Author Archives: jik

Everything about Friendly’s is bad

Below is the letter which I just sent to Friendly’s through their web site. At around 11:00am on September 10, 2017, my son and I visited the Friendly’s restaurant in Watertown, Massachusetts for ice cream. I can say without exaggeration that every single aspect of our visit, from start to finish, was unpleasant. Because our… Read More »

CrashPlan for Home: disputing renewal with credit-card co.

I renewed CrashPlan less than two months ago. Given CrashPlan’s refusal to refund my renewal fee now that they’re shutting down and have therefore broken their home backup service, I’ve no choice but to dispute the renewal charge with the credit card company.

CrashPlan jumps the shark

I owe a lot of people an apology. For about the last five years, I’ve been a major cheerleader for the “CrashPlan for Home” backup service. Many times, I’ve been asked directly about what computer backup service I recommend or stumbled across a discussion of that question, and many times, I’ve unreservedly recommended CrashPlan. Their… Read More »

Congratulations to Jeff Gonneville on his new role at the MBTA

Several years ago, I contacted my state senator, Will Brownsberger, and asked for his help addressing a serious problem: some MBTA buses were leaking engine fumes into their passenger compartments, sickening passengers and putting their long-term health at risk. I wrote about this issue extensively here. In response, Will arranged for me to meet with… Read More »

PenguinDome: new, open-source Linux mobile device management (MDM) solution

Where I work, we have employees who use (in decreasing order of popularity) Mac OS, Windows, and Linux as their desktop computers. We’ve deployed a large, complex remote administration / MDM application for managing the Mac OS and Windows desktops. It’s big and complicated and difficult to maintain. It does much more than we will… Read More »

Python: How to make Flask work with Logbook

If you’ve arrived at this page, it’s probably because you’re searching the web for an answer why, even though you’ve called logbook.compat.redirect_logging() in your Python Flask app, you’re still not getting any Flask logging in your log files. The problem is that Flask sets the propagate flag on its logger to False by default, so even though Logbook’s… Read More »