Macos

The Problem A small business running Microsoft 365 with no existing Intune footprint wanted phishing-resistant, hardware-bound MFA their Macs: the same Windows Hello for Business-equivalent experience, but for macOS. Apple’s answer is Platform SSO (PSSO) with a Secure Enclave-backed key, and Microsoft’s Entra ID plugin supports it. The problem: virtually every piece of public documentation for this assumes Intune. This organization didn’t have an Intune license and didn’t want to buy one just to push a single configuration profile. ...

I spent an embarrassing amount of time today chasing a dquote> prompt in zsh. Not because the commands were wrong. Not because of hidden characters in the source files. Not because of clipboard managers, bracketed paste mode, or terminal emulator quirks. Because TextEdit, Apple’s own plain text editor, was silently replacing a closing ASCII double quote with a Unicode smart quote, and doing it inconsistently enough to make the problem look like something else entirely. ...

Overview This guide walks through my automated macOS setup and backup workflow. The goals: Quickly set up a new Mac by running a single bootstrap script. Avoid manually remembering installed apps, preferences, and configs. Automatically back up my dotfiles and Homebrew installs to a GitHub repo. Include App Store apps, macOS preferences, and even my AirPrint printer. Core Components 1. Homebrew Bundle I use Homebrew’s brew bundle dump to capture all my brew formulas, casks, and MAS (Mac App Store) apps into a Brewfile. ...