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

ANTERGOS 18.12 KDE REVIEW AND A BRIEF TALE OF MY EXPERIENCES WITH KDE IN GENERAL

Antergos, a Spanish produced, Arch-based, Unix-Like operating system, is a modern marvel to say the least, when compared to Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, etc. Antergos works similarly to a standard build of Arch in that it doesn’t really offer many bells and whistles itself, whereas Manjaro uses its own repos, and seems self aware of what it is doing in the way it manages SSDs and partitioning schemes. Antergos is a more bare-bones system, which is not to say it doesn’t add something over vanilla Arch, but it does so in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the user, doesn’t effect the user’s ability to use the operating system in any way. As I previously mentioned, partitioning is different between Antergos and other Arch-based distros like Manjaro in that Antergos pays close attention to detail whilst installing. It creates a separate root and boot partitioning schema on the drive with swap taking the rest. It seems to use a more logical and advanced method that I can only assume comes from a different piece of software in the background(Manjaro seems to use Fdisk?). When observing the finished product with Parted and other tools, the difference is easy to see. With Antergos, there are fewer chances of partitions being placed outside of boundaries or being misaligned so there is thus, fewer writes for each cycle being used. Antergos also has a modern look and feel when booted. Antergos in general is much more bare in terms of installed applications, however, it makes it easy to install others with the pamac package manager. KDE itself has fewer widgets and less to customize, but both run really well. KDE is a favorite of mine because it can be customized within inches of look and feel of Windows 10. KDE has had its own issues in the past, even past versions were riddled with bugs, however, Plasma5 as a desktop is an improvement and it’s kinda growing on me. Antergos KDE has a more purist KDE approach as it include way more KDE apps than does Manjaro or possibly even Kubuntu. Antergos uses an Arch kernel which is also used within Manjaro, however, Manjaro often tweaks or adds/subtracts from it. The kernel is a Monolithic kernel much like other Linux distros use, however, Arch is usually a few steps ahead of everyone else, which leads into my next point; Arch is ahead of everyone else, this also means that there may be bugs or issues with running bleeding-edge software. I recently installed a few days ago and have yet to see any issues, however, running Arch, it is inevitable that you may need a backup, especially when it is the only os you have or you are keeping family photos on your only hard drive. I installed Antergos on a Crucial MX500 250GB SSD(review will come later.) so I’m not really using this for mass storage, but I am keeping my eye on some things. I also noticed that with Arch-based systems, usually the installer turns TRIM on by default and sets it to run all the time with the “discard” option. Discard is a mounting parameter which tells the kernel to force trim to be ran after every erase cycle. This is nice in that it helps reclaim space for future files, however, in Linux specifically, this is probably more of a hinder than anything as it forces the drive to be in use longer, thus taking a toll on system resources and power consumption. I usually disable that feature in fstab. Antergos is a rolling release so it should never need reinstallation, barring the usual issues with bleeding-edge bugs of course. Antergos has the ability to use the AUR, however, no Arch-based installations I’ve used ever seem to come with this enabled by default. One more thing to mention, the theming and icon themes do seem to be a bit out of whack in some situations on KDE, never noticed it in XFCE, but gtk seems to be still on gtk2, which might not even be that bad as kde native apps seem to theme well. Icons seem to not mesh well with KDE in this build yet for some reason, however; Papirus, Breeze, Breath and Obsidian all seem to work well enough for Icons, with the Breeze-gtk-theme working pretty well for everything else. All in all, I’d give this distribution five stars for efficiency and ease of 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 par
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