James'Techblog

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 browser, a product of Opera Software, a subsidiary of Otella based in Norway, is the chromium-based browser that has built in features such as ad blocking, free VPN, memory improvements over Chrome itself and wallpapers and a light and dark theme pre-configured. Opera browser has been around for a long time. It started its life around 1994. Opera was co-founded by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, an Icelandic born programmer living in Norway at the time. Under the direction of Jon and his colleagues, Opera built some amazing features into their software such as; Tabbed browsing, fraud and phishing protection, bookmarks bar and many other features that the competition at the time simply didn’t have. Opera was very fast and it accomplished much of this thanks to the founding company’s own in-house Presto engine. Opera used Presto up to version 12 then dropped the engine in favor of a pre-built Web kit engine which was of similar fashion to what Google Chrome was using. Later on Web ...

A couple of weeks ago, my new Western Digital Blue 250 GB SSD came in the mail. It’s fast. My computer automatically recognized the new hardware when I plugged it in. After installing Manjaro 17.1.1 on the device(As I had no Manjaro 17.1.2), it booted quickly and cleanly. The system ran as if I had a regular Hard disk drive in the machine. It shutdown 2 times as fast as the hard disk drives I’ve been using have done. It also loaded applications in a flash. Everything seemed stable on the system. A couple of issues I’ve been having with Manjaro lately, the themes aren’t working as they are supposed to, this doesn’t seem to matter here. All my scripts worked beautifully on it, everything finished in half the normal amount of time. I’ve had absolutely zero problems with it. Installing the device, however, might prove to be a challenge. The only available slots are where the floppy drive would go and it isn’t open, and an SD card reader spot. I also didn’t originally have a cable that wou...

For those who are running older systems, and I’m talking systems with ancient AMD chips and Nvidia graphics. You might have updated kernels in Linux lately and got the following message; Spectre mitigation V2 LFENCE not serializing. What this most likely means is that AMD is pretty hardy and it turns out that most AMD processors were not as vulnerable as the Intel processors were. Thus, your processor is probably not vulnerable to certain variants. I’m speaking of variants 1 & 2. Variant 3, however… Any who, if this message shows itself at boot, it appears that it is so far, just words. I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you later notice that something about your hardware configuration is acting strange. What it is doing is going back to a generic retpoline. If you didn’t catch anything at boot and are worried about the potential incompatibility, you can usually just revert back in Linux by hitting the shift key before the kernel loads itself. In most distributions you...

Pale Moon has recently released a new version 27.7. In this new version, many big changes have begun to take place in the browser. Mainly security and cosmetic related, however, there are a few important ones I wish to touch on today. As always, the  Release Notes page has more information. Pale Moon recently changed how it handles auto-fill information. By default, the previous versions of the browser automatically allowed auto-filling important forms and logins within the browser. Now Pale Moon no longer does this, but it allows the user to change this directly from the interface in preferences under the security tab. Auto-filling is a growing privacy concern within browsers lately. In Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, we are seeing sites stealing information this way. This is a privacy fix. Pale Moon also made a security feature freshly available in the browser’s back end for users who know what they are doing. This setting allows users to change how Pale Moon handles...

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. ...

MANJARO UPDATES, MAINTENANCE, SECURITY AND NEW USERS Arch Linux, a rolling release distribution, has great documentation. Everything to do with a terminal command even for Ubuntu can be found in the Arch Wiki or some other form of Arch documentation. The problem with Arch Linux is that it is so very difficult to install for new users. Many times when going into an arch related forum, you get called names and ridiculed for asking a question. Manjaro Linux on the other hand, they don’t do that. They are knowledgeable and helpful. They offer almost immediate assistance, at least within 24 hours. They have equally good documentation for a lot of the things related to Arch and their own distro. Many times, it is encouraged still to use the Arch Wiki, however. STABLE, TESTING, UNSTABLE There are three branches within the Manjaro package management world. Each has their own set of mirrors. When switching between them, it is advisable to use sudo pacman-mirrors b(ranch) an...