Category: Uncategorized
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WinClone Pro freezing up
We had an older version of WinClone. Installed a newer version. The newer version froze up… or it let you click on the left part of the window, but then you couldn’t click on the right part of the window. Turns out, even though it looks as if you can have two versions of WinClone…
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AutoPkg Adobe Flash Player recipes, licenses, and Munki
13 October, 2016 update: Adobe just broke this by making the distribution page require an Adobe ID login before you can view it. Even though Flash is slowly being deprecated, people still use it. And while people still use it, Mac admins keep having to make sure their users’ Adobe Flash Player plugins are up…
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Viewing test scores in a PowerSchool custom page
By default, PowerSchool will show you a list of tests, and then you have to drill down into each test to get to the actual set of scores. There isn’t a way built into PowerSchool to view all the scores and subscores for a particular student. Previously, I’d created a custom page that fetched a…
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PowerSchool tlist_sql fails but SQL Developer query is fine
Full props to Romy from the PowerSource forums for helping me sleuth a problem with a query working just fine in SQL Developer but then failing (with a blank-loaded page) in tlist_sql on a PowerSchool custom page. Basically, a colon, even within quotation marks, messes up the query within tlist_sql, so I had to use…
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“Out of memory” error with Adobe InDesign CS6 and El Capitan
A user who upgraded to El Capitan but still uses Adobe InDesign CS6 was getting an error about InDesign being “out of memory.” I did some Googling and came across this fix. Application Frame was already disabled under the window, so the user didn’t have to do that, but “trashing” (really renaming to com.adobe.InDesign.plist.bak when…
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Requiring a user to be logged in to install a Munki item
You may occasionally get an item you want installed for clients, but the item is oddly constructed so as to require a user to be logged in. (Relevant Munki-Discuss mailing list thread) Even though there are supported pkginfo keys in Munki to require a logout or require a reboot, there is no official way to…
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Terminal command to get the full name of a Mac user
Munki-Enroll is a great little script combo that automatically changes the ClientIdentifier for Munki clients and then automatically creates a corresponding manifest on the Munki server that includes the old manifest. I wanted to tweak it quite a bit to fit some of the quirks of how our organization does Munki client manifests, so I…
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Bulk-importing .pkg files into Munki
When GarageBand launches up after being installed, it will prompt you to install extra content, which requires an admin password to install. If you’re using Munki, you probably want to find a way around that admin password (either to not bother your users who are admins on their own machines or to not frustrate your…
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Things I learned from creating a Google apps script
Recently, I had to create a Google Apps script, and I learned a few nuances along the way. If you’re new to creating Google Apps scripts, you may want to keep these in mind. You can select spreadsheets by ID but have to select sheets by name. I’d love to be corrected on this, but…
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How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick on/for Macs
For some reason (at least as of this writing), the official Ubuntu documentation on creating a bootable USB of Ubuntu for Macs is now recommending using UNetbootin. I haven’t found that to actually work. I dug up a cached copy of the old instructions (which do work), but I wanted to document the old procedure…
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Licensing GSP Deployments by Terminal Command
Update 21 September, 2018: This doesn’t work at all for 10.13.6. If you’re trying to activate on 10.13.6, find more details here: Activating Geometer’s Sketchpad in macOS 10.13.6 (and beyond?) Update 26 July, 2017: Recently I found this not working any more. I had to send the command through Apple Remote Desktop (or run it…
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Converting seconds to time in PowerSchool custom pages
I know someone’s going to jump in here and tell me that PowerSchool’s custom pages have no problems with SQL statements but are just less forgiving of syntactical errors than SQL Developer is, but I couldn’t get any of the convert-seconds-to-time standard SQL approaches to work in a PowerSchool custom page using tlist_sql, even when…
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Disappearing Notability notes when using iCloud sync
We’ve seen a couple of instances of students’ Notability notes supposedly syncing to iCloud but really just disappearing. In these cases, we’ve looked closely with the students at their settings and checked both the iPad and their iCloud Drive account through a desktop/laptop computer, and—as far as we can tell—the missing Notability notes are stored…
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Fixing Printopia Pro jobs being stuck as “processing”
This is a rather obscure problem, but in case anyone else runs into it, too, here was the fix that worked for us. We use Printopia Pro to manage our iPad printing, authenticated against Active Directory. Ordinarily, when students print, we would see the jobs come in as processing and then complete (or processing and…
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Putting Dockutil add/removes in arrays in Bash
Most of the time when you see scripts using Dockutil to add and/or remove items from the Dock in Mac OS X, they look like this: /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP1.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP2.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP3.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP4.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP5.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP6.app’ –no-restart /usr/local/bin/dockutil –add ‘/Applications/NAMEOFAPP7.app’ –no-restart That’s…