Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
During August, I acquired an Olympus Pen E-PL5 and it is an item to which I still am becoming accustomed and it looks as if that is set to continue. The main reason that it appealed to me was the idea of having a camera with much of the functionality of an SLR but with many of the dimensions of a compact camera. In that way, it was a step up from my Canon PowerShot G11 without carrying around something that was too bulky.
Before I settled on the E-PL5, I had been looking at Canon’s EOS M and got to hear about its sluggish autofocus. That it had no mode dial on its top plate was another consideration though it does pack in an APS-C sized sensor (with Canon’s tendency to overexpose finding a little favour with me too on inspection of images from an well aged Canon EOS 10D) at a not so unappealing price of around £399. A sighting of a group of it and similar cameras in Practical Photography was enough to land that particular issue into my possession and they liked the similarly priced Olympus Pen E-PM2 more than the Canon. Though it was a Panasonic that won top honours in that test, I was intrigued enough by the Olympus option that I had a further look. Unlike the E-PM2 and the EOS M, the E-PL5 does have a mode dial on its top plate and an extra grip so that got my vote even it meant paying a little extra for it. There was a time when Olympus Pen models attracted my attention before now due to sale prices but this investment goes beyond that opportunism.
The E-PL5 comes in three colours: black, silver and white. Though I have a tendency to go for black when buying cameras, it was the silver option that took my fancy this time around for the sake of a spot of variety. The body itself is a very compact affair so it is the lens that takes up the most of the bulk. The standard 14-42 mm zoom ensures that this is not a camera for a shirt pocket and I got a black Lowepro Apex 100 AW case for it; the case fits snugly around the camera, so much so that I was left wondering if I should have gone for a bigger one but it’s been working out fine anyway. The other accessory that I added was a 37 mm Hoya HMC UV filter so that the lens doesn’t get too knocked about while I have the camera with me on an outing of one sort or another, especially when its plastic construction protrudes a lot further than I was expecting and doesn’t retract fully into its housing like some Sigma lenses that I use.
When I first gave the camera a test run, I had to work out how best to hold it. After all, the powered zoom and autofocus on my Canon PowerShot G11 made that camera more intuitive to hold and it has been similar for any SLR that I have used. Having to work a zoom lens while holding a dinky body was fiddly at first until I worked out how to use my right thumb to keep the body steady (the thumb grip on the back of the camera is curved to hold a thumb in a vertical position) while the left hand adjusted the lens freely. Having an electronic viewfinder instead of using the screen would have made life a little easier but they are not cheap and I already had spent enough money.
The next task after working out how to hold the camera was to acclimatise myself to the exposure characteristics of the camera. In my experience so far, it appears to err on the side of overexposure. Because I had set it to store images as raw (ORF) files, this could be sorted later but I prefer to have a greater sense of control while at the photo capture stage. Until now, I have not found a spot or partial metering button like what I would have on an SLR or my G11. That has meant either using exposure compensation to go along with my preferred choice of aperture priority mode or go with fully manual exposure. Other modes are available and they should be familiar to any SLR user (shutter priority, program, automatic, etc.). Currently, I am using bracketing while finding my feet after setting the ISO setting to 400, increasing the brightness of the screen and adding histograms to the playback views. With my hold on the camera growing more secure, using the dial to change exposure settings such as aperture (f/16 remains a favourite of mine in spite what others may think given the size of a micro four thirds sensor) and compensation while keeping the scene exactly the same to test out what the response to any changes might be.
While I still am finding my feet, I am seeing some pleasing results so far that encourage me to keep going; some remind me of my Pentax K10D. The E-PL5 certainly is slower to use than the G11 but that often can be a good thing when it comes to photography. That it forces a little relaxation in this often hectic world is another advantage. The G11 is having a quieter time at the moment and any episodes of sunshine offer useful opportunities for further experimentation and acclimatisation too. So far, my entry in the world of compact system cameras has revealed them to be of a very different form to those of compact fixed lens cameras or SLR’s. Neither truly get replaced and another type of camera has emerged.
Much of what you find here once got strewn around the LinkBlog and Data Science Directory pages because I have taken to trying out new computing languages. R, Python and Julia were among those that were new to me, and I am curious about Go too. My way of learning often involves trying out things and finding out possible approaches from the web. This collation comes from those ongoing efforts. More may follow them.
