470: Beans In The Buckets

Topics:

-Sam finds some Monterey changes difficult on his quest to be more efficient.

-Jerry uses Daylite exclusively for Reminders.

-Joe likes the Things app

-Intermittently. Sam’s reminders would stop appearing on his Mac. A setting in Notifications & Focus

-Back in his teens, Sam recalls the time he started up his own “reminder service”.

-Joe was using Terminal tools like ioreg to detect things like if a Mac is in clamshell mode.

-Poor care for laptops leads to screen or hinge breaks.

-Troubleshooting Magic Keyboard issues led to a simple upgrade being required.

-Sam is learning a lot more about Google Workspace and its MDM restrictions.

-Jerry poses the question about what cloud services to recommend to small clients.

-During a 1Password migration for his family, Sam moved a little too fast and deleted his wife’s private vault.

-Safari is causing Sam some greif and Jerry has advice.

-Private Relay and Addigy Live Desktop don’t play nice together in Joe’s experiment.

-confusion ensues for how and where to disable these privacy features.

-One of Jerry’s clients compares him to their “technical guys” at work.

469: Past Performance Is No Guarantee Of Future Results

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed.  On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

Topics:

-What is a Windows NUC?

-Jerry had to reconstruct a network and struggled with the guest network.

-Another Jerry networking story, he struggles with a network setup and Comcast/Xfinity cable modem.

-Billing for essentially observing a situation can be an uncomfortable to bill full rate for.

-Sam also had to deal with an ISP issue with an old client. Turned out to be a billing issue.

-Not to be left out, Joe has an ISP story of his own.

-During a recent fiber upgrade at Sam’s own house, he runs into a set of issues and runarounds from the ISP.

-Do you accept direct emails and texts from customers?

-Zendesk macros are handy. As well as smith.ai chat bot features.

-A client from a decade ago re-engaged with Sam. A lot had changed since then as he wasn’t even an MSP back then.

-Adobe’s Creative Cloud sharing functions are terrible yet they don’t support other cloud services or on-site servers.

-Sam ordered AirPods Pro on Amazon and thought he got “Jerry’d”.

468: Happy Sherlock Day

Command Control Power has reached our 9th anniversary! We have been recording new episodes every week since June of 2013. We are very appreciative of our Patrons and over the next month or so, we are going to do something a little different to show our appreciation.

We will be airing new shows every week on the private Patreon feed.  On the public show we will re-air a classic episode from our catalog of almost 500 episodes, along with the occasional new show. Become a Patron today for access to the freshest content, get a peek behind the scenes, and more candid conversations about running our businesses, dealing with clients and fixing tough technical issues.

Topics:

-We kick around our thoughts on WWDC and hardware releases.

-Jerry is quoted in an article about his thoughts on WWDC 2022.

-What are your thoughts on the latest Messages updates?

-Small Cubed could get “Sherlocked” with the latest Mail announcements. They quickly made an announcement: https://smallcubed.com/support/ventura/

-Joe wants custom Tapbacks.

-Texting with clients comes back up.

-We would love to hear from anybody using Apple Business Chat.

-Back to Mail Cubed, Jerry used Send Later and had another incident of messages disappearing before being sent.

-In a recent TidBITS Content Network article, they discuss iCloud shared folders and the extremely dangerous behavior of deleting items.

-While discussing the very welcome shared Photos library feature, Jerry warns us that all users will have full edit/delete capabilities.

-Screen sharing with some clients can be so infuriating at times.

-When you direct a client to restart to resolve an issue and it’s clear they have not, what’s the best way to address that?

467: Interview with Brian Best from BestMacs and Mac-MSP Gruntwork

Topics:

This week on Command Control Power, we are featuring a patron only show for our supporters. If you are already subscribed on Patreon, you will find this show in your private podcast feed. To sign up and get instant access to special features like this one and several other Patreon only episodes, visit us at our Patreon support page and become a patron. For our general audience, we are featuring a classic episode from our catalog of nearly 500 episodes. We hope you enjoy it.

466: How Much Do You Want To Pay A Month?

Topics:

-Sam talks about his recovery from Covid.

-Some personal experiences and opinions are shared.

-Joe shares a sneak peak of an offering for Patrons. A Numbers based tool based on Watchman Monitoring reports with customized output.

-What monthly MSP plan works for you? Do monthly services work for residential clients?

-Jerry has abandoned the “monitoring only” approach since most clients ignored the alerts.

-Raising rates. Is it the right time or the wrong time?

-How do your phrase a rate change to clients?

465: Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole

Topics:

-Joe has an update on using his new Synology with Synlogy Central Management System. After digging around with notifications, he was frustrated. Thanks to Dan Monge of Mac IT Pros for the tip to look at the client Synology notifications as there is an additional CMS column.

-PsiMac charges a monthly service fee for network management.

-“Don’t be afraid to charge the client” -Jerry Zigmont

-A pesky client calls Jerry multiple times as he racking up his Smith.ai bill.

-Someone that needed help and Joe spent some time diagnosing, decides to try and migrate data on her 10 year old computer on her own.

-Jerry expresses concerns about working with customers that have 10 year old equipment and the risks that come with it.

-For new clients, Joe standardizes on getting a system report from Watchman Monitoring.

-PSA - BackBlaze keeps your historical data for only 30 days by default.

-Keeping old hardware for cost saving reasons can end up costing people in the end as the labor to upgrade can be extended due to aging equipment.

-Joe brings up finding better ways to manage automatic updates across different hardware/software.

-UniFi updates seem to handle rolling updates well.