🔒 Patreon Special

IT Pros: exclusive shows await you on Patreon, focusing on the more challenging aspects of running your practice and working with clients and employees.

044: Tales from Decrypt

/

Recorded live April 1, 2014

Topics:

- Sam is growing the practice

- freeing up time to do business development, plan projects, talk to clients

- travel charge?

- how to reimburse employee for mileage

- use PDFPen to strike through or highlight line items on invoice

- to send or not to send the zero balance invoice

- advising clients about billing for two techs on certain projects

- Jerry’s MacBook Air lockout; manual decrypt using command line

- issues with users connecting via SMB to Mavericks Server

036: Low Hanging Fruit & Slow Paying Clients

/

Recorded live February 4, 2014

Topics:

- dealing with clients who are slow to pay

- recurring payment processing options: Ryan said, "jotform.com for cheap forms with Stripe recurring payments" and Allen said "keep the card with Merchant Warehouse; stripe will do this on its own; or recurly.com"

- serving on the ACN Advisory Council as a way to get more involved and give back to the community 

- Printers going off-line and needing to be power cycled

- why kernel_task sometimes pegs the CPU at 100% or more: seems to be related to throttling CPU intensive tasks to cool the system down when it's too warm by prioritizing simpler system tasks

- re: recent discussion on Accidental Tech Podcast about pitfalls in modern technology that our kids will think were crazy: no one mentioned passwords!

027: Cleanup tools, repairing permissions, tracking down freezes and kernel panics

/

Recorded live on November 19, 2013

Topics:

- Day 392: the Mac mini held hostage

- Apple Configurator insight/anecdote from Jerry; 20 device limit syncing to MacBook Air

- cleaning the dyld cache and font cache

- OnyX, Cocktail, CleanMyMac, TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior, memtest with 7 loops, Disk Utility's verify disk, Drive Genius hard drive test

- MacKeeper finds over 8 PB (Petabytes) of wasted disk space, courtesy Mike Kingsley

- use resetpassword Terminal command to reset home folder ACLs

- repairing permissions: helpful or just another 15 minutes of billable time?  Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore

- repairing permissions can fix some printing issues; reset printing system is the nuclear option

- Knock your iPhone to unlock your Mac; great third-party app (not secret Cupertino project)

- Apple Stores configure machines to use OpenDNS and block DNS queries to non-OpenDNS servers

- VPN Reorder: app to reorder connections in VPN Status menu, courtesy Allen Hancock

Picks of the week:

- iStat Menus

- whatsmydns.com – Jerry

Memorable lines:

- Another 15 minutes of billable time! - Jerry, re: repairing permissions