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23:44 February 3, 2023
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How to run command or code in parallel in bash shell under Linux or Unix
23:39 February 3, 2023
23:28 February 3, 2023
17:55 January 20, 2023
11:31 January 20, 2023
13:18 November 30, 2022
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09:57 November 21, 2022
18:14 November 19, 2022
17:00 October 27, 2022
09:40 October 24, 2022
09:39 October 24, 2022
The JSON LIBNAME Engine: Real-World Applications Using Open APIs
09:37 October 21, 2022
09:35 October 21, 2022
09:25 October 14, 2022
LEAVE and CONTINUE: Two ways to control the flow in a SAS DO loop
11:57 October 12, 2022
14:04 October 3, 2022
14:03 October 3, 2022
14:03 October 3, 2022
09:38 October 1, 2022
09:37 October 1, 2022
Linux / UNIX: Bash Script Sleep or Delay a Specified Amount of Time
12:05 September 29, 2022
12:05 September 29, 2022
15:14 September 28, 2022
17:01 September 27, 2022
17:00 September 27, 2022
12:41 September 16, 2022
18:06 August 24, 2022
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11:54 August 20, 2022
Using Pandas with Python Decimal for accurate currency arithmetic
13:10 August 18, 2022
12:56 August 13, 2022
15:34 July 29, 2022
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15:33 July 29, 2022
18:33 July 21, 2022
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09:30 February 8, 2022
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15:19 January 22, 2022
21:09 January 16, 2022
14:22 January 16, 2022
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14:01 January 16, 2022
5 Julia Projects for Beginners — Easy Ideas to Get Started Coding in Julia
13:58 January 16, 2022
17:52 January 14, 2022
18:22 January 13, 2022
15:45 January 12, 2022
09:02 January 12, 2022
13:16 January 11, 2022
12:15 January 10, 2022
12:08 January 10, 2022
Top 7 Best R Shiny Books and Courses That Are Completely Free
12:06 January 10, 2022
How renv restores packages from r-universe for reproducibility or production
12:04 January 10, 2022
13:58 January 8, 2022
13:18 January 8, 2022
09:49 January 8, 2022
New features in DataFrames.jl 1.3: Part 1
New features in DataFrames.jl 1.3: Part 2
New features in DataFrames.jl 1.3: Part 3
15:41 December 25, 2021
15:39 December 25, 2021
Tips to create beautiful, publication-quality plots in Julia
14:38 December 25, 2021
11:39 December 25, 2021
DTable – an early performance assessment of a new distributed table implementation
18:08 December 24, 2021
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DataFrames.jl: why do we have both subset and filter functions?
15:08 November 28, 2021
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14:53 November 17, 2021
12:18 November 10, 2021
08:55 November 2, 2021
How To Add Labels to Grouped Barplot with Bars Side-By-Side in R?
12:47 October 21, 2021
SAS Problem Note 31278: Table 1 node generated by PROC REPORT
18:24 October 5, 2021
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12:44 September 30, 2021
13:27 September 29, 2021
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Using SYSTASK and SAS macro loops for massively parallel processing
21:31 August 24, 2021
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10:58 August 23, 2021
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How to Sort Output of ‘ls’ Command By Last Modified Date and Time
12:45 August 16, 2021
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10:31 August 13, 2021
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SAS OnDemand for Academics: Working with Python, including Jupyter Notebook
09:02 August 4, 2021
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JuMP | JuMP is a modeling language and supporting packages for mathematical optimization in Julia.
