Mac at Work (was FreeBSD on Dell C400, and other stuff)

All PC workstations in the office belong the company domain and single sign-on with kerberos works pretty much flawlessly.  As a Mac user, I also wanted the benefits of single sign-on.  Specifically, it is really nice not having to enter/save passwords for all the company websites.  In addition, connecting to network drives is faster with kerberos. Lately, Ticket Viewer has not been playing nicely on Sierra, so I am using the terminal to run kinit to get a kerberos ticket at the beginning of the day.   This depends on some settings in /etc/krb5.conf which are displayed below.  Remember to replace REALM with your company domain. [appdefaults] forwardable = true proxiable = true no-address = true [libdefaults] default_realm = REALM dns_lookup_kdc = true dns_lookup_realm = true [realms] My typical morning routine is to open the laptop, open terminal, run "kinit username@REALM" to get the ticket, then run an automator application to mount the ...

Recently, I was assigned to work at a supplier's facility about 200 miles away from the office.  The network in that location basically required me to run everything locally on my laptop instead of trying to use remote desktop with my PC in the office. Sadly, the macbook air was not up to the task of running a complex Navisworks model in a Windows virtual machine.  This was just about the time that Apple released the new model Macbook Pros with the Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C connector) connections.  Armed with a credit card, I headed to Best Buy to try out the 15-inch, then the 13-inch macbook pros.  I ended up returning both of them: the 15-inch because it was too expensive and the 13-inch because its 8 GB of RAM was not enough. On the new macbook pros, I did find the touchbar useful for limited cases, and TouchID was fantastic.  The keyboard was mostly fine, but I found I kept missing the delete key.  I think it is slightly farther away from the J key t...

I am a focal point at work for various issues so I get lots of visitors to my desk who want to ask questions.  If I have to leave my desk, it is helpful to leave a note so people can find me if they really need me at that moment. I have used the Computer Name screensaver on my Mac with a custom message, but going to System Preferences -> ScreenSaver -> Options... to change the text was always a bit of a psychological burden, so I started looking into a way to change that text programmatically. After some internet research, I was able to develop an Automator service to prompt for a message and then start the screensaver using that message.  Here is the image of the automator service. I saved my service as StartScreensaver.  Then I opened System Preferences, went to Keyboard, and then Shortcuts to add a keyboard shortcut that will launch my service.  I chose Command-shift-8, but you can pick whatever you want. Now I just hit Command-Shift-...