Laptops, notebooks, ultrabooks, netbooks, Macbooks, or whatever you want to call them have gotten smaller and lighter with better battery capacity in recent years. While that means laptops are less of a pain or you have fewer accessories to haul around with you, laptop bags have also gotten significantly better in that same time with new styles and accommodations. Here are … [Read more...]
Handling incidents, not blame
There's a great article from 2012 titled Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. It was written by John Allspaw, a SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy. The article tackles the topic of handling errors and incidents after they have happened. It's a great article and I recommend that everybody in IT read it because it has the power to change your team culture for the … [Read more...]
KnockKnock, the Mac equivalent to Autoruns
Autoruns is a useful Sysinternals utility for Windows computers to quickly check all of the places a program can hook into Windows to launch automatically. This is useful for troubleshooting annoying behaviors of applications or malware infections. A similar application for Mac OS X is called KnockKnock. KnockKnock (UI) is a native Objective-C, portable application that you … [Read more...]
Intel Compute Stick, a sold out success?
Intel announced the Intel Compute Stick in January and released the device last week. Positive reviews have not been hard to find but what has been difficult to find has been the device itself. The Intel Compute Stick provides a full Windows 8.1 experience in a tiny form factor that plugs into an available HDMI port on a TV or monitor. It includes a quad-core Intel Atom … [Read more...]
PowerShell script to detect antivirus product and status
With an antivirus roll-out on the horizon, I was looking into a script that could act independently of the enterprise antivirus consoles of both the old product and the new product to help find any stragglers that did not get updates. This PowerShell script can be used as a startup script to query the Windows Security Center on Windows 7 or newer computers. It returns the … [Read more...]