Category: Work

Using a OSX recovery key on a Macbook M1

Passwords are annoying, but also a critical part of your security posture. Strong passwords are important, and many organizations have policies which require you to regularly change those passwords. This will eventually lead to you changing your password – and then forgetting it – locking you out of your machine.

The Apple Macbook Pro M1 has some great hardware security, this is good to keep the bad guys out, but it’ll also keep you out if you’ve forgotten your password.

Use pass phrases. Long passwords are better passwords. Use a password manager – like 1Password or Bitwarden. When you change a key password – make sure to put aside time to practice entering that password. I find if I can spend a few hours the afternoon after I change a password – I can lock it into my muscle memory. I tend to keep it written down for those first few hours, but then make sure to securely delete/dispose of that record of the password once it’s baked into my brain/fingers.

For the first time in many years, I blew it. Thankfully my work provides a way with the serial number of the device to get a recovery key if I reach out to our IT support folks. If you don’t have this safety net – make sure you take the time to create a recovery key and then store it somewhere very safe and secure.

The key will look something like this:

RECOVERY KEY: GE62-3HW1-Y7ER-QZCT-2JJ1-6SNK

Of course, in the heat of the moment you’ll be trying to surf the web on your phone to figure out how to do these steps – and there are lots of options. Let me lay out the very simple steps you need to do to recover using this key on an M1.
  1. Boot into recovery. From a powered off state, press and hold the power button until you boot into recovery mode.
  2. Connect to a network.
  3. Open a terminal from the Utilities menu.
  4. Run the resetpassword command – follow the prompts which is where you will use that recovery key.
That’s it. Easy, but make sure you have the recovery key available to you – future you will be thankful.

30 Years

I’ve passed 20, then 25-year milestones and while it was very nice to hear from co-workers and friends on those dates it wasn’t significant. Hitting 30 years is surprisingly different for me, it is unbelievable to hit this milestone. I’m fortunate to have more than a handful of co-workers who have longer tenure than I do, some more than a decade ahead of me. It is these people that are showing me the way forward from here.

I’m proud to be a technical leader in my area. Recognized as a “Master Inventor“. Called upon to mentor and coach people both in my group and outside. I regularly work with customers, consultants, and other companies. Sometimes I even get my hands dirty with code and the work of keeping some of our cloud services going. 30 years in, and there is still plenty to keep me actively engaged and looking for the next hill to climb.

Now, 30 years counts all my full-time work. The company I started at: Object Technology International, was purchased by IBM and we were granted our tenure at that company as IBM tenure. I have many great memories of the work we did at OTI. Inside IBM we continued to make our mark in the Java space. I did a stint in Corporate helping communicate technical strategy. My most recent chapter is about building IBM Cloud. While this has all been within “one company” I’ve had a lot of different jobs over the years.

One of the things that I find attractive about computers is what they enable a single individual to accomplish. That is still true, but I’ve learned that the real magic is when you get a team of people working together to solve a problem that a has real impact. It is all my team members, past and present that I’m thankful for.

IBM continues to be a great place for me. I hope to continue to grow and learn. I’ve certainly become a better person over time, and I hope that I’ve helped others build their skills too.

None of my accomplishments would have been possible without the support of my wife and kids, to them I am forever grateful.

A Tale of Two Macbooks

I like many have been, and continue to, work from home. You may have also heard of the chip shortage making things like laptops a bit more difficult to get your hands on, especially at the scale of a large company. This has delayed the usual upgrade cycle, and meant I was using a machine with no AppleCare warranty.

Up until recently I’ve been using a 2017 macbook pro – yes, the one with the bad butterfly key-switches – that is until recently.

Right from the start the keyboard had given me problems. In the first few weeks my W key was janky and needed extra presses to work. It sorted itself out after a little while and I discovered that if I was careful about dust/crumbs I could avoid problems. When problems happened, giving it a good shake upside-down would help remedy the issue.

In this case the F key started jamming, then broke off entirely. Normal typing would dislodge the key and was generally a pain. Apparently once one key busts off, others are not far behind. This was proved out by a coworker of mine in the same situation, but with 2 busted keys. I guess it was time for a replacement.

After the usual paperwork, I was back in business – sort of, as the first replacement had a busted microphone and that makes participating in emeetings sort of tough. The second replacement arrived, this was a 2019 with a bit of warranty left and everything works. So now you know why the lead picture has 3 macbooks in it.

The first replacement was a 2018 machine, a little faster than the 2017 but basically on par. I won’t mention much about this because I only had that a day give or take. This is why the post is a tale of 2 macbooks and not 3.

The 2017 was a great machine aside from the keyboard and the cursed touchbar. I don’t regret giving up my previous pre-touchbar macbook pro, because the 2017 was pretty slick and had USB-C charging.

The battery data from the 2017 does tell a longevity story

It had reasonable performance up to the day I stopped using it. Not bad for a 4+ year old machine. The Geekbench score was 867 single-core, 3363 multi-core. I also really liked the stickers I’d accumulated over time.

The 2019, while a previously used machine it has a noticeably better keyboard. The keys feel a bit more muted, and seem to have a little more travel. It’s sticker free still, just a boring space grey slab.

This was still a nice upgrade. Intel i7 -> i9. 4-core -> 8-core. Faster memory 2133 -> 2400. The Geekbench numbers are nicer too: 1059 single-core, 6074 multi-core, a pretty big numbers jump. It does seem a little faster but you get used to the modest speed increase pretty quickly.

Let’s look at the battery stats

There is a nice bump in Full Charge Capacity (+714 mAh).. but things get pretty mysterious when we talk about batteries. It seems the 2017 design capacity was 6669 mAh, and the 2019 design capacity was 8790 mAh.  I’m sure the cycle count factors in here (781 vs 168), as well as many other variables such as charge rates etc.

While I was sad to see the well stickered and travelled laptop go, having a fully working keyboard is a joy you quickly take for granted. I’m still looking forward to a real hardware upgrade to a non-touchbar machine, maybe with the M1X or whatever comes after it. Oh, and 32GB of RAM would be very nice.