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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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VIVALDI-SNAPSHOT AND UPDATES ON WHAT I'M DOING

Vivaldi recently released a new snapshot, and though I don’t often comment on the development of that version, I saw a brief overview of it on Ghacks and thought what the heck?! I’ve been using the snapshot build within Linux for some time now. I’m currently running it on Solus Mate and it feels a bit faster than Google Chrome on that particular desktop environment. I have mentioned updates from Vivaldi’s stable branch before, even did a review on the browser in general, but nothing to do with the snapshot version as it is beta software and most general users probably won’t even bother with it. The snapshots were the first to include Vivaldi’s own sync engine and a host of other features which now are included in the stable. Vivaldi recently added user accounts to their browser which allows multiple users to use separate profiles in the same browser tied to separate accounts to the sync server. This would allow users to have guests over to surf the web for a research project without leaving any of the history on the regular user’s profile. Chrome and Firefox already support this feature and Vivaldi did to an extent with command line switches, but now they have implemented a graphical way to manage it. This isn’t the only big change from Vivaldi as often they fix numerous regressions and everything they do is somewhat of a big deal, but it is a step in the right direction for competing with Chrome itself and other Chromium-based browsers. Another good thing about the snapshot version is that it now, better supports media codecs and things out of the box. In Ubuntu you might have to run Vivaldi-Snapshot from a terminal to get a link to download more suitable codecs, but everywhere else, things just work. They’ve also recently added options to run background context searches and rename tab stacks with double-click option. Fixed multiple regressions and crashes, upgraded the Chromium Blink engine to the latest within the v72 series. The blink engine version for snapshot stays slightly ahead of other versions of Chrome browser itself which will inevitably include chrome’s upstream rendering improvements as well. I should further note that using Vivaldi doesn’t equate to using Chrome. Vivaldi layers their browser on top of the stripped down Chromium engine Blink which means that not all advances that Chrome makes get picked up by Vivaldi. Depending on how you view Google, this could be a blessing. Vivaldi, while not open source, is in fact, a good-guy. Users who wish to test Vivaldi-Snapshot out for themselves should go here: https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/user-profile-support-vivaldi-browser-snapshot-1468-4/
Vivaldi-Snapshot is beta, but it is very stable, most users should have no problems with it.

Update: I am currently hosting my new Solus-Toolbox script on the same Github as my other distribution scripts. I created this one to work with another rolling release that I recently found myself using more and more. Solus is a great distribution for people who like Debian’s stability with Arch’s continual updates. While Solus itself doesn’t include all the biggest software names like your other distributions do at the moment, they are growing and Snaps is an already working repo within the distribution. With the leaving of Ikey Doherty, the lead developer, new advancements fall to Josh Strobl and his team, it is for this reason that Solus might take longer to see the newest features, but it continues to work beautifully just the same. You can learn more about Solus here. You can download the script here. The script has all the features you’d expect with any of the other scripts just some things work differently. I am pondering adding a Fedora/RHEL version eventually, but this will be some time down the road as a lot more things work differently there.

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