094: Remind me on a website

Recorded on March 17, 2015

This week's show has been brought to you by the fine folks at Backblaze: Online Backup Made Easy. Visit Backblaze.com/ccp to sign up for their Partner Program and ask for your free license of Backblaze. Try Backblaze and see just how great it is!

Topics:

- Joe thinks Reminders should have the ability to remind me "on a website" (in addition to "on a day" and "at a location"). How great would it be to be reminded when you end up on Amazon or MonoPrice that you need some cable or whatever?

- Apple engineer explains how the new MacBook came to be

- Jerry's funny wifi story

- Sam's Apple Store saga: cracked screen, poorly seated memory, failed migration; seltzer (goes well with sushi – see also: non-alcoholic beer)

- Joe's client attempted a self-directed email server migration at noon on a Wednesday; see also: Episode 077: Trust No One, Yoseminite Sam in regards to a serious permissions issue caused by a prior consultant

- Sam's client turned off Time Machine, but Backblaze saved the day

- Jerry reminds us of Bender, which saved the day for his client

- Joe's CCC praise: migrating to new SSD in new machine, Carbon Copy Cloner identifies drives across reboots, and across different startup disks

- Sam encounters (and solves – remotely) "unapproved caller: SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software"

- Joe teases an upcoming segment about upgrading a client's van

087: Joe's Birthday Bash

Recorded live on February 3, 2015

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.

Topics:

- Joe complains about the Windows 7 installation process, follow up to Jerry's point about Windows last week: 1) select appropriate version of Windows; 2) buy Windows 7 from Amazon; 3) wait for physical delivery; 4) insert Windows disc and run installer 5) enter product key when prompted; 6) update Windows updater & restart 7) install 174 updates.

- Wren Sound having a sale on current lineup; planning Bluetooth/AirPlay combo units coming soon - BONUS: CCP Listeners Who Enter The Code giffin50 at the Wren Sound Store get an additional $50 off! Bringing the total to $199 from the Wren Sound Store http://wrensound.com
This speaker has been rated by The Wirecutter as one of the best AirPlay speakers you can buy - http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-airplay-speaker/

- Tim Nyberg asks about client purchases: Apple Store affiliate program vs. Apple Store vs. Apple Authorized Reseller

- Alexis Cornellier asks about what tools we use for diagnostics; Joe recommends SoftRAID for its SMART status analysis

- Sam advises that Word 2011 may have sporadic issues saving to a sever with the word "file" in the share name

- iOS 8 GMT bug, which manifests as a "PST" bug for Joe

- Sam deals with an "email tough-guy"

- Jerry debates "you lie" vs. "new parakeet" - 
Monty Python "Dead Parrot" Sketch

080: "Smart" apostrophe

Recorded live on December 9, 2014

Many thanks to our sponsor this week, Watchman Monitoring. We use and highly recommend Watchman Monitoring. Sign up for your free trial at watchmanmonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show! Here's an example of a smart Watchman alert: "Battery condition has changed to Service Battery." Let your client know they need to replace their battery before their next trip!

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

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

069: Interview with Ben Greiner, Forget Computers

Recorded live on September 23, 2014

We're sponsored this week by Smile.  Visit smilesoftware.com/restart for great Mac, iPhone, and iPad software, and recommend it to your clients! Smile makes three of our favorites: TextExpander, PDFpen, and PDFpen Scan+.

Topics:

- first, we discuss our frustrations trying to navigate phone plan options

- we feature an interview with Ben Greiner of Forget Computers, discussing the new version of RobotCloud and SupportMenu

- check out the Device Scout Demo or get the Beta of Starter Kit

- Ben wrote an article explaining Best Practices for Creating Apple IDs in an organization

- Sam reports back on his recent APS gig, and reminds us that Apple Configurator is now DEP aware

- how iOS 8 is changing the game: http://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-8-changed-how-i-work-on-my-iphone-and-ipad/

- Joe offers a fix for problems with AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext and AirTrafficHost.framework; Apple called Joe to ask what fixed it