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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
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OPERA 51 RELEASED AND VLC RELEASE

Opera 51, the new stable release from Opera, is a descent improvement over the 50 release. In this release, the team fixed the usual bugs of course, but also added features. One such feature was the new scroll to top of page when clicking tab feature. This easily helps access the top portion of the page without wasting time scrolling on the scroll wheel of the mouse or clicking the arrow or trackpad on a laptop. The team have also added a Reset Opera button which now takes all the work of backing up preferences out of the equation. With this button, you can keep your history and bookmarks while refreshing the home profile of the browser, this feature is already seen in Firefox and Chrome, however, it was never before introduced in Opera or Vivaldi.

There was also a redesign of the private browsing mode. Now Mac and Windows versions look similar and you also have new animations on all versions. To skip the animation, you can click the “Don’t show this anymore” button on the page. Opera also took the liberty of reorganizing tabs on the tabs bar to make it easier to find long forgotten or pinned tabs at the right of the tabs bar. Under the hood improvements include, but are not limited to, an added mitigation for Spectre and Meltdown. You can read more about that and other improvements in the blogs.

VLC 3.0 is stable now, It includes a similar interface with many core improvements. It also supports new formats. You can read more about it on the home page, or you can go to ghacks.net and read their article there. Link will be below. Unfortunately, right now, you might have to install it manually on Manjaro, I had to take that out of my scripts recently, but the new ones I am working on will include it again in one form or another. Manjaro still uses the Nighly version, however, this is becoming more and more usable so you may no longer have a problem.

I recently switched one hard disk drive over to Linux Mint 18.3, but I had to go through the older versions to do it. I’m hoping this will work well enough to use as a test system for improving my Ubuntu version of my scripts. So far it is working stable enough. I haven’t really had time to do any work on it yet though. I still have my mind on many things I’m planning to do later in the year and that’s becoming a bit of a problem for me. I will try to refrain from doing that soon.

 ONE MORE THING: I should also point out that Vivaldi has been having a series of steady updates since moving to the 1.14 stream earlier this month. Vivaldi is a really good browser and I have done an article on them in the past, but never did a full review, however, right now, the new version does seem a tad bit buggy right now, I would like certain things to work better than they do, so I will keep an eye on the browser in the upcoming months. One browser I would recommend though is Opera 51. It is worth checking out, especially after all of these improvements.

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