494: My Curmudgeon Ways

Topics:

-There are some downsides to push clients to recommended upgrades & services. Their expectations are high and anything that goes wrong is on you.

-Should we put our efforts more into gaining new clients than encouraging clients to make changes?

-Some clients aren’t worth pushing additional services to.

-Sam continues his story of an incredibly frustrating employee that doesn’t reply and then blames HCS for a lack of support.

-As the group discusses Sam’s client’s security policies, Joe brings up the features and different approach of Kolide.

-Joe talks about Custom Checks from Kolide, which offer the ability to investigate specific security concerns on a computer.

-Joe touts Ross Matsuda, who offers up some great tools on his site https://www.sudoade.com. One of them being the ability to add admin privileges with logging.

-Sam has personal experience with using Kolide on his work computer and he shares what he found.

Best Of CCP - Interview With Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner 2015

492: Lightening! Not the Connector

Topics:

-As a tree on Jerry’s property gets hit by lightening, he ends up down a rabbit hole of technical troubleshooting.

-He goes through various replacement equipment and testing. Two products he recommends:
Coaxial surge protector
Ethernet surge protector

-He quickly finds that even basic things like turning on/off lights is difficult without internet.

-A handy surge filter turns out to be a great, low cost option to protect from future lighting strikes.

-Good advice from Dave Provine about proper grounding.

-YouTube TV increases Joe’s monthly subscription cost. Except he finds that paying through Apple turns out to be the additional cost factor.

-Sam expresses his frustration at increasing streaming costs.

-After experiencing some client losses, Sam looks to manage company processes better. He finds his answer in Monday.com.

491: Who Am I?

Topics:

-Jerry deals with some complications when one of his clients opens a satellite office in another company’s space.

-Confusion arises when an A/V vendor Joe works with says his client mentions another “IT guy”.

-Be careful with warranty statuses for Ubiquiti purchases on Amazon.

-One of Sam’s clients receives a FUD newsletter from a competitor looking to solicit business.

-Apple software updates are continually problematic. But Joe talks about Addigy’s beta software update MDM command. He also talks about a GitHub project known as Nudge.

-S.U.P.E.R.M.A.N. is another popular software update Girhub project that has a bright future.

-An employee fired off an aggressive email chain with Sam over the weekend.

-App Updater is a useful tool that Joe has been testing and Jerry has been using for a while. Also discussed on an episode of MacGeekGab.

-Installomator is another incredibly useful GitHub app install tool by friend of the show, Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

-As Joe talks Ventura features, Jerry talks about the dangers of iCloud Shared Photo Library.

490: The Bicycle Thief

Topics:

-Sam has follow to his UniFi G4 Doorbell. Even after some great advice from Jerry and additional research, his answer was embarrassingly easy.

-Joe laments how the promise of the smart home in the 90’s still haven’t been met.

-He is also considering a doorbell camera for his complex that multiple neighbors could access.

-A client of Joe’s turned away cloud storage but instead has a 15 minute paid technically conversation.

-We talk about cloud solutions for personal and business use.

-Sam talks about Microsoft Sharepoint storage plans and how confusing it is. Joe has similar experiences.

-Jerry talks about Synology Drive as a cloud service.

-Follow up from an earlier conversation between Joe & Jerry about scrambling the jets every time a security update is announced.

-In a recent Scripting OS X newsletter, Joe talks about Rapid Security Responses, which are an interesting new security feature of macOS.

-We get into the little annoyances of how our customers operate their computers.

-Joe’s wish - a way for macOS to have a proactive restart when a system is overly taxed.

489: Status Clone

Topics:

-Sam talk more about is trip off the grid.

-On Joe’s recommendation, he got himself the Garmin InReach satellite phone.

-He talks about his quest for all 50 states.

-Joe brings up a major delay in voicemails coming through on iPhone. Sam is elated to hear it because it’s been happening to him for a long time. Jerry has seen this as well. They are all on AT&T…

-Helping friends and family with basic issues can be tricky at times.

-Joe recommends Omni Disk Sweeper to help find large files taking up space. Jerry talks of running as root to access otherwise inaccessible files.

-Jerry also mentions Grand Perspective. A big point he mentions is allowing Full Disk Access.

-One of Joe’s client found her Carbon Copy Cloner external volume and accidentally began working on the clone.

-Carbon Copy Cloner has some automation features that Jerry uses with his Synology. He especially loves running clones while recording the show.

-Joe talks about using a simple script with the tmutil command to resolve Time Machine issues. He also uses Addigy to deploy this to problematic computers.

-Jerry has a client that falls for the typical phishing scam, this time pretending to be Best Buy with the intent of giving her money.