Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. Backup is something I take very seriously, but unfortunately many users do not. Computers, smart phones, tablets, Internet of Things devices (smart devices), etc. are very much a part of every day life, and should be backed up in case disaster strikes. In both my professional and personal life, I routinely […]
UPDATED: Since this writing, I’ve switched from Mike Bombich’s NetRestore, to DeployStudio. DeployStudio offers the ability to populate all 4 computer info fields after restoring an image, as part of an imaging workflow. I highly recommend DeployStudio for system imaging. Occasionally, I still use the method outlined below to tweak these fields. Part of my […]
I realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.
Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6). Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo. The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.
To get around this, I did the following: (more…)
I use the Google Notifier for Mac to alert me when my gmail account has new messages and lately, I’ve grown tired of the standard OS X notification sounds that it lets you use. I wanted to use my own sounds so that I can more easily distinguish this aural alert from other notifications.
Google Notifier lets you choose from the Mac’s standard notification sounds, or two custom tones that Google supplies. We’re simply going to replace one of these tones with our own. (more…)
While digging around for a native solution to easily drag and drop pictures from my Mac directly to my iPhone, I stumbled upon the fact that Image Capture has the ability to share imaging devices connected to your Mac. This would be useful for something like a small office setting with one scanner, which all […]
UPDATED: To the best of my knowledge, this method does not work on OS X 10.5 Leopard, or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, due to changes in the way the printing system works in those versions of the Operating System.
While configuring our Middle and Upper School art rooms at work, I ran into an issue that was potentially going to cause a massive headache. How to use Workgroup Manager (WGM) to manage a local, shared USB printer?
Managing networked printers is easy with WGM, it even lets you decide if users have the ability to connect their own local USB printer. It does not, however, allow you to share this local printer and manage it.
What’s an admin to do? The first thing I did was start digging around for property list files, and that’s exactly where I found my answer.