Anthony Reimer’s blog for Mac Admins and everyone following his personal journey
Since anyone who read my post detailing my health journey was able to find this blog at least once, I decided that this would be a good place to provide updates. I’ve even rebranded the blog to reflect this (as you can see at the top of each page). Here’s the first installment. I have been undergoing treatment since that post. I completed 30 radiation treatments concurrent with oral Chemotherapy…
I listened to Episode 434 of the MacAdmins Podcast and felt I wanted to write a blog-length response to what Kitzy and the hosts were talking about. I resonated with so many things in that discussion, albeit from a different angle sometimes.
2025 July 17 (Thursday) Day 3 of the 2025 MacAdmins Conference was coming to a close, with the day’s final event being a live audience recording of the Mac Admins Podcast. I was walking by the washrooms near Dean’s Hall 1 and 2 on my way to the event when I hit a wall. No, I don’t mean that feeling when the intensity of a multi-day conference or event catches up to you and it becomes necessary to…
Last November, I was updating my AutoPkg recipe overrides for the Adobe Creative Cloud applications to reflect the new version year. After having to change multiple variables in multiple recipe overrides to accomplish this, I decided it would be smarter (and less error-prone) to change just one variable in each override each year. So I created a new Input variable for the Version Year and used…
Who needs a Comments section when you have the Mac Admins Slack, Mastodon, and dedicated Mac Admins bloggers! Apparently there is more to know about inserting paths and existing Terminal features. So a follow-up to my blog post on Copy as Pathname is in order. Paste Escaped On The Mac Admins Slack, Graham Pugh pointed out that if you have text on the clipboard, you have the option of pasting that…
When you are shell scripting or working in Terminal, sometimes you want a quicker way to enter the path to a file or folder, particularly if you have already navigated to it in the Finder. One way that works in Terminal is to drag the file or folder from the Finder onto the Terminal window, which then types the path into the current command. However, another method was introduced in El Capitan (OS…
A couple of recent discussions in the #autopkg channel of the Mac Admins Slack included knowledge about URLTextSearcher that veteran AutoPkg recipe authors generally know but are not front-and-centre in the documentation. Since there is no good place to put them in the Wiki, I thought I would describe these more advanced tips here. I‘ll start with a “cheat sheet” and then describe them in detail.…
Recently, I was asked to deploy an app that is supplied as a drag-and-drop app in a disk image (.dmg). Luckily for me, someone had already written download and pkg AutoPkg recipes for it, so I just had to add a child recipe to upload to my management system. Except… The open source developer of this app provides separate downloads for Intel and Apple Silicon CPUs (I still have to support both…
A couple of recent discussions in the #autopkg channel of the Mac Admins Slack got me thinking more deeply about trust in AutoPkg. Trust Verification was adopted in late 2016 with Version 1.0 of AutoPkg.[1] As of that version, all recipe overrides track the non-core processors and parent recipes that the override uses, such that changes to any of those will trigger a trust warning (and, if you…
It’s been over two weeks since I had the pleasure of co-presenting with James “Sorry James” Smith a half-day workshop on AutoPkg at X World in Melbourne, Australia. I have finally recovered enough from the trip (and a cold!) to gather up the slides and post them here. While this workshop did leverage some of the content Elliot Jordan and I developed for the workshop we gave at the Mac Admins…