Server with a Synology, Sam gets the dreaded ticket to report that items are missing.  The story turns to an issue of illegal characters in filenames.  An old favorite called A Better Finder Rename is brought in to do mass renames on the server.

-The Synology discussion prompts Jerry to talk about types of drives used, including WD Reds and Seagate IronWolf.

-DAS PSA from Jerry about Drobo units and a run of bad power supplies

-Sam brings up a great blog discussion about APFS snapshots at the setup assistant thanks to a tip from Arek Dreyer https://smithjw.me/2018/04/23/APFS-Snapshots-Setup-Assistant/

257: Interview With Lucas Acosta, CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, Georgia

Topics:

Lucas Acosta, Founder & CEO of Foojee Consultants in Atlanta, GA joins us this week for an interview

Five Things You Should Know About Foojee

1. Foojee was born out of a calling to serve. We combined that calling with our enthusiasm of Apple products and created a company.

2. We're in it to win it. We don't outsource our talent. All of our team members are W-2 employees with benefits, and each one adds their own spice to the Foojee brand.

3. Why the name Foojee? Welp, the Fuji apple is our founder's favorite type of apple. Simple as that.

4. Since we opened shop, we've grown on referrals alone.

5. We create monthly Apple®-centric videos filled with tips, news, advice, and the occasional joke. It's how we like to keep in touch with our clients.

-Foojee is an outsourced IT shop for businesses using Apple products

-The majority is managed services for small businesses as well as MDM projects

-Video started out as a side hobby that turned into a revenue stream for Foojee. It all started when they started doing it for themselves. Lucas encourages those listening to try it yourself first

-Foojee uses a traditional email campaign with hosted YouTube videos to send to their subscribers

-Video also creates a way to keep that close relationship with your clients

-"Apple products at work" is the theme of their latest videos, focusing on using Apple products in business

-Get started using an iPhone as your microphone, using the Voice Memos app

-One thing videos do not do is generate leads.  But it helps when potential clients are comparing you to your competitors

-Visit Foojee's YouTube channel

-Lucas discusses the raw, single take vs scripted video and the pros and cons of each

-As the CEO, Lucas is still 50-60% engineer and 20-30% business development

-Lucas started Foojee in 2008 and he discusses the ebbs & flows of running a business

-He was initially under the impression that he needed to be big in order for clients to hire them

-In the same vein, Joe talks about his focus on the residential market

The main reason Lucas is part of the ACN, besides the leads, is that he wants to be aligned with Apple

Foojee's original company name was On-Site Technical Consulting!

Thank you to our Patron sponsors!

254: What's up, Dock?

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company.  Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access.  Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing.  If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user.  In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it.  They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it.  They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time.  Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete.  Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada.  Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually.  A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock.  Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad.  Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Justin and his wife were at Apple during the famous "I'm a Mac" commercials.  He talks about the underdog mentality that made for a very exciting time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU

-He was on the team that created and released Aperture

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor.  At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!).  At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors.  Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline.  Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it!  Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

252: Migrate Is Becoming A Trigger Word For Me

Topics:

-Joe has some follow up for same from Episode 223 "It's not you, it's me" about Mail notifications

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off.  He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:
diskutil list
diskutil umount force /dev/disk1
(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)
diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-We reference Mike Bombich from Carbon Copy Cloner and an APFS issue that was found when dealing with sparse images:
https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

-Not to be outdone, Joe introduces yet another segment, "Joe's Kuriosity Korner"

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware.  PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back.  Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.  

-Sam has an issue with spotlight and Outlook 2016 and found a more recent support article to deal with the issue using the mdimport command.  This was a welcome new approach to removing and rebuilding the spotlight database:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2741535/outlook-for-mac-search-returns-no-results-and-task-items-are-not-displ

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers.  After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained.  In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

"Just re-index it dude" 
-Apparently Sam