James'Techblog

Manjaro’s last stable release posted on their homepage was 17.06. Since this time, the team have worked hard on yet another stable release code named Hakoila and is set to be released soon. So far, the release has recently hit the stable channel as of time of this writing. 17.1 rolls out a new kernel amongst many other package changes. The new kernel is linux414. The team recently fixed a network regression as well as other issues. The kernel is not considered technically LTS yet, but as of this month it should roll out as one. The team also fixed several issues with Calamares, their installer. I have also fixed a few more issues I found in my scripts not working the way I wanted, I added a list of packages to potentially be installed and a loop which allows the user to install one and then see the list again until each package that he or she wants is installed. The loop will discontinue once the user types the number 27. I also added a prompt that asks the user if they want to uninst

Thunderbird, the well known email client by Mozilla, was found to have issues. Issues were discovered to be unpatched in both the client and the addon enigmail that is often used with it to encrypt emails. These vulnerabilities could have allowed any emails sent using their encryption to be read anyway. Researchers supect that they will be updated soon. I rarely use Thunderbird unless I’m testing something anyway. I am slowly but surely getting all my emails moved to protonmail anyway. This being Manjaro unstable, I’ll no doubt receive the updates when they are released. Like I said, I trust protonmail and it’s great! It is based in Switzerland and was created by CERN personnel. Protonmail follows strictly the laws of Switzerland when it comes to privacy and encryption. The rules in Europe about that are way more appropriate than they are here in the states. Yes, the gene pool for politicians in this country are spread pretty thin, so is the intelligence. There are plenty of othe

I recently was inspired over the holidays to work on my masterpieces on Github when I noticed some errors and discrepancies with my code. I replaced a few things that weren’t very clear, I gave the Arch-based scripts a face lift with a couple of new features, I even managed to wrangle up at least a temporary way to make the hosts file updater to restart the network manager service based on which distribution you were on. This isn’t a very good or convenient way, but it did help to show me just how to do that in a way that will work with multiple Ubuntu derivatives as well as Arch Linux derivatives in the future. I also came up with some ideas for making installing and uninstalling software even easier for new users. The future looks bright for this year, however, I did run into constant hurdles with Linux Mint. It just did not want to cooperate with me. Yes I have been testing with 18.3. I finally got the distro to boot on my device and everything is now working on it. One of many fea

A rather simplistic and minimalist text editor, Geany has plugins and language formats which far surpass its tiny footprint. Geany is great for programming and code editing in Python, Java, C, HTML and even bash, but it is also great for editing text files too. Geany is pronounced as genie, as in Djinn or even magical lamp genie. It comes with a lamp icon in Linux at least. It is a cross platform editor. Geany relies heavily on the GTK toolkit. You can download Geany via www.geany.org . Geany was meant to be an independent editor meaning it had few dependencies and didn’t rely on a single desktop environment. It also was meant to be fast and oriented for work. Most people underestimate this editor. You can also change the theme of the editor from solid white to black or inverted if you like. It has the ability to auto-complete and close brackets, etc. When you open Geany you’ll get a big tool bar and side bar as well as a message window at the bottom. These are mainly used for

Opera is the first choice that many think of when they want to get away from the norm. Opera has been around since 1994 and since has brought countless improvements to the browsing experience. Under direction of Jon Von Tetzchner and his team, the browser added tab stacking, extensions, mouse gestures, and security enhancements before not seen by browser software and some which weren’t seen until Chrome in 2008. Opera also brought CSS support. It was the first to offer this. CSS allows website developers use something other than javascript to make their sites look pretty. It allows for control of text and background color on a page. It also handles font size for people who want to add a little something more than just bland HTML to their page. Opera was at the forefront for many years and then it just kinda slacked off. That is where Vivaldi came in, however, Vivaldi didn’t really produce an actual browser until around April of 2016. Vivaldi did add features that Opera 12 had

It’s a sad day when trying to convert back to Ubuntu 16.04.3 you find that it just is not what it was in 16.04.1. When you find that it was downhill then and has slowly and progressively crept down the slippery slope to its demise. I once recommended this for new users, but I can’t now. I never have the issues in Manjaro that I have in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 16.04.3, from my standpoint, seems extremely buggy and impossible to use. So I’m sticking with what I know for now. Where I am I get the most up to date packages and I don’t have to deal with constant alerts telling me that something new crashed in the background. Everything crashes in Ubuntu for me right now, everything. I know that I could just remove apport, but to me that takes something away from the distribution itself. Earlier, I was testing some new features I’m working on for my scripts and one of them was to determine intelligently what distribution a user was running without making the user do anything. All of a sudden, I get t

