403: I Hope You Find Honest Work One Day

Topics:

All roads lead to automated support…

• Someone tried to hustle Jerry and he exacts revenge.

• Scammers get scammed.

• Is the warrantee on your car expiring?

• Jerry felt like a hero after fixing a client’s difficult 2013 mac. Hint, it had to do with /private/tmp

• Should we officially not recommend hardware updates for 2013 iMac computers since they cannot run Big Sur?

• Joe praises Addigy for their new feature “Addigy Live Desktop” and talks about how useful this tool can be.

• He shares a very helpful tip that solved the common problem of getting stuck while trying to restore from a Time Machine backup with Synology.

• Sam ends up in a familiar situation with a client who just won’t listen to him and ended up getting themselves into a difficult situation when network equipment fails.

• The group shares ideas to help Sams issues with a problem client.

• What do you do if you have a client who won’t take your security advice and they can possibly get themselves into trouble?

• Jerry has a client who likes to mess around with the Unifi gateway.

• He has a Pro Tip for managing the date/time on a UniFi Gateway via SSH.
  admin@ubnt:~$ set date ntp 0.ubnt.pool.ntp.org

• Sam hopes Joe finds honest work someday.

399: Interview With Amy McKnight of The Mac Spa & My Mac Mentor

Topics:

-This week we welcome Amy McKnight, owner of The Mac Spa and Mac Mentor. 

-Amy talks about choosing the Fit Bit over the Apple Watch. 

-It spawns a conversation about fitness. 

-She tells us her story about dealing with the pandemic in the early days and how it affected her businesses. She also used it as an opportunity to pursue other avenues. 

-Amy’s goal has been to reach more people in more places. To that end, they have put their classes on Zoom and made them available to customers outside of the Denver area. 

-As they go more virtual, her company is looking for more partners to help broaden their reach. 

-Joe has been doing remote work for a lot longer than any of us and her inadvertently prepared for these times. 

-How much of these changes are permanent?

-Amy’s primary market is the residential space and focus is on empowering people to understand the technology. 

-Classes are more scalable than the break/fix part of IT. 

-Mac Mentor has some core classes like intro to Mac and managing passwords. 

-Both Amy and Steve have a presentation setup with multiple computers and devices. 

-Friday’s are Q&A sessions just for members. 

-Recurring fees for classes is a great way to keep a good customer base. 

-The Class Pass is now available as an affiliate program. Interested affiliates can sign up with Mac Mentor

-Jerry describes how this can fill a niche for consultants that are busy “fixing”. 

-Stress free support appears to be the opposite of Jerry’s experience. 

-Amy ordered a new MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. 

388: Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network Discusses Apple's M1 Silicon

Topics:

-Adam Engst of TidBITS Content Network joins us to talk about Apple’s release of the M1 chips.

-We talk about “One More Thing...”

-Joe goes on a tear about some history of Mac. 

-Joe is proud of his first generation JamBox. 

-Adam is very excited about the benchmarks he is reading about the M1 chips. 

-Even Rosetta 2 is showing a benchmark of 80% of native use!

-Adam talks about unified memory and how the memory is built in to the M1 chip. 

-Thermal capacity in the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini is discussed. The MacBook Air doesn’t even have a fan!

-Sam & Joe are emotionally scarred from recent MacBook Air models. 

-Adam is not impressed with the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. 

-While we were once concerned about first generation chips, everything we are hearing has us excited. 

-Battery life is a notable difference that users will be most aware of. 

-50 of recent Mac purchases were customers new to the Mac. 

-Adam warns about issues to be wary of with Big Sur when it comes to third party backup programs like Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper. 

-Time Machine in Big Sur now uses APFS. You will likely want to start your backups fresh. 

-The low end MacBook Air has a 7 core CPU instead of an 8 core. Why?

-Adam is going to test his new computer by dumping all his apps in Login Items to see how it responds. 

-Sign up with TidBITS Content Network and have Adam and his team create meaningful content for your organization. 

387: Know When To Fold Em'

Topics:

-Joe had a client reach out just to say something positive about Parallels 16. How infrequently do we get those feel good calls?

-Speaking of Parallels 16, Jerry has a gripe about a Parallels update that ended up costing him.

-Sam wants to inject some feel good stories and talks about a free offer from a local ISP for households with educators and school age children.

-Another great tool for educators is Safe You Tube, a site that lets you play YouTube videos for children, without potentially inappropriate ad content.

-What happened to paper cups?

-We have some follow up to the Carbon Copy Cloner Privacy Fish, from Mike Bombitch himself!

-And now we have a hot air balloon from Tech Tool Pro.

-Amy McKnight and others give Joe some credit for his PSA about being able to open PDFs in Microsoft Word.

-Jerry is annoyed by a client that is clearly multi tasking while trying to work with him remotely.

-Joe has a similar client and sees the proof with Handoff displaying multiple apps in their Mac Dock. 

-While trying to work with a new client remotely, Sam seems just how difficult it can be when leaving a lot of the work to the client.

-Sam & Joe have a live conversation about a potential new client that they are both in discussions with.

373: Super Secret Squirrel Password

Topics:

-Joe schools us on verified phone calls on iPhone. 

-Jerry has been testing iOS 14 with positive results. 

-Both Jerry & Joe have been using RingCentral for years. Joe decided to clean house with his extensions. 

-Sam just has nana answering his calls. 

-Back to user sentiment surveys, Joe describes how apps seem to pause for an extended period before asking for a rating. 

-Exavault makes a diagnostics tool called MTR that Jerry has had success with for traceroutes.

-Security is brought up again by Joe. It reminds Sam of the “I’m a Mac” commercials with Windows Vista:
https://youtu.be/8CwoluNRSSc

-Screen Recording, a long griped about feature on the show, is an admin only feature as of now in the beta release of Big Sur. The hope is that this will be configurable via MDM. 

-System 8 is now available virtually!
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21346392/mac-os-8-electron-app-download-windows-linux-features

-One of Sam’s neighbors sometimes reminds him of Rick Moranis from Ghostbusters. It then turns into a story about the feud between his dog and the mailman. 

-Sam spins a yarn about setting up new Wi-Fi hardware and SSIDs at multiple client sites and the curve balls that are thrown at him.

-The conversation delves into Joe’s yoga practices.

-Since diving into the Wi-Fi security topic, Joe talks about 802.1x Authentication and other security measures. It starts a discussion about learning new technology on the job.