Happy Equinox, everyone!
The Coronavirus pandemic seems to be affecting nearly everything this week. WWDC will be an online event this year. Apple Stores outside of China are closed, as are most of our work places and schools.
My wife’s and her home office got featured in this post from Leiden University about how their faculty are dealing with working from home.
But, we also got a new MacBook Air (new keyboard), a new iPad Pro (amazing looking, albeit expensive Magic Keyboard), bumped SSD storage on the Mac mini, and a GM release for the iOS 13.4 family (with trackpad support on iPadOS) and macOS Catalina 10.15.4, with a release date for the OS updates next week.
Stay safe!
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Apple Releases
- WWDC20 – Apple Developer (Note: the Apple Developer app to take part in this event “is available only on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.” Not for macOS. You can access the old videos in a browser, but…)
- Apple unveils new iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support in iPadOS
- New MacBook Air has more to love and is now just $999
- Apple Doubles Mac mini Storage Configurations – Adam Engst, TidBITS
- List of Mac BoardIDs, Model Identifiers & Machine Models, Updated! – Mr. Macintosh
#! On Scripting OS X
📰News and Opinion
- It’s a disgrace that Apple still sells an iMac with a 5400rpm hard disk – Oliver Haslam, iMore
- Fun With Charts: The pace of macOS updates – Jason Snell, Six Colors
- The growth of command line options, 1979-Present – Dan Luu
- Proxyman – Brent Simmons, Inessential
🦠Coronavirus and Remote Work
- Virtual Conferences: A Primer – Alex Lindsay, GearMediaTech
- Virtual Happy Hour – Tom Bridge
- Take Control of Working from Home Temporarily – Take Control Books (free eBook)
- Google halts upcoming releases of Chrome and Chrome OS – Chris Welch, The Verge
- 27 Tips for Working From Home – Charles Edge
🐦MacAdmins on Twitter
- Mike Boylan: “Mac Admin Pro Tip: The checkbox to allow an app to record the screen is able to be checked even by a standard user on the Mac. The whole pane does not need to be unlocked. This means your users don’t need to be admins to approve camera, mic, and/or screen sharing for a conf tool.”
- Tim Perfitt: “the new ipad pro looks like a laptop. i am officially calling BS on the ARM based macs. apple strategy is clear: ios is the future. macs are trucks. Xcode on iOS is coming. The new ipad pro convinces me of that. ARM-based macs rumors are a distraction.”
🐞Bugs and Security
- New Presentation: Exploring macOS with APOLLO from #OBTS 3.0 – mac4n6.com
- Are your employees Slack Messages leaking while their screen is locked? – Fritz Ifert-Miller, Kolide
- Sniffing Authentication References on macOS – Patrick Wardle, Objective-See
- Hacker Fantastic: “There is a 0day in VMware fusion for MacOS that allows any user to get root permissions. The bug is public and the fix for cve2020–3950 is incorrect, thus the weakness is a public 0day. It is a very straight forward LPE on any macOS with fusion installed.”
🔨Support and HowTos
- Jamf Pro Inventory Update and recon functions – alike, but not the same – Rich Trouton
- Creating a wrapper package for a choices.xml file – Eric Hemmeter
- Which extended attributes does iCloud preserve, and which get stripped? – Howard Oakley
- TIL: Recovery Mode From Boot Selector – Robin Laurén
🤖Scripting and Automation
- Microsoft Plots the End of Visual Basic – Michael Tsai
- Identifying which MDM server a Mac is enrolled with – Rich Trouton
- Changing ownership of files in Google Drive via Google Apps Script – Alan Siu
🍏Apple Support
- Apple Business Manager User Guide (updated) (via Mike Boylan)
- Apple School Manager User Guide (updated)
♻️Updates and Releases
- SAP/macOS-enterprise-privileges 1.5.1
- ABridoux/scout: cli tool to read plist, xml and json files
- Jamf Pro 10.20
- GitHub for mobile
🎧To Listen
- The Death Of The Kext – Jamf After Dark
- Bradley Chambers and Apple @ Work – Mac Admins Podcast
- 352: Update – March 15, 2020 — Command-Control-Power
- On the challenges of managed service providers – Lock and Code, Malwarebytes Labs
- Simplifying digital signage with Apple TV – Apple @ Work Podcast
📚 Support
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