Jonathan Markevich

Author: Jonathan

  • M-Audio StudioPro 3 repair

    First of all, let me say “hi there, Googlers!” I owned the M-Audio StudioPro 3 speakers for quite a few years before they started to fail on me.  They were not too bad, gave decent sound at reasonable desktop volume.  In the last year or so, the right speaker conked out.  Well, it played, but…

  • Clown Sized Phone

    Despite my earlier misgivings, I got a biggie size phone – the iPhone 8 Plus.  After lots of research and analysis, I realized an error in my previous logic.  I said: It loses the magic of convenience that is so important to me in the iPhone. That seems now to be a matter of perspective.…

  • Mounting Cloud Drives

    Cloud drives are everywhere. OneDrive, Google, Dropbox, Amazon, Box, and a dozen others I haven’t remembered.  You can create your own with OwnCloud or even just WebDAV if you need. But the problem with having a half-dozen cloud drives (and we all do) is a half-dozen sync apps to interface with them.  That can go…

  • Rescuing Encrypted files on ACD

    So Amazon is shutting out Linux users.  But what if I have a bunch of encrypted files there using old encfs and acd_cli scripts? I can copy down the encrypted files using their client at any point, but how will I know which one is which? I did the following.  First, create a temporary directory.…

  • Amazon Drive Shutouts

    Amazon is in the process of revoking API keys for a number of apps used to access their Cloud Drive product.  They started with acd_cli and have now banned rclone, and apparently Stablebit CloudDrive.  As more users of these products filter into fewer and fewer available options, the API hit from those products will certainly…

  • Managing Encrypted files on Amazon Cloud Drive

    I have implemented a file system on Amazon Cloud Drive for a lot of media with the great acd_cli.  To protect my privacy, I have run this through an encryption layer encfs.  My writeup will follow. A problem I was trying to solve in my mind though, is how to manage – rename and delete…

  • A Dip in the Music Stream

    Music streaming has become a big deal in the last few years.  People don’t seem to care about bandwidth, they know its a resource that seems to be basically infinite (if metered). My problem is that it almost seems like the users are treating music the same way. I reflect back to my discovery of music.…

  • The Best eBook Reader, Again

    I came to the realization a few years ago that the eBook reader Marvin was hands down, the best ePub reader for me.  Very flexible, configurable and some (still) unique features made it well worth the price. That was, as I mentioned, a few years ago and I started to get a little frustrated with…

  • Steam Controller

    The visible and eminently tactile part of the Steam hardware experience is the controller. Steam took a leap and designed something significantly different from the standard twin stick/d-pad “standard”. The fundamental reason for doing this is that Valve is designing a controller for their platform and not for a subset of games that are already suited…

  • AppleTV Updated

    Finally, Apple decided to update the AppleTV – and promote it to the product menu bar on the main site!  This common, and popular, device had been overlooked for four years! The changes are exactly what I was wishing for… but somehow not enough.  The main thing I wanted was apps.  It seemed kinda dumb…