Blogging is as much social media as YouTube is, particularly in the fact it can be as much of a suck as it can be absorbing (:keanu_whoa:) – apropos of… not much, welcome to 2026! I come to bury a hatchet about spicy autocorrect, not (necessarily) praise it. This ain’t […]

Catching Up When we last saw our subject matter experts in 2022(!), we were discussing how to craft queries so that compliance objectives could be reached with Zentral’s ‘checks’, which has since expanded to scripted results from any interpreter you can target when wrapping a Munki run. For folks behind the […]

I’m going to ping pong between a few topics here, so to give everyone guideposts, here are the three main topics I’d like to stay with you, dear reader: 1. With 50k people in the MacAdmins Slack, it’s fine if you don’t want to be a Client Platform Engineer, but […]

You’ve watched my MDOYVR presentation, but instead of being able to draw an owl, you’re concerned about standing up an osquery query distribution stack in production (unfortunately not what we’ll cover in this post, sorry!) and actually doing the job of visualizing the data. ‘Observability’ and ‘governance’ are my favorite […]

It is commonly said that python tends to be at least the second-best tool to reach for when approaching a task, whereas some of us get by just fine with shell. The lack of a compilation step for scripting languages tends to help us iterate and ship good-enough solutions quickly, […]

Part Two, Git Recommendations Revisited. (Part One is Here) Since we’re talking code, we should come to grips with the ungainly topic of version control itself before going much further, which in 2020 still means git. On this site (~6 years ago! with not the most generous title) we went […]

Welcome to a series about wranglin’ cats code. Some of us are inclined to care about titles, and while I’m fine being a MacAdmin, Client Platform ‘Engineer‘ is a more recent term recruiters want to plug into LinkedIn. That engineer part is meant to differentiate us from the apes sysadmins, […]

On the Twitters not too long ago the question was posed: what topic could you give a 20 minute talk about without any prep? macOS Computer Naming is a thing I can’t find a great canonical resource for on the internets, so here’s an attempt to fill that gap, since […]

If the recent kerfluffle among autopkg folks (over GitHub shutting off TLS less-than 1.2) is any indication, a lot of people are still on 10.12.6. If I may editorialize for a second, this is probably contributed to by Apple’s less-than-ideal planning, execution, and communication around the High Sierra release. What […]

Let’s discuss the basic input/output system for IBM PC compatible computing devices, aka BIOS. Wait, that’s not a good start, P.eople C.an’t reM.ember C.omputer and I.nternet A.cronyms. Ok, EFI – that’s a thing that’s like BIOS, right? You can lock it, it makes sure all your most vital hardware components […]