No major Apple announcement either this week. We got the fifth beta for macOS 11.3, iOS 14.5 and siblings. Apple also released new versions for the apps formerly known as iWork. Is this the start of the spring release season?
Talking about spring releases, Mac OS X was released twenty years ago this week!
To support the weekly news summary, please consider:
macOS Terminal and Shell:
You have always wanted to ‘learn Terminal,‘ right? This book teaches how (and why) to use the command line on macOS. Get it on Apple Books!
List of upcoming conferences, dates, and their video archives on my website:
📰News and Opinion
- Twenty Years of Mac OS X – Armin Briegel
- A Pair of Books for Learning the Mac Command Line – Adam Engst, TidBITS
🌅macOS 11 Big Sur and Apple silicon Macs
🔨Support and HowTos
- Additional admin with SecureToken, or not? – Frederick Abeloos
- How to update your Mac’s firmware – Howard Oakley
- Xcode Tips – Jesse Squires
- Copying the Rosetta 2 installer for offline installations – Alan Siu
- My favorite way to keep track of the Mac Admin Slack’s nuggets of wisdom – Dr. Emily Kausalik
- os_log haystack needler – The Bits
🤖Scripting and Automation
- Script Identity Crisis: get the Path to the Current Script – Armin Briegel
- macOS Big Sur: easy erase – Michael Rieder
- Batch rename nested files and folders on macOS with ZSH – Ben Frain
- Running Jamf Scripts with Custom Command Line Arguments at Runtime (Without Jamf Remote) – A.P. Orlebeke
- Get better at programming by learning how things work – Julia Evans
🍏Apple Support
♻️Updates and Releases
- Munki 5.3 Release Candidate 1
- BBEdit 13.5.5
- Introducing Updated Script Editor and New Global Variables – Kandji
📺To Watch
🎧To Listen
- The Best Workplace in Boston! – Mac Admins Podcast
- Accruing Technical Debt — Command-Control-Power
- Osquery: Open source device management and security tools – MacDevOpsYVR
📚 Support
If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!
If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!