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Migrating Cobbservations to Hugo

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I’ve wanted more control over this medium for a while, and when I actually find the time to post about relevant content I want it to be quick and easy but keep the appropriate level of detail. As such, I find it necessary to change my blog location and post format from WordPress to Markdown, and start using Hugo to generate static site content with version control on Github.

Starting soon, this address will forward to the new-new…Cobbservations, and I’ll hopefully be able to post a bit more often after making the change. However, because I love Markdown and git so very much, I’ve decided I’m going to port all of my posts over so they can be version-controlled as well. 🎉

I hope the new site format is easier to navigate and slightly more appealing to readers as well. One of my first posts will be about the transition to Hugo and what it took to get started.

See you on the flip side! 👋

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Enhancement: iOS MDM should allow display timeout management without passcode

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Hey all!

I’ve just opened rdar://30582319 in response to some testing I’ve been doing to attempt to manage the auto-lock settings on various iOS devices used as kiosks. In our case, we want to be able to set the display timeout to ’15 minutes’ or ideally ‘Never’, but not require the device to have a passcode enabled.

I’ve been testing this with a custom config profile, of which I’ve created a gist here.

Some interesting additional behavior I’ve seen on iOS 9.3 and iOS 10.x is also found in the radar ticket. I’ve seen two problem behaviors:

  1. the iOS device requires a passcode despite the forcePIN key being set to False.
  2. the iOS device does not recognize the updated integer under the maxInactivity key.

Ideally I’d like to see display timeout management broken out separately from passcode policy, or have the device/OS recognize that the forcePIN key is set to false and not require a passcode when the profile is installed.

If anyone has been able to manage display lock separately from the passcode I’d be interested in hearing about your success.

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How to remove the Kids profile from your Netflix account

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This came up on Twitter yesterday and I had previously dug into this a good while ago for myself so I figured I’d write a short post about it. I don’t have kids so I don’t use the ‘Kids’ Netflix profile for anything.

  1. Login to Netflix’s ‘Manage Accounts’ page.
  2. Click the Edit (pencil icon) for the ‘Kids’ profile.
  3. Click ‘Delete Profile’ at the bottom and confirm on the following page.

This should remove it when logging in from other devices as well. The next thing Netflix could do is bypass profile selection entirely if there’s only one profile, or allow you to select a default.

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Fixing persistent notifications on iOS 10

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Forgot to post this a while back so figured I’d catch up on it…

After upgrading to iOS 10, quite a few people have noticed a rather annoying change in the behavior of notifications on their devices. In particular, banner-style notifications that were automatically dismissed in previous versions of iOS, seem to stay on the screen until an explicit action is taken to snooze or dismiss them. Well, if they seem that way, it’s because that’s how they were designed. In fact, notifications can carry three styles and have for quite some time on iOS:

  1. Alerts – “require an action before proceeding”
  2. Banners – “appear at the top of the screen and go away automatically”
  3. None

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