I only heard this romantic story on Tuesday evening on You tube and again found it today on OMGUBUNTU. Link below. But apparently an interim release of Ubuntu destroyed the latest model of Lenovo laptops. This included the Lenovo Yoga line. The laptop series that this happened on was apparently marked down for Christmas. The laptops are now no longer able to save time and date settings a long with a host of other settings effecting user hardware. This essentially makes the laptops useless. Canonical and the Ubuntu team seem very upset and want to get to the bottom of the issue, but it appeared yesterday that Lenovo just didn’t care. Lenovo told one user in the forums to simply get a new motherboard and this was said in a way that seems they didn’t bother to test their laptops at all before they released them. If the BIOS on the laptops are indeed borked up, this would mean that inadequate testing went into their product before it reached the shelf. I’ve made mention of Lenovo in the

I did a review of Pale Moon back when 27.6.2 came out in linux. I had mostly great things to say about the browser then and my feelings towards it have not changed. Pale Moon is a very useful tool for scowering the net. It has privacy at its core with a few implementations made by Moonchild, the lead developer, built in. I also mentioned the point that Pale Moon has a canvas poisoning feature in the backend, however, I wasn’t very clear about how to turn it on. I thought in this tutorial, I’d show with a series of screen shots, some of the useful settings and preferences that I change to make Pale Moon a bit more private. I also thought I’d take this time to rant a little more about some of the not so savory issues with Firefox which have recently come under scrutiny by various people in the the Linux world. First order of business, if you haven’t heard, Mozilla recently added an extension into their browser which gave people ads. That’s right, they were ads for a specific t

Firefox 58 will soon ship with the option to toggle on and off the system title bar. This toggle will be at the bottom left under the customization window, it is already there in nightly, but it is a mixed bag about which systems it will work on. It has worked on mine, but in return I can’t move the window around. Still, it is a possible that they will have the kinks worked out by the time it reaches stable. Also, HTTP is being replaced by HTTPS. What this means is that websites that use HTTPS will be encrypted, meaning most if not all of your traffic will be shielded from third parties being able to see what you’re doing there. Most websites already implemented this before in regards to credit car and billing information autofills, but now browsers are going to start marking HTTP as unsecure, which will drive many websites to start getting their act together and making HTTPS the new standard. I should also point out that the EFF foundation is planning to continue fighting for net ne

Smart devices have become the norm, for those who can afford to purchase them, smart speakers and home automation devices can, in fact, reall be very helpful. Smart speaking devices can often take input from the user and act on this input across home-wide wireless networking. They can invoke other devices to perform their daily tasks as requested by the user. They can turn on the lights, take inventory of what’s in the fridge, run the microwave, dishwasher, etc. But where does a smart home become smarter than the people living inside of it? Where does a smart device become smarter than the creator? FIRMWARE TRASHES SMART LOCKS According to a post on dslreports, originally quoting an article on The Register, back in August, over-the-air upgrades in firmware which got the locks via its link to the user’s router, delivered a botched firmware update which left the locks potentially useless for the next week. No getting in or out through the front door at least. The working par

Assuming you’ve followed my steps on cleaning out an infected computer, you may or may not still have a few weird or unused applications on your system, but most of the taskbar nonsense in Windows has stopped. Most of the errors have ceased. You are likely able to boot your computer, if you are, you may notice it is still booting somewhat slowly or there may be a few icons in the startup folder that you don’t recognize, the popups are gone, but the icons remain. There is a possibility that everything is just fine, however, you have a strange homepage or you could still have issues with IE. FIRST STEP After your computer is mostly clean, you should be able to access taskmgr and all of your other system services. Go to Start> in the text box run msconfig.exe, assuming you’re on a newer system, on older systems use the left Windows key + R and then type the same thing in. Go to start up applications and disable everything except antivirus software. If you know that something

Viruses are annoying, often misdiagnosed and some are hard to find. Like Viruses in the body, computer viruses are seemingly invisible and self replicating. Viruses are encompassed in the term Malware , however, malware isn’t always a virus, it can cover anything from Spyware , PUP and Rootkits . While not all malware is the same, it is important to stay vigilant in your routine maintenance and security on vulnerable systems, because each one brings its own bad behavior. Whether you’re a technician or an average computer user, here are some tips on how to deal with the threat and stay safe, also a list of common infections. Malware, as previously mentioned, often encompasses many different types of infections. These infections each do something different, but the end goal is usually similar. Some malware relies on other malware that it downloads from another server after having been installed, other malware is just a carrier of something even worse already packed inside it

 An article on thehackernews confirms Windows 10’s newest update brings Keeper password manager which apparently steals users’ passwords. The app is one of many apps that are possibly being installed in secret, forcefully upon a user’s system without them even getting an alert. This package doesn’t install with system updates, but Microsoft does suggest it. Obviously, Microsoft thought it was a good idea to press their affiliated apps upon people now, because making money through bing and Windows 10 purchases isn’t doing it for them. Apparently the app hasn’t been updated in a year either. A researcher from the Chromium project recently analyzed the app and found that a critical flaw different from one that he himself reported finding in an associated plugin over six months ago. As of right now, I would strongly urge users to not try using the password manager anymore and if you haven’t already, refrain from doing so. However, there does seem to have been an update released on t