Security on the web must be taken seriously, and people should trust software and PC makers to help them remain secure when conducting business online. Sadly, too often PC makers or software publishers put your security at risk for other motivations.

Since at least September 2014, customers of Lenovo PCs have been complaining on the Lenovo forum about mysterious advertisements showing up generated by pre-installed software, Superfish, that also posed a security threat. In January 2015, security researcher, Chris Palmer, purchased a Lenovo Yoga 2 and confirmed the Superfish adware created a self-signed certificate with the same private key as on other Lenovo PCs as reported by Ars Technica. Worse yet, another security expert at Errata Security extracted the Superfish certificate by cracking the password which turned out to be, komodia. The Superfish adware makes it much easier for attackers perform a man in the middle theft by using the same certificate key to spoof other websites and fool visitors into handing over sensitive information.

Markdown, created by John Gruber, is a plain-text syntax and a software tool that converts plain text to HTML. Of course, it’s also simple for other tools to convert text in Markdown’s syntax to other formats such as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF.

Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. -John Gruber

Basic characters denote format such as surrounding text with asterisks for emphasis or pound signs (#) leading a header. The symbols often look like what one would expect, or similar in usage within email, making them easy to remember and the syntax easy to read.

I’ve been writing my blog posts in Markdown syntax, but I’ve also begun writing short stories and novels in Markdown as well using a distraction-free editor. This allows me to focus on writing and later let software help me prepare for proper formatted output.

Seagrave’s Journey - The long way back home, a web-serial by Feidor S. LaView is an urban fantasy with Western world meeting Eastern lore including Jiang Shi (zombie/vampire) and shape-shifters. The globe-spanning trip is a turbulent, occasionally psychedelic, ride dotted by beautiful pools of reflection.

Word cloud created at wordle.net using the RSS feed for KandyFangs.com.

My late 2009 iMac began showing signs of hard drive (HD) failure including applications loading slower, media reading errors, and increasing number of pinwheels (beachballs) showing up. I had already replaced this iMac with a newer Mac for work, and the 5 year-old iMac had been delegated as a media server and second monitor for my gaming PC. One of the reasons I chose the iMac was for its extended life as a high-quality 27-inch monitor using DisplayPort. This target display mode feature requires a running OS which meant I needed a working drive booting OS X.

The big drawback of an all-in-one is the increased difficulty in replacing the internal HD. Opening the iMac and replacing the HD with an SSD is an option, but I didn’t want to spend resources on an already replaced 5 year-old PC. Instead, I used what I had available: an external 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Studio FireWire drive to boot OS X.