how to

How to remove photos from your iPhone. Or, this shouldn’t require a post.

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For inexplicable reasons, Photos on the Mac won’t let you delete photos from the iPhone if you forgot to delete them during import (we’re not even getting into how half the time, it never deletes them from a flash card, period). There are times when you import your photos from an iPhone and don’t feel … Read more

DropBox Smart Sync and High Sierra; or, I thought I was supposed to upgrade, why me.

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Not interested in my ramblings? Skip down.

If you’ve been paying attention to the narrative coming from IT over the past few years, including us, one of the most recurring themes is this:

Stay up to date.

Staying up to date is the number one way to keep your hardware running well and, most critically, keep you secure. In the past, this advice came with some wincing, since updates, particularly system updates, could bring along a plethora of issues. This wincing advice was gradually replaced with certainty––Apple Mac OS updates have been more and more robust over the past few years, to the point where I was almost, almost ready to just start pulling the plug and upgrading to the latest version of the OS as soon as it came out.

But lo, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. High Sierra definitely tooketh away.

I mean, percentage wise, it’s still been pretty painless. There have been some really wince-worthy security issues with High Sierra, but in terms of functional show-stoppers, it’s still in the 10% range. It says a lot about the past few years that this feels really bad.

But one thing that has been completely consistent throughout our High Sierra deployments is that new installs of DropBox do not work with Smart Sync.

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How do I install WordPress?

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Here is a surprisingly common question: how do I install WordPress on my webhost?

Here’s the one sentence answer: you don’t, you use the 1-click install option that any decent webhost (Bluehost, HostGator, LiquidWeb, GoDaddy, etc etc) now provides.

These days, almost all of them provide a big fat button that says ‘WordPress’ when you log in to view your hosting options. Click on that, and off you go. If there is any uncertainty, you call your hosting provider, and they will happily walk you through it.

So why do we get the question so often?

Because, for some reason, people love perpetuating the manual method for installing WordPress, listed on the official WordPress.org website. It’s billed as the ‘super de duper easy peasy five minute install’ which is 100% true if you find math problems fun, chess invigorating, and live on a planet where minutes are actually hours.

Otherwise, it is a lie.

Look, it’s true that compared to many other potential installs, it’s easy. And for some, I don’t doubt it’s five minutes or less. But the problem is that other people, normal people who wonder about the difference between ‘domain’ and ‘hosting’ are being told to attempt something they have no hope of doing without a wasted afternoon and a cup of rage.

But maybe you still wonder about the difference, and maybe you still want to try. So, I’m going to give a broad overview of what’s going on in both cases.

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Your iPhone or iPad isn’t saving sent IMAP messages in the cloud

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The send settings for an IMAP account on an iPhone running iOS9

Most email accounts today use an IMAP email server. The advantage to this is whatever happens on one device–say, a laptop–gets reflected on another–say, an iPhone. If you read a message on your Mac, it will show up on your iPhone as having been read. If you send a message from an iPhone, it will show up in the sent folder on the Mac as well.

Except! Sometimes this doesn’t happen. You send an email on the iPhone, it sends successfully, but the email never shows in sent mailbox on the Mac.

The reason for this is some accounts configure with a different default setting for sent messages–they are configured to store sent emails locally, instead of on the IMAP server. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix.

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Unable to load replica list in Yosemite Server, or Active Directory can’t be joined after upgrading

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NOTE: If you have the much more common ‘Ooops, OS X Server just randomly decided to eat the most important part of my configuration’ that can result in the above error, this thread on Apple Discussion forums might prove handy. I’d write it up on the site if I figured out a surefire to fix this outside of just restoring from a OD backup you’ve hopefully made, but it makes me angry that the backups can’t be scheduled, and there is no other way to fix it, so I don’t consider myself to have a ‘fix’ just yet.

I just upgraded a client’s OS X Server from Mavericks to Yosemite 10.10 OS X server. They use Windows Server 2012 for authentication and user services through Active Directory, and the Mac server simply joins to the domain to grab authentication and user/group information.

After the upgrade, Open Directory fired on just fine, and local Open Directory users were hunky dory, but the replica list, which would typically list what AD master had been joined, simply said ‘Unable to load replica list’.

Typically, I get a little trickle of fear anytime OS X server gives me any kind of message about being unable to load anything, because that has led me down some very dark rabbit holes indeed. But this time, just as I was about try and go through the process of re-connecting the AD server (which, by the way, cannot be done with WorkGroup manager anymore) I was lucky enough to google about and stumble on this KB from apple:

http://support.apple.com/en-us/TS4600

It doesn’t pertain to it directly, but it’s close enough. To paraphrase the directions:

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Group Members can’t access OS X Server wiki, or, users and groups can’t be added

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So for a long time, there was a group set on the Out of a Jam Staff wiki. And lo, all was well. Users were added to the group, and access was had by all.

Then, one day, Michael added a new employee to the JamStaff group and and behold – they had zilch for permissions on the wiki. Being in the middle of running around like a chicken with its head cut off and its hair on fire, Michael simply added the user directly and gave them access. “I’ll fix that someday,” he told himself and, as is always the case with such things, someday never came. As time went on, it got more and more annoying, but he got more and more used to it as well, so there you go. Apathy is the immovable object.

Fast forward to today, and not only did being part of the group do zip, but it actually wasn’t possible to add a user directly to the wiki either. Oh, you could add, but saving would give a nasty red message saying ‘Error Saving ACL’s’. Wondering if the ill fated  group, which lit up in red at that message as well and was set as owner, might be part of the problem, Michael attempted to delete it. When it vanished, attempting to save just gave an unhelpful ‘Error Saving Settings’ and that’s it.

Huh.

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iCloud Storage Full: Or, my phone keeps annoying me and I want to smash it

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iOS iPhone iCloud backup settings

The latter part of the subject could be a lot of things. The first part, too, I suppose, but fewer enough to where we can cover them here!

If you’re an iPhone user, chances are you are, whether unwittingly or not an iCloud user as well. Apple reps at the Apple Store are pretty aggressive about turning it on (Apple ad: used car salesmen everywhere: would you like to push iCloud services instead?) and iOS itself is pretty insistent you get some iCloud on.

It’s not that iCloud is bad – by and large, it’s great, and well worth having for one reason or another. The times when you wouldn’t want iCloud are worthy of an article entirely on their own, but for the moment, lets get over my absurdly long intro and get to the meat: what do you do when you start being incessantly told your iCloud storage is full?

The possible reasons are many, the common reasons are but two. 

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How to Scan in Mac OS X

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A little while ago, I had the following conversation over dinner:

Michael, speaking with the same enthusiasm with which he is chewing his dinner (which is a lot, considering it is delicious):

“So I’m trying to decide. Should I write about how to scan on the mac, or something different?”

Everybody at dinner:

“BoooorrriiiiZzzzzz.”

So it’s possible, I suppose, that ‘how to scan on the Mac’ isn’t the most riveting of subjects.  But I actually get that question a lot, and here’s why. 

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