Category: Uncategorized
-
Escaping an apostrophe on a PowerSchool custom page variable
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Roger Sprik on the PowerSchool forums for this tip. I have a custom page that uses the last name field: ~([05]Last_Name) The only problem with that is if the last name has an apostrophe in it, that can lead to unexpected stuff when used in jQuery. Apparently, you can strip out the…
-
Chrome Gmail unread messages not appearing in bold
We had a user whose unread emails were appearing as bold in Safari (with an ugly font) and not bold at all in Chrome (font looked okay), and we did some digging and found the solution was to enable the Arial Bold font in Font Book on the user’s Mac, and it was all good.…
-
When you can’t draw, erase, or highlight in Notability on iOS
A user wasn’t able to draw (with a finger) using the pen tool in Notability. Highlighting and erasing were also not working (just seemed to move the note about in Notability). We worked with the user on the usual troubleshooting steps (kill the app, do the home–power button reset, make sure iOS and Notability are…
-
Fix for Google Sheets error message: “Can’t save your changes. Copy any recent changes, then revert to an earlier revision”
If you come across a message that Google Sheets can’t save your sheets and you need to revert to an earlier version, but even the earlier version can’t save, don’t bother doing any of these suggested steps. Clearing cookies won’t help. Disabling extensions won’t help. Instead, try this (as counterintuitive as it seems): copy and…
-
macOS command to add back Wi-Fi service
Acknowledgements: Hat tip to Eric Hemmeter on the MacAdmins Slack for this command. If you want a command that will add back the Wi-Fi service if you deleted it and now want it back, here it is: networksetup -createnetworkservice Wi-Fi en1 That’s assuming the output of networksetup -listallhardwareports has a hardware port of Wi-Fi with…
-
Importing library patrons into Follett
Follett/Destiny has its own documentation on the process of importing patrons into its online database, which is not very helpful. Below are instructions on how you actually do it, based on trial and error and various calls to customer service for more details on the process that aren’t actually documented anywhere. Getting the Site Short…
-
Removing Find My Mac from re-imaged machines
Sadly, my 250th blog post isn’t fully an original post but just a link to an awesome blog post someone else wrote, but it’s a good read: Find My Mac The only two things I’ll add are these: If you want to clear everything out (say, if you’re re-imaging a machine… not sure why you’d…
-
Terminal command to see the Startup Disk in macOS
If you want to see what the current Startup Disk is on your macOS installation, you can certainly go to System Preferences > Startup Disk. But if you want to use the terminal instead of the GUI, this command will return the current Startup Disk: bless –getBoot If a Startup Disk is set, you’ll see…
-
Use the command-line to set a firmware password on macOS
For extra security, you can add a firmware password to Macs, especially since Find My Mac is essentially useless (unlike for iPads, which have an activation lock preventing thieves from reactivating the iPad after a factory reset) and DEP-to-MDM enrollments for Macs can even be avoided by thieves if they’re resourceful enough. If you have…
-
Fixing DNS on Ubuntu after a DNS server change
Maybe this is too niche an issue, but in case anyone else runs into this problem, we recently retired one DNS server for another one. A Ubuntu VM I was running didn’t pick up on this change. I kept Googling about hosts not resolving in Ubuntu, and people kept pointing to the /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname…
-
If you can’t change the system language on macOS…
In theory, you can change the system language through System Preferences on macOS. I did find a couple of machines that came with the system language in a different one from what I wanted, and even when I changed the primary language back to English (and rebooted when prompted), the original language persisted. After doing…
-
Deploying Logic Pro X additional content
For one computer, you can use Apple’s Logic Pro X: Download additional content knowledgebase article. If you have a lot of computers to deploy the additional content to, though, you’ll want to capture those .pkg files. One way to do that is to “install” on one machine and track down the .pkg files before doing…
-
Setting up GAM: “Click the 3 dots to the right of your service account” not showing
GAM is a neat little command-line utility for admins to manage the G-Suite for their organizations. The setup process is fairly straightforward, even though there are a lot of steps. I did notice one little bit of weirdness that actually has nothing to do with GAM, but it put a little wrench in my GAM…
-
USB-C Multi-port adapter constantly prompts to install drivers
If you’ve run into the issue of the multi-port adapter constantly prompting to install drivers even after you’ve already installed the drivers (particularly annoying, since it requires a reboot), apparently the solution is to plug the power cable in through the multi-port adapter (instead of through a separate port). Worked for me that way. Hat…
-
AutoPkg recipe writing: things to look out for
AutoPkg is a cool project for Mac admins (in theory, Windows admins could use it, too, and there are even a few Windows recipes). Although it’s a flexible framework that can be applied in many different ways, what it’s most useful for is automating the tedious process of going to a website, downloading a new…