14:12 July 26, 2021
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Get image size (width, height) with Python, OpenCV, Pillow (PIL)
14:56 July 15, 2021
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How to conditionally stop SAS code execution and gracefully terminate SAS session
09:14 July 15, 2021
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12:01 July 13, 2021
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Adding lines or other geoms to a plot in ggplot by calling a custom function
12:36 July 11, 2021
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4 tricks you should know to parse date columns with Pandas read_csv()
09:26 July 11, 2021
13:12 July 8, 2021
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Problem Note 41684: RTF output appears truncated when a very long text string spans multiple pages
10:53 June 11, 2021
Adding a Column to a Pandas DataFrame Based on an If-Else Condition
11:37 June 9, 2021
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Pandas Groupby: Summarising, Aggregating, Grouping in Python
10:17 May 28, 2021
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Customize Dates on Time Series Plots in Python Using Matplotlib
10:15 May 28, 2021
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Sample 24820: Creating a Directory Listing Using SAS for Windows
09:17 May 19, 2021
Python Data Wrangling Solutions — Dynamically Creating Variables When Slicing Data Frames
13:52 May 16, 2021
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% Macro Core -- Production Ready Macros for SAS Application Developers
13:44 May 16, 2021
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Create a nice looking table using R
17:02 May 13, 2021
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How to Check if a File or a Directory exists in R, Python and Bash
10:46 May 12, 2021
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How to fix common problems in output from SAS ODS Graphics procedures
17:12 May 10, 2021
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09:14 April 2, 2021
14:14 March 12, 2021
Using SAS with Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint)
14:02 March 9, 2021
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10:52 March 3, 2021
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How to create stunning visualizations from scratch using Python
18:39 March 2, 2021
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10:56 December 31, 2020
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How to change your working directory for SAS with the DLGCDIR DATA step function
16:45 January 16, 2019
Working with Dates and Times Using the ISO 8601 Basic and Extended Notations
11:25 January 15, 2019
Have you created Scalable Vector Graphics with SAS?
Creating SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Files Using Universal Printing
14:19 December 20, 2018
18:58 December 10, 2018
15:19 October 4, 2018
15:28 October 2, 2018
Summary of SAS Macro Quoting Functions and the Characters They Mask
17:11 September 8, 2018
17:50 September 3, 2018
17:09 August 10, 2018
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Five things you (probably) don’t know you can do with a hash table in SAS
22:37 June 28, 2018
Summary of SAS Macro Quoting Functions and the Characters They Mask
09:58 May 28, 2018
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20:01 October 16, 2017
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Sample 35864: Change line colors and styles for PROC SGPLOT output
11:23 November 14, 2016
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SAS trick: get the LIBNAME statement to create folders for you
10:36 February 10, 2016
10:19 February 5, 2016
Usage Note 38339: SAS® file compatibility when upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit Microsoft Windows
The top gotchas when moving to 64-bit SAS for Windows
Migrating from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS
Migrating to a 64-bit operating system: Quick pointers
Converting SAS Formats from 32-Bit to 64-Bit
Excuse Me; But, Is That a 32-Bit or a 64-Bit SAS Catalog?
Handling SAS Formats Catalogs across Versions
Proc Migrate: How to Migrate Your Data and Know You’ve Done It Right!
20:41 January 30, 2016
12:14 November 30, 2015
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Flag an item without associating a date
Excel import from Word: Extracting data from merged cells in a Word 2010 Table using VBA
01:55 March 5, 2015
17:06 December 9, 2014
LIBNAME Statement Syntax :: SAS/ACCESS 9.3 Interface to PC Files: Reference
15:17 November 14, 2014
19:14 November 8, 2014
The world of open UNIX variants may not be as vibrant as the Linux one, but UNIX predates Linux by decades so it might be put down to its much greater maturity. BSD seems to predominate here, but the reason may be because of Sun keeping a tight hold on Solaris for so long. Now that Oracle has gone and been more restrictive again, it is the breakaway projects to which we have to look for OpenSolaris successors now. However, the partially free availability of Solaris 10 & 11 may draw some away from the open-source community of the alternative.
In the world of BSD UNIX, it often is difficult to see what is different between the various projects and some are based on technical excellence using the sort of reasoning that would be inaccessible to many computer users. Though many see the operating system as being one for servers alone, there are PC-focussed versions with PC-BSD being the most notable. The existence of those projects is in start contrast to a mantra that keeps BSD for servers and Linux for desktop systems.
This was a fork of FreeBSD and it seems to have been done for very technical reasons, such as handling of cluster computing and larger disc drives. If the reasons make sense to you, then it could be an option, but it doesn’t sound like one for the masses, though BSD UNIX hardly is at the best of times.
When someone turns to creating a desktop variant of BSD, FreeBSD seems to be a starting point for so much of the time. Even Debian, itself the foundation of so many Linux distributions, bases its own BSD variant on FreeBSD and Gentoo apparently has been looking at doing something similar. FreeBSD does give away a bias towards servers in that the default installation does not include a desktop environment. However, if you do the work, you can get one like GNOME 2 or XFCE on there and the process does remind me of the thinking behind Arch Linux. Until recently, I had FreeBSD 10 installed in a VirtualBox virtual machine until a software update broke it and that does sit well with the BSD culture of stability. Of course, it could be another sign of a focus on server computing too. Nevertheless, it ran well until then and fared no worse than the aforementioned Arch Linux, though it probably should have done better.
