James'Techblog

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 ...