Screensavers, you say? They’re more art than function these days. But, why not inject something either beautiful or useful into this mundane task of screen locking. Yes, it would be best if you still were locking your screen unless you want your four-year-old Slack messaging your co-workers. I have used a hot corner to the lower left to start my screen saver, locking the screen after a few seconds (if I accidentally trigger it)....
On June 1, 2016, Microsoft released an update to it’s Remote Desktop client for Mac OS X via the Mac App Store. The update to version 8.0.32 broke some functionality for people. The most commonly reported error I have seen is “Connection reset to peer” before authentication. Sadly, unless you have a Time Machine backup to grab the old version from you are likely going to have to find an alternative....
I happen to be someone that finds themselves setting up new systems for myself often. I have to remind myself there are tools that I need installed before the scenario in which I need to use them (on an airplane, during a crisis, etc.). I use a Mac so this list of software and setup is going to be very Mac OS X centric. From the web: Google Chrome Evernote - My brain lives here Google Drive - I keep some ....
Like a lot of systems folks I use sed, a lot. It is probably an unhealthy amount of sed use but so be it. I operate on a lot of Linux servers but my desktop environment of choice is Mac OS X which means BSD tools (not the Linux-y GNU tools). The differences are relatively subtle between BSD sed and GNU sed. However, most of my work is done through iTerm (a literal black box)....
A few weeks ago a co-worker and I were discussing some things we really enjoyed about our work environment. It reminded me of a few key questions I ask (or things that I look for) during an interview that typically indicate whether or not a job is going to be a good fit or not. What do you use for e-mail? It is a simple question but the answer tells you a lot about a company....
As more and more security policies demand the use of multi-factor authentication the number of times a day you use a multi-factor token will increase. Hopefully that number will not increase to a level that throws the balance of security and convenience towards the annoyingly secure side of the scale. But, if that ever does happen hopefully you can use an Yubikey as your token. There are various sizes and styles of Yubikey to suit your need but the Yubikey of choice with myself and my co-workers seems to be the FIDO U2F ready Yubikey Nano 4....
Apple has introduced a new security feature in Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11) called System Integrity Protection (sometimes referred to as rootless). What is System Integrity Protection? According to Apple’s documentation: A new security policy that applies to every running process, including privileged code and code that runs out of the sandbox. The policy extends additional protections to components on disk and at run-time, only allowing system binaries to be modified by the system installer and software updates....
I had some Apple Keychain issues after upgrading to Mac OS X El Capitan yesterday. Apple provided a reasonable resolution (blow away the login Apple Keychain and re-create it). As it turns out, my issues weren’t limited to just the El Capitan upgrade. The Juniper Networks’ VPN client, Junos Pulse, has some pretty awful issues. The behavior went something like this: Save a password for a VPN connection in Junos Pulse VPN client The first use of the VPN connection will be fine Disconnect VPN connection Close Junos Pulse VPN client Open VPN client Attempt to connect to recently created VPN (with saved password) All hell breaks loose; Apple Keychain issues galore....