I went down a real rabbit hole today, trying to do something that seems quite simple – opening a new Terminal window with a given profile from a script. Why? I like my Terminal windows the way nature intended –...
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Our thinking
Enable Touch ID for authentication in sudo
In getting a new laptop recently, I'm reminded of all the small tweaks and quality-of-life improvements that I end up making. One of them is enabling Touch ID authentication for sudo in the macOS Terminal app. I'm not sure why...
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Find your external IP address from the Terminal
If you're using a Unix or Linux terminal and you need to know what your external IP address is (e.g. if you're behind NAT) then there's a quick one-liner that will do it for you: dig +short txt ch whoami.cloudflare...
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Disable Entra ID domain Federation in PowerShell
I was recently setting up federation between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, using Google Workspace as the Identity Provider for Entra ID. Somewhere in the process however something went wrong and I was stuck in a broken configuration where Federation...
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Direct download links for Microsoft Surface drivers
Here are links to the driver packs for various Microsoft Surface devices, including Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-au/surface/manage-surface-driver-and-firmware-updates They're all available as msi installer packages and can be installed on top of a vanilla Windows 11 installation or slipstreamed...
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Start Windows Defender offline scan with third-party antivirus installed
If you're using Windows Defender as your primary antivirus, then it's pretty easy to start an offline scan – simply go to the Window Security app > Virus & threat protection > Scan options > Microsoft Defender Antivirus (offline scan)...
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Set Immutable ID (onPremisesImmutableId) in Entra ID via Microsoft Graph PowerShell
I've got a few clients who use Google Workspace as their main platform, but also need to use Microsoft Office or Teams, so have a Microsoft 365 tenancy as well. It gets to be a pain managing two sets of...
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IT Support Technician (Part-Time, 3-4 days/week)
Automatica is a boutique consultancy that keeps creative small businesses humming. We tame Macs, wrangle the occasional Windows machine, and dive deep into Microsoft 365 and Dropbox. We are all about using the right tool for the right job, and...
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Network discovery using LLDP on macOS
In trying to find the IP address of a switch on the network, I first turned (without much hope) to performing a Bonjour discovery on the network, but as expected the switch was not advertising itself via this protocol. In...
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Post-installation script for Dropbox on macOS
If you're deploying Dropbox to multiple systems, there's now an Enterprise Installer available from Dropbox which has a postinstall script to properly initialise the Dropbox Updater. I've been deploying Dropbox and using an old script that seems to be working,...
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