Skip to main content

Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
Post a Comment

MEDIA PLAYERS IN LINUX

In Linux, it seems that there are plenty of choices for media players. Banshee(no longer being maintained?), Clementine, Rhythmbox, VLC(Videolan), Gnome Player, Xplayer, Smplayer, Parole, and the list goes on. Depending upon your desktop environment, one may work better than another. What I have noticed is that Parole seems to work fine in almost any environment. Parole is also one of the lightest video players specifically that I have found. Regardless of your choice in media players, the thing that they are supposed to do is play media. I recently talked a little about manjaro making many improvements recently. Another big improvement with the latest release now upgraded to 17.05 is that VLC works perfectly again, as opposed to earlier this year, I tested it and it did not play movies, however, I was always able to convert music files into mp3 on it though.

Clementine is another music specific player that I install on all my systems. Mainly for the system tray control. I really like Rhythmbox, but in some distributions the systray icon is not there. That means that you essentially have to reload your music on to Rhythmbox each time you start it, granted, it will do that for you, but still. Clementine themes well with your Desktop and has a pretty good set of control over your music and the interface. One gripe I do have with it is that it doesn’t allow for conversion. My number two choice is of course Audacious, but sometimes the tray icon doesn’t work in that one either in arch based distros. Amarok was the inspiration to a lot of today’s music players, Clementine specifically. Like Clementine, it was multiplatform.

Xplayer is Linux Mint’s team’s new project for a compatible media player in Linux Mint 18.x that should be able to take the place of Gnome Player, etc. While it does have potential, the bigger the window, the more cpu it tends to use, at least on my systems. Also, there are fewer options and controls built in. You get one interface, you can’t really change it much. Hopefully with time more features will be implemented. Gnome Player, at one time was the default in Ubuntu, but nowadays, everyone under the sun uses VLC. Hopefully in the future the option to convert files from one format to another will be implemented in these other players allowing users to use one program to do it all. I’m sure there are many others that I failed to mention, however, I may test them in the future. I’ve given some thought to possibly creating my own utilities like this one day, but I need to brush up on my python first. I would be curious to know what any readers use.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NOSCRIPT CONFIGURATION FOR PALE MOON SPECIFICALLY

I wrote an article before about making Pale Moon more private. I covered a few of the settings and back end changes I make each time I install it. I mentioned Noscript, but I didn’t give any details about how I set it up. First though, you have to get the version already marked for your version of “Firefox” or in this case, Pale Moon. If you went to https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/noscript/ you would probably find the Pale Moon addons page devoted to the newest possible Noscript being marked specifically for Pale Moon. Other versions may work, but these are hybrid addons and the closer we get to Noscript 10, the less I trust it to work with Pale Moon specifically. I just opt to stick with 5.0.6. There have been people asking about what happens when Maone, the developer stops supporting the hybrid versions of Noscript, “Will it work with Pale Moon?” Why yes it will. Noscript blocks scripts, that’s its main function and it will do that as long as Java script exists on a page. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

SSD PARTITION ALIGNMENT

I was searching for more information regarding SSDs last night as that is what I now use, I found an interesting little tip that most users will never have to worry about, but people using Arch Linux, Manjaro or Windows that was cloned from another drive may want to consider checking this. The Partition manager within Linux normally takes good care to ensure that you have some free space to be used by the SSD in the event that a cell becomes worn out or corrupted. Also, Linux generally ensures that a proper amount of unallocated drive space is set aside preceeding the partition. However, on my own image of Manjaro, I discovered that this was not the case. The partition was “out of alignment”. To fix this situation, I found an article on  Lifehacker that went into instructional detail about how to solve this from a live environment or an image of Gparted . Gparted is a separate live environment of Linux that is based on Debian and uses Gparted as the main tool to manage...
Post a Comment
Read more

PALE MOON PRIVACY SETUP

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...
Post a Comment
Read more