Jonathan Markevich

All that Snoo

  • 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…

  • WWDC 2014

    Apple had their WWDC keynote today, and announced, well, everything. Their user experience is converging like I couldn’t have imagined before.  Continuity lets you transfer your work from mobile to desktop just by being close to your Mac.  You can answer your phone from your computer. Mavericks looks awesome, despite my worry about flattening things.…