James'Techblog

Lately, I’ve been working on improving my scripts and their Help feature. This feature includes leaflets on basic functionality of some of the features held within the script. I layout basic details about what is being done in each more clearly, but still there are things missing here. I removed as many lines previously as possible to allow for some added lines of information. I realize that it doesn’t seem like a lot at the moment, however, I have also mirrored my repository on Github and moved a copy of it to Gitlab. I’ve made that repo almost completely independent of Github. There is still a bit of work to be done and so I will be doing that soon. I’ve also made my Gitlab publicly accessible now. My mind and my sleeping have been sort of a wreck lately, I’ve been trying to make minor improvements around the house with all this going on, I feel my time and energy has been largely divided, though not in equal parts. I’m hoping that by the end of this week, things will be a littl...

Solus, an operating system with a rather colorful history as Solus OS, having been based on Debian at one point, is now released as a rolling distribution, most recently in the form of Solus 4.0 Fortitude. Solus 4.0 took a while to reach release due to changes in project management and various other matters. Solus 4.0 uses the latest software packages and updates in a timely fashion. The software that comes preinstalled is very sparse, meaning that users should go into Solus expecting to install other software. The package manager is a forked version of Pisi which is called Eopkg. Eopkg is not based on deb or rpm package managers so getting deb files to work might be a bit of a hassle, nevertheless, most software that newer users might find useful should be either within the standard Solus repository or the ever growing third-party repository. Snapd is also preinstalled and readily available for those who want software that isn’t in either of these. Solus 4.0 also uses one of the ...

We all know about the speed and efficiency of Linux, the security is unmatched as well. Linux is by far more secure than Windows and Mac as the Open Source community behind Linux is always eyeballing the code and subsequently fixing bugs thereafter. Linux and Unix are about as secure and as efficient as running a computer operating system gets, but there are some issues and bugs that don’t always get fixed or noticed in a timely fashion and one of the jobs of a System Administrator would be to check for these issues to make sure they’re not a problem in a business environment. SSH is a big gap in security that gets updated frequently, however, there is nothing that can be done to prevent it from being an inherent security risk as it is facing the internet and is a hole with which data travels through from device to device. Businesses and administrators use SSH to tunnel through from their devices to effect changes in files on other machines remotely and this, along with Telnet(wh...

Fare thee well to the misused ideas of others. Coinhive, a crypto-mining operation being used in the place of embedded javascript ads on websites is closing its doors for good. Coinhive was a nifty idea, but sadly, it was abused and was really easy to abuse. After a while on the net, the service was used by malware developers and ad writers to harness users’ hardware in an attempt to mine for bitcoin. Bitcoin is a lucrative piece of virtual currency that costs bundles more than the name appears to be worth. With one coin equating to a whopping $3,854.92, it is little wonder why someone would attempt to cash in on this platform. Many honest or at least semi-honest people mine for currency on the web with no ill intentions, however, this misuse of the ads platform is just another reason that people use ad-blockers. Malwarebytes already blocked this type of advertising, (or should we say malvertising)? Along with the misuse and mistrust, Coinhive also mentioned other reasons as to wh...

The Linux kernel recently had a 5.0 release. This is the newest kernel signed off by Torvalds and friends. Linux 5.0 includes a plethora of changes and security fixes as is the case with any major release for the kernel. 4.20 was released around the holidays. That was a good release and I’ve been using it without issue for a while now, but Linux 5.0 has some things that might interest you. According to OMGUBUNTU, Linux Mint is getting a logo revamp as well. This is actually not something new to me, but before I assumed they were mere rumors. The new Linux Kernel’s changes are mostly hardware stack related with Raspberry Pi and Intel getting some support among other systems. This according to OMGUBUNTU. The newest kernel is already available on kernel.org, but you’ll have to compile it yourself. It is recommended to stick with the latest kernel with your distribution to retain support. Kernels are those pieces of the overall operating system that don’t really need to be updated jus...

Pale Moon is a web browser once forked from Mozilla code. As such, the browser shares many similarities with Firefox as far as style and feel. While built around older Firefox code, it is actively maintained and patched with security fixes that pertain to Pale Moon and only Pale Moon, which decreases the chances of incompatibilities and improves on code that is no longer being maintained by Mozilla anymore. Mozilla went a different direction and while on XUL they may have implemented some of the same features that Pale Moon does as of now, it is now up to Moonchild(MC Straver), to maintain this project himself with his team of developers. Pale Moon works with XUL and XP COM, both technologies no longer being supported by Mozilla, so much of the underlying code that gets implemented as security fixes in big updates, gets separated from other Mozilla code by Moonchild himself and instead he adds his own workarounds and code to patch other portions of the browser. Most people fail t...

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 pro...