407: A Ticking Time Bomb In Your Business

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Topics:

• What exactly is technical debt?

• Jerry has two pretty big professional clients who have accumulated quite a bit of technical debt.

• Spending money on important things will save you the trouble of dealing with it later.

• The group talks about how these clients who refuse to spend money sometimes aren’t sustainable.

• News Flash: On TeamViewer you can now disable in-product marketing messages.

• Sam is looking into a business continuity document that can be very useful especially with clients who don’t listen (thanks to Michael Thompsen of Origin84 for the tip).

• When your system can’t keep up with you it can cause you to be unproductive because you end up wasting time on things and switching tasks.

• Sam tells a story about how one of his client’s old systems finally kicked the bucket and he had to get all of their data back.

• Tip: Update your software about every 2 to 3 years.

• You end up paying less to keep up with updates than to fix everything when it goes wrong.

• Joe actually had to buy floppy disks for a job he had to do on a Powerbook 100.

• Jerry shares two useful tools he uses: Smith.ai and a helpful calendar app called Harmonizely. Harmonizely allow clients to schedule appointments and offers direct integration with Daylite..

• Daylight training has been transformative for Jerry.

• Sam can’t bring himself to start offering calendaring services to his clients. One reason is a need for control.

• Joe also talks about showing just how unavailable you might be.

• Jerry talks about the mysterious “alien arrow” that one of Joe’s clients has been telling him about.

• What is Casper Sky??

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406: Interview With Armin Briegel Author of "macOS Terminal and Shell"

Topics:

• This week we are joined once again by Armin Briegel of scriptingosx.com and the author of “macOS Terminal and Shell”

• Armin speaks about his personal pandemic experience with work and family.

• The group speaks about the differences in how different countries are handling the pandemic. They have extended the lockdown in the Netherlands until April, while it seems the U.S. is loosening up. Vaccinations are rolling out a bit slower in Europe than the States.

• No one’s network was prepared for the pandemic with the amount of people working from home.

• Armin tells us about how conferences in the near future are looking. Many are still holding out but one he was planning on attending has already chosen to go online even though it is scheduled for October.

• It is worrisome for conference speakers because they have to plan on how to talk based on if it is virtual, pre-recorded, or in-person.

• Armin speaks about his experience speaking at virtual conferences and preparing for pre-recorded sessions as well.

• Sam dislikes speaking online when everyone has their camera off because he feels disconnected from the audience.

• Sometimes it is less stressful to present a pre-recorded session and answer questions in the chat.

• Now that presentations are recorded online, you cannot reuse a presentation and you have to build a new one each time.

• Armin plans on presenting at JNUC.

• Sam is looking forward to regularly interacting with people in 2022.

• Armin talks a bit about his new book “macOS Terminal and Shell” (available on Apple Books) and how he began self-publishing in 2016. He has managed to publish a book almost every year since then.

• Jerry talks to Armin about why he specifically chose Terminal as the subject for his book and the difficulties of talking about Terminal and Shell.

• Armin is planning to write his next book on scripting.

• Follow Armin’s informative posts on Scripting OS X

• Help Armin surpass his wife in Twitter followers

405: Accruing Technical Debt

Topics:

• Jerry brings up clients that you need to be more up front with billing for your time so there is no confusion that can lead to an unpaid bill.

• He talks about one particular client that has aging hardware/software and they are scrambling for support. He tries to set expectations early.

• That rings a familiar bell for Joe who might be more inclined to start helping someone right away.

• With Sam’s monthly clients, he has formal paperwork that mentions “discovery”. Often times customers are more inclined to accept that if they know it will save them costs moving forward if you are already familiar with their environment.

• Jerry talks about smaller clients to possibly start small and move incrementally to earn some money up front.

• “Technical debt” is a term Joe coins from all of this.

• Realizing Joe may have missed an opportunity for calling out chargeable items, he realizes that he may need to get more comfortable onboarding a larger client.

• Sam talks about he learned from a similar situation.

• Jerry talks about a very strange problem his client who could not find any of her mail, her inbox was empty (and Time Machine wouldn’t work!)

• Joe remembers back when emails would disappear after updating to Catalina.

• The group discusses the many issues everyone has with mail and the recovery service.

• Tim Nyberg of The Mac Guys shared some feedback about using the mobile support feature of Splashtop which leads into a conversation about using it.

• He has a remote support feature on his website (themacguys.com) that helps you download the correct version of Splashtop.

• Sam has to break the news that he had to let go of a really nice office space.

404: Let's Just Say His Name Was Bill

Topics:

• Joe performed a fully remote project with a client where he had to help extend their Eero network into their outdoor garage studio all through email.

• He works on a similar project for another client who gives him hard time about billing and the story ends with a surprising twist.

• The group talks about the difficulty of charging for remote work.

• How and when should you let a client know that there are going to be billable charges for a remote assessment and evaluation?

• Some difficult clients aren’t worth the money. But it’s a tough decision if they represent a large portion of income.

• Joe talks about “Fire Client Friday”.

• When does a client go too far?

• The group discusses how to figure out who you want to work with.

• Sam feels like he’s in an awkward position of assisting a previous employee of a client who may be turning around and billing for the answers.

• Joe and Jerry give Sam good advice on how to approach the issue.

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.

402: Never Lose Your Trash Again!

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Topics:

Happy 400th episode!….2 episodes late.

• Joe dropped his iPhone 11 Pro Max. He ends up replacing it with a new iPhone 12 pro which leads into a group discussion about iPhone repairs and carriers

• He talks about the difficulties he had and the time it took when trying to get two carriers on his new phone. eSIM and physical SIM setup order is important!

• Sam sets up three separate Genius Bar appointments for his iPhone 11, Apple Watch series 3, and AirPod Pro issues. This leads into a second unexpected event that causes him to be locked out of his car.

• Pop quiz - What did Sam forget when he restored his iCloud backup to a new phone?

• The group speaks about being treated as a normal consumer when purchasing technology or speaking with customer service.

• Sam reveals his oversight with Google Authenticator.

• iCloud Drive presents a challenge to Jerry in an experience he had with a client losing a very important file in iCloud drive.

• Joe piggybacks off of Jerry’s story and talks about his client also losing data.

• Should you use the trash to store files? PsiMac may have an offering for you!

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