James'Techblog

Bash scripts are miniature programs that you can whip up in under 10 minutes, usually in Notepad. In Windows, you can easily access the system’s components underneath the desktop via batch files. This same concept is also alive in Linux. Linux is heavily built around the terminal, however, unlike it’s predecessor, Unix, great strides have been made to make each new distribution, “User-Friendly”. Bash is one of many programming languages which converts human-readable text into machine language, a way to talk to the system. Each key that you press has a reference to either a 1 or 0. Many keys might access both in a pattern. Binary is questionably the backbone behind even the universe itself, but that’s something else entirely. What I wanted to do here today is go over some of Bash’s usefulness and where you can get some setup scripts which will make it easier to learn the syntax and set up your systems while you’re at it. Bash scripts, like any other program, are loaded from the d...

 Remember a time when Linux operating system(s) were rather sparse, and there wasn’t a lot of different things to choose from? Even now, each and every distro creator is more or less building on what someone else did before. This is not different with System 76’s POP OS. As you may know, System 76 is a rather trusted vendor of modern hardware sporting a Linux distribution, usually Ubuntu based on sturdy hardware. System 76 has recently decided to get into the distribution game. This decision was not something the company made lightly, however, it would seem that way. There are many different opinions, but a majority of them say the same thing about the new distro, they usually insist that it is just Ubuntu with a few different tweaks added in. A lot of flashy branding. Pop OS is very new and will take some time to win any awards with newcomers, but the goal was originally to allow newbies access to a stable computing experience without the hassles that might come with the rec...

 America Online, a once thriving internet company in the mid 90s, with services that included instant messaging, emails, provision of the internet itself. A Time Warner conglomerate that controlled much of the way we see the world wide web. AOL is shutting down its infamous AIM messaging service for good at the end of this year. A week before Christmas, AIM users will login for the last time into their favorite, trusted AIM accounts to either save their chat history, or to copy over pictures on to their computers. AOL itself was at the forefront of almost everything during the dialup days of the net. AOL had names prior to being called AOL as it was already a successful company before the internet. Most of the popularity of AOL services waned a long time ago after DSL became a thing, but there are still aged users of the timeless service. The company had already retired from enhancing and updating the service, however, it was still supported and will continue to be suppo...

 Ccleaner, originally Crap Cleaner, was founded in 2003 and was quickly one of the world’s most popular cleaning utilities for Windows. Ccleaner made a name for itself, it was well received and was downloaded over two-billion times as of time of writing, according to Piriform. Piriform are the original development team behind such programs like Ccleaner, Defraggler, Speccy, and a few other applications, including a cloud cleaning application for remote access to clients or servers in regards to maintenance. Ccleaner started out rather small offering few other tools than a disk cleaner, but quickly built itself up to include a host of other useful tools. Useful tools that were later included into Ccleaner include: Disk cleanup, registry cleaner, startup manager, addons manager, applications uninstaller, etc. Ccleaner became so popular that it even raised the eyebrows of Avast. Avast is a well known antivirus company in the Czech Republic and was founded circa 1988. As of rece...

 As seen in a report by the hacker news, yet another Linux trojan has been found. This trojan is using prehacked devices(specifically IoT) to spread spammed email documents. This brings me back to some other security incidents involving Linux. The past year you could say was the year of the kernel flaw. Google stores holding hundreds of malicious apps compatible with Android, various personal exploits, such as the one modeled after the Windows Wannacry were rewritten for Linux. Linux Mint’s own servers getting hacked to allow the attackers access to the Cinnamon edition in an attempt to clone the distro with additional goodies like backdoors. The IT world is full of malicious entities trying to gain access to personal information, including nefarious actors within world governments. Linux has been gaining a following recently and thus, this is why it is being targeted more and more these days. Windows still holds a large margin of the desktop computer share with Window...

In Linux, it seems that there are plenty of choices for media players. Banshee(no longer being maintained?), Clementine, Rhythmbox, VLC(Videolan), Gnome Player, Xplayer, Smplayer, Parole, and the list goes on. Depending upon your desktop environment, one may work better than another. What I have noticed is that Parole seems to work fine in almost any environment. Parole is also one of the lightest video players specifically that I have found. Regardless of your choice in media players, the thing that they are supposed to do is play media. I recently talked a little about manjaro making many improvements recently. Another big improvement with the latest release now upgraded to 17.05 is that VLC works perfectly again, as opposed to earlier this year, I tested it and it did not play movies, however, I was always able to convert music files into mp3 on it though. Clementine is another music specific player that I install on all my systems. Mainly for the system tray c...

If you have been considering trying out Arch linux but haven’t yet, you should give Manjaro’s new release a try. Philip Müller, the head of the development team for the OS, has done a great job fixing issues with KDE and bringing in upgraded packages. According to Phillip, the Calamares installer in 17.03 had a few issues that needed working out, he later found that KDE and Mesa weren’t exactly acting right, so he upgraded those and added the most up to date packages for his stable branch in 17.04. Manjaro and I have had ups and downs in the past, I was recently using Antergos and was skeptical, but when I first booted it up, I noticed a plethora of changes right off the bat. One of the said changes that caught my eye, the theme had had a facelift. Firefox was still a bit buggy, so I installed a stock firefox from the mozilla site and found that it works slightly better(I’m planning on writing about how to do that in the up coming weeks). I noticed also that Qupzil...