080: "Smart" apostrophe

Recorded live on December 9, 2014

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Topics:

- Joe found that "smart" apostrophe (actually a right single curved quotation mark) in the Computer Name caused a client's Time Machine backup to fail; replacing it with an actual apostrophe (straight single quote) fixed it

- Jerry expresses frustrations when trying to walk a client through initiating a "spontaneous" screen sharing session and walks us through some alternatives to TeamViewer and finds the free trial of join.me to be easiest

- Jerry's client is tickled to teach him something

- Jerry's analogy about where the space on his MacBook Air is going: it's like "the help" stealing silverware piece by piece for a year until Thanksgiving comes and you only have place settings for two and a half

- Time Machine's Local Snapshots (Mobile Backups) can take up space and fail to be removed:
sudo tmutil disablelocal
sudo mv /.MobileBackups.trash /Trashme

- OmniDiskSweeper, DaisyDisk, WhatSize will not see the .MobileBackups folder unless run as root

- Joe's client deliberates for so long about upgrading iCloud storage (to enable iCloud Backup) that it could have paid for two years of iCloud storage

079: Interview with John O'Fallon of Maxum Development

Recorded live on December 2, 2014

This week's show has been brought to you by the good folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems, makers of Clarify.  Visit Clarify-It.com to download a free trial of Clarify, and start creating how-to's and instructional documents today – and help others be great.  Use coupon code CCPSENTME for 15% off.

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

Topics:

- John O'Fallon of Maxum Development, makers of Rumpus, discusses 20 years of Mac development, including Apple contracting Maxum to develop the first web server for Mac, the basis of Personal Web Sharing in System 7, Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9!

- how Rumpus came to be

- what are the most popular features and feature requests of Rumpus

- Mike Kingsley offers a couple of examples of customized branding in the Rumpus interface

- plus, John started a brewery!

078: Spelunking for Yasmite

Recorded live on November 25, 2014

Thanks to Smile, makers of TextExpander touch, for sponsoring this week's Command Control Power! Visit smilesoftware.com/restart to learn more.

Topics:

- helping clients with their "Flash Drive Plug-in"

- Joe noticed Contacts app is better about pasting in an address, automatically parsing city, state, and zip

- trouble with DiskMakerX? createinstallmedia works great for Mavericks, Yosemite, etc.

- difficulty cloning copies of Yosemite installer using latest version of CCC? Disk Utility block copy works

- CCC works perfectly to copy all the data from a failing drive with directory corruption; Disk Utility thought there were only 30GB of data on the drive, but there were actually 235GB; CCC got it all; after rebuilding the directory and repeating the clone using CCC, no additional data needed to be copied; great support from Mike Bombich

- Sam recounts flash storage becoming inaccessible on new MacBook Pro

- Sam explains the pitfalls of restoring the Microsoft User Data folder from Time Machine backup

- Jerry discusses a recent client interaction from which we can all learn something

- how to restore Calendar from Time Machine backup

- we discuss strategies for billing for those unexpectedly-long resolutions; Sam recommends communicating at regular intervals

077: Trust No One, Yoseminite Sam

Recorded on November 19, 2014

Topics

- Jerry bails out Joe onsite, and diagnoses an issue where a specific website wouldn't load or respond to pings from a client location, but loaded fine from elsewhere; turned out to be a block on the client's static IP due to three failed login attempts

- we discuss clients trying to set things up and fix things themselves

Yoseminite Sam: a no-nonsense guy

- do you give clients easy access to their servers, e.g. Screen Sharing?

- Sam lands a client on bowtie alone: "I'm a no-nonsense guy, and you look like a no-nonsense guy too."

- what's your dress code for consulting?

- Joe details troubleshooting serious permissions issues in Yosemite after a prior "consultant" tried to set up shared calendars

- how do you bill for extensive cleanup work like the saga Joe describes?

- Joe notices a pattern to Security Questions answered by a prior consultant

076: Interview with John Chaffee of BusyMac, formerly of Now Software

Recorded live on November 11, 2014

Many thanks to our sponsor this week, Watchman Monitoring. We're all very happy users of Watchman Monitoring. Sign up for your free trial at watchmanmonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show! Here's and example of a smart Watchman alert: "Time Machine AutoBackup was enabled, but is now off." Time Machine may not be completing its backups on schedule

Special thanks to our guest this week, John Chaffee of BusyMac, gearing up for the much-anticipated premiere of BusyContacts. Listen to the show for 20% off!

- John takes us on a trip down memory lane, including the history of Now Software, BusyMac, BusyCal, and now BusyContacts

- remember Now Utilities? see this TidBITS from 1994 for context (note the CompuServe email address at the bottom)

- Power On Software acquired Now Software and rebranded as Now Software in early 2000's

- Calendar and Contacts cloud syncing options (iCloud, Google, Exchange, Kerio, Zimbra, Fruux, OS X Server, etc.)

- Mac App Store challenges

- how to wisely roll out a public beta (i.e. BusyContacts)

075: Hey Siri

Pre-recorded on November 4, 2014

This week's show has been brought to you by the good folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems, makers of Clarify.  Visit Clarify-It.com to download a free trial of Clarify, and start creating how-to's and instructional documents today – and help others be great.  Use coupon code CCPSENTME for 15% off

- Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Gigabit Router saves the day... wait – what?!

- how to use Hey Siri feature without being connected to power

- how to use Speak Screen feature: Settings > General > Accessibility > Speech and then toggle on Speak Screen. Speak Screen is only available for devices running iOS 8 or higher.

- Jerry's Windows Migration Assistant woes

- Apple Store Stories: they don't check migrated data – anecdotal, or corporate policy?

- we wonder why the mainstream press hasn't paid more attention to the decreasing repairability of the Mac mini

- we address a pressing question from listener Gannon Nordberg: @CmdCtrlpwr I’d love to hear what you guys think about eating meals when onsite with a client. Also, business customer vs. residential

- client foibles: upper caps and lower caps; small caps; x-ing out; UBS port; closing everything when we connect remotely