Jonathan Markevich

All that Snoo

  • MacDVDRipper Pro 5

    I was a fan of RipIt and DVDRemaster a couple of years ago, I had a nice workflow going where I could convert my DVD TV series discs into MP4s for the Apple TV  (We have a lot of discs).  I discovered MDRP since then, and I have been very happy with it, just a…

  • Freemium Free

    It began with an outright refusal to pay extra to play more of a game. Freemium games are now dead to me. I should define more early what I mean. In this context I don’t mean a full game or app with add-ins, like extra levels or “pro” functionality. I figure each level is very…

  • Apple Pay

    The third punch in the Apple show was the biggest, in my opinion.  Again, on the surface it appears to be catch-up but this is much more significant. The competition liked to throw in an NFC antenna and then claim it was a feature, but without deep integration all it is is more hardware.  Yes…

  • Apple Watch

    I, like others, was drooling when Apple introduced their new wearable.  They made the competition look horrendous.  (As a side note, when I first saw the Galaxy Gear S in pictures, I was excited – it too looked great, and not Android… until I saw the actual size.  It’s absurd.) They pitched this at everyone.…

  • BIG PHONES

    Apple’s done it.  “They’ve kneeled to the pressure from Android”.  Haven’t they?  Let me think. One day to a few hours before the event I saw a fair number of tweets where people expressed that they didn’t really want a bigger phone.  The iPhone 5 size is wonderfully compact and ideal for daily use (but lets talk about…

  • WD MyBook Live

    I discovered the other day that my WD MyBook Live is a lot more capable than I realized. It is actually running some flavour of Debian and has a fair suite of default unix commands. So what did I do with it? I didn’t go too wild… Due to the death of a previous MyBook…

  • More hack attempts

    After my last experience, I checked my logs and noticed quite a load of failed attempts on my mail server.  It looks like a brute force script kiddie attack, which I’m pretty sure will fail on my machine. Still, I want to kick out these morons.  So after some research, I found fail2ban.  The installation…

  • Hack Attack

    Someone mentioned they got a bounce from my domain’s email. I went to take a look at the error and discovered a couple of hosts trying to brute force login to my SMTP server. Some quick config changes to create a blacklist, and a fail2ban install and it has stopped now. Lesson 1: check your…

  • Android… stuff.

    So I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the Google I/O keynote.  I just noticed the tweets. One thing I did notice was the Samsung Gear Live watch – that thing actually looks decent. The problem is a) Samsung and b) Google. Samsung is of course just annoying.  I’m certain 6 months from now…

  • Arduino.  Fine, and you?

    I have long avoided Arduino, because “that’s hardware stuff”, and I just didn’t get it.  Based on a request from a friend, I looked at it and I just knew I could write the code to get him started. Turns out I could and I did! Now I’ve got loads of ideas, partly practical, partly…