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

UPDATES AND FUN FACTS FOR THE WEEK

Recently, Cloudflare launched a new DNS service. This service is relatively fast and responsive from my own testing. The service reports that is is actually milliseconds faster than Google’s own public DNS. DNS is the lookup of internet domains based on numbers which correspond to domain names given by the user, much in the same way a phonebook works. While this DNS service does appear to offer a few privacy features such as the lack of ip logging and the deletion of 24hr query logs, this doesn’t offer malware blocking yet, unlike OpenDns which offers this for free. OpenDns is a bit of pain, for someone who just wants to use a simple, fast, lightweight DNS service that isn’t Google, this could be service you’re looking for. I suspect with future updates and improvements will also come more features. More can be found at: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/cloudflare-privacy-focused-dns-service,36786.html also: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/04/02/cloudflare-launches-fast-and-privacy-focused-dns-at-1-1-1-1/ and finally: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/

In other news, Windows updates meant to patch the exploits of Meltdown and Spectre, fail miserably at doing so and open Windows machines up to more vulnerabilities. A security researcher found the issue in Windows 7 and Windows Server boxes running the 2008 R2 version specifically. More can be read here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-7-meltdown-patch-caused-another-system-vulnerability-520440.shtml

As for the updates, I’m currently working on scripts again, however, I’m running into a snag. The feature I’m working on is a function to create separate user accounts in Linux. I should have this added in eventually, but as for now, I’ve also recently written an article, a bit of an update really, about the use of the new WD Blue SSD that I got during Christmas. I stated a bit about the performance gain that I got and how to enable Trim as well. I’m still monitoring it, but it is safe to say that Swap values were not optimal out of the box, thus I changed the Swap value number from 10 to 5 in the scripts. This will effectively, and automatically, set the script user’s swap value to 5 which is a better number for SSDs. This should be fine for HDDs too. I also added another command to collect power usage information and determine the state of Wake On Lan(WOL). As always, the scripts can be found on Github .

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