I recently had a client who when they gave me the login details to set up a new user for them, they had a typo in that person's first name. As their email addresses followed the pattern [email protected], I also...
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Our thinking
Configure Netgear NF20MESH wifi modem router in bridge mode
I was recently stuck with trying to set up a UniFi Dream Machine on an NBN FTTN connection, and being FTTN it was delivered over VDSL, not Ethernet. As such, the device connecting to the NBN had to have a...
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Fix broken createinstallmedia from macOS Catalina to run on modern macOS
In my last post, described a way to download the macOS Catalina onto an Apple Silicon Mac. Once I had the installer in hand however, running the createinstallmedia command simply didn't work – the process was just killed. As it...
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Download older Intel macOS Installers on an Apple Silicon Mac
I recently picked up a bunch of older Intel Macs that a client was disposing of, and needed to wipe them and instal an older version of macOS, such as Catalina, on them. In order to do this, I wanted...
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Add a domain to the Tennant Allow/Block Lists in Microsoft 365 using PowerShell
If you're using Defender for Office 365, then you have access to some pretty powerful anti-phishing and anti-spam capabilities. Sometimes however the anti-phishing can be a bit too aggressive in blocking emails suspected of being phishing – in this situation,...
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Force Spotlight to rebuild search indexes
There's an excellent series of articles on Spotlight in recent versions of macOS over on the Eclectic Light website. I've recently had a couple of machines that were not searching in Mail, among other things, and I needed to rebuild...
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Check APC UPS Warranty Status and Build Date
I had a bit more trouble than I would have expected trying to find a page on APC's website to enter a serial number and check the warranty status of a UPS. Over on the UPS Lifecycle page, there's a...
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macOS High Sierra Internet Recovery Error: “The Recovery Server Could Not Be Contacted”
I had a Mac recently that had been wiped via Find My, so it had neither an OS nor the recovery environment on the internal drive. It also had the default firmware settings that didn't allow booting from external media....
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Automatica Corporate ID Refresh
As we head into 2025, we are in the process of rolling out a new corporate ID for Automatica with the aim to freshen and simplify our visual imagery. We're keeping the same orange and grey colours, and keeping a...
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Automate LetsEncrypt certbot SSL certificate renewal on macOS
The instructions for certbot on the EFF website for macOS instruct you to schedule the automatic renewal using Cron. On recent versions of macOS, Cron has been deprecated in favour of launchctl. Cron is still there, and it still works,...
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