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

Update for all things Firefox

Having criticized Firefox in the past, I realize how this might sound coming from me. I have recently tested the new Firefox 57. I have to say, I am really digging the sleek, flat look, the dark theme set to compact, the layout of the menu, the customization page now has more items you can throw onto your toolbar. The speed, it's quickly replacing chromium for me. An issue many users might face, it might not be available for you for a few days in linux, depending upon your distribution's package maintainers. I am currently still in Manjaro 17.1pre2 Hakoila. As of yet, the latest package has not dripped down into the repos, so I had to improvise. You can download the tarball at Mozilla, the website recognizes what platform you are using. From there you have to cd into the Downloads folder from your terminal as in: cd ~/Downloads/, once there, you will find the tarball listed by doing a ls. To untar this file, you have to type tar -xvf $filename into the terminal and that should do it, once done, you can move it to your home folder and cd into the firefox folder and type ./firefox, or you can sudo mv firefox /opt/ and from there create a symbolic link from that directory to /usr/bin/firefox. Having done all of this you can now use the app finder to run firefox from that command, providing you don't already have firefox installed, if you do, then you would link it to /usr/bin/firefox-new and search for it in the app finder as before. To create a symbolic link, you have to type sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox(new). Once Firefox is opened, you'll notice that many extensions were moved to the Legacy extensions tab, don't worry, a few will be updated in the coming week or so, others will have replacements. With the new Firefox, you get better privacy control, more control over preferences, and more features, now Pocket is almost integrated seamlessly into the browser. Pocket is there for people who have a ton of bookmarks, they can move them to the cloud by saving them to pocket. Users also have a new screenshot tool which was there in the previous version, but it's worth a mention as it is still fairly new. Firefox's new preferences layout also include upfront controls for location, camera, microphone, etc, however, my biggest gripe is that they have not added the old script blocking feature into the browser. Script blocking was a very useful feature back when Firefox was young, it wasn't as trending as it is now, but it did help when sites were hogging cpu and memory needlessly. Anyways, the new Firefox has really impressed me having installed it only yesterday. I am sure that like with all other versions, there will be a bug fix in the next week or so, but as for now, I have yet to find one.

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