Leadership: My employer decided to honor me with my first official leadership spotlight post! I was also blessed with the opportunity to participate in a fraud and cybersecurity panel during a recent CCUL Upstate Chapter Meeting.

Intune: I’ve been working on my out-of-the-box experience for iPads and MacBooks. I have been fairly successful in with my iPads using specific device configuration profiles, but these aren’t working so well on Macs. Software deployment for Macs is also sub-par, so I’ve been falling back to my current solutions.

Broken Shortcuts: Apple shortcuts has a bug which strips links from the Make Rich Text From tasks (More Info: Adding Rich Text to Note no longer works in iOS 17 : r/shortcuts). This broke my ability to draft my compilation posts in Apple Notes I’m bypassing this by writing directly to a Markdown file in my Shortcuts iCloud folder. My hope is this should work from both Mac and iOS as it has in the past.

Home Automation: I have been using Scrypted to link my cameras into Homebridge, but I am not able to get my smart motion notifications to work. Nor am I able to get my doorbell audio working bidirectionally. Scrypted is great otherwise and I would recommend it for anyone with compatible cameras. I’ll experiment with using Homebridge’s FFMPG plugins again.

Please stop trying to monetize me while I read! I don’t like Medium and other blogger platforms – they seem to be built for profit and drive you to subscribe either to the author’s newsletter or the service by limitingthe number of free views per month. I feel like this is going to backfire in the long run.

Reading

Career

The Curse of the Senior Software Engineer – Dmitry Kudryavtsev – This post resonated with me. I faced the same issue once my wife and I decided to move when my stepson graduated high school. (Can I speak more about this?)

Gen-Z is shunning college to take up traditional trades like welding and plumbing they say is far more satisfying and which doesn’t incur huge student debt | Daily Mail Online – My advice to my kids has been exactly this: find a trade, take the 2 year degree, then figure out life from there. I loved what my MS in Cybersecurity taught me, but it wasn’t worth the money I’m paying on it.

Industry News and Trends

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related “unease” | Ars Technica – I’ve been reading more Reddit posts and industry forums discussing huge increases in license renewals and poor support. This is mirroring how Broadcom destroyed Symantec during their acquisition. Folks are looking for alternatives like Nutanix, Proxmox, Azure/AWS, etc. What I don’t hear folks talking about is going to Hyper-V.

Microsoft is confident Windows on Arm could finally beat Apple – Microsoft could very well be faster than Apple’s M3, but the UI has a long way to be as clean and functional as macOS.

Introducing Google’s new Arm-based CPU | Google Cloud Blog – Google is rolling out their own custom silicon to support their own cloud and AI initiatives.

Mac Tips

Disk Utility now has full features for managing snapshots – The Eclectic Light Company – I discovered this neat feature only after reformatting my full backup drive.

Police warn of thieves using wifi-jamming tech to disarm cameras, alarms | KTLA – I feel like this is old news considering how many security cameras are wireless. Running CAT5 isn’t that hard or expensive, and it’s well worth the extra expense.

Health

A diet high in ultra-processed food is linked to a greater risk of many diseases : Shots – Health News : NPR – I’m not surprised by the findings here. The food industry has moved to faster, cheaper ingredients at the expense of consumers health.

From the strange files

Mysterious Drones Swarmed Langley AFB For Weeks | The War Zone – What’s happening here?