Apparently, this is FreeBSD with a choice of MATE (a fork of GNOME 2 for those not fancying the idea of using GNOME 3 and its GNOME Shell), XFCE, LXDE or OpenBox desktop environments. A recent look demonstrated that the desktop environments are turned out very nicely too. All in all, it looks like an interesting counterpart to what you would find with a Linux distro.
Given the troubled state of the online world because of cybercrime and cyberwarfare, it hardly comes as a surprise that computer security has a higher profile than it ever has. It then is hardly surprising that someone decided to create a more secure spin of FreeBSD. For added context, here is what the project had to say about its goals:
HardenedBSD aims to implement innovative exploit mitigation and security solutions for the FreeBSD community. Security is like an onion--it’s made up of layers. To be successful, attackers must peel back each layer. HardenedBSD takes a holistic approach to security by hardening the system and implementing exploit mitigation technologies. We will work with FreeBSD and any other FreeBSD-based project to include our innovations. Our primary goal is to provide a clean-room reimplementation of the publicly documented parts of the grsecurity patchset for Linux.
According to the website, this is a derivative of NetBSD developed with desktop users in mind. At first, it had a feel that would have been more widely available with UNIX and Linux systems in the middle of the 1990’s. Since then, XFCE was chosen as a desktop environment and that has modernised the feel.
Since I last had a look, the focus of this project has become portability. What they mean by portability is have versions of NetBSD that run on all sorts of hardware and I even thought I saw a mention of Sony PlayStation (PS2) if my eyes did not deceive me and ARM-based systems also appeared, hardly a surprise with the rise of tablet computing. Other more conventional computing platforms are served too, but the others make NetBSD stand out from the others more than I once thought it did.
To some, portability is about running software under different hardware architectures. That is not what is meant here since we are talking about the ability to run an installation off a USB drive plugged in to any computer, more likely with Intel and AMD processors. The underlying basis is FreeBSD with OpenBox being the chosen desktop environment, assuring a friendly user interface as well.
With a strap line like “Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!”, you’d have to suspect that security and stability are the key attributes of this operating system. The security aspect certainly crops up a lot so I think that a spot of exploration is in order, especially when various system types (x86 and SPARC are just two of them) are supported anyway. The ongoing furore about intelligence service monitoring and increasing numbers of attacks on different systems over the web do make the whole subject more relevant now than it ever was and it never was irrelevant.
When m0n0wall was discontinued in 2015, OPNsense was forked from pfSense, a move that has left tension between the two projects. The newcomer gave the following reasons for its actions: code quality, regular releases, security issues related to the web UI being run as root, source code for the pfSense build tools is no longer publicly available, concern regarding transparency, new ownership of the pfSense brand, using the brand name to fence off the competition and several licence changes for no apparent reason. These have been contested by the pfSense while OPNsense now uses HardenedBSD as its basis and has stuck with a frequent release model.
This was started in 2004 as a fork of the now defunct m0n0wall with the first public release coming in 2006. It is based on FreeBSD and can be installed on physical or virtual appliances for added network security. It seems to add a BSD installation for a firewall and other security functions, but there clearly is a place for this in the enterprise market by all accounts.
Network-assisted Storage (NAS) has blossomed in recent years for home users and anyone with a DIY mindset might be tempted to go and build things themselves using PC parts and it is for those that this FreeBSD-based distro would be an asset. When I went looking at the possibility, the inability to boot the installation disk that I was using put paid to the attempt. Then, I was left wondering if my use of AMD’s CPU’s was part of the problem, though I since have realised that building a low-power system might be a better option than reusing a full PC. There has been an incursion into the world of NAS drives in the form of a 3 GB Western Digital My Book Live, so any return to DIY ways could be a better informed.
Like TrueNAS, this another BSD for use when making an old PC into a NAS file server. In fact, this came into being when part of the FreeNAS community took exception to the direction in which iXsystems were starting to take it after 2011. It also is based on FreeBSD and has a different web interface. That makes it an alternative if TrueNAS does not do the deed for you.
One of the casualties of Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems was the community-based OpenSolaris project. The more proprietary Solaris 11 Express became Oracle’s answer to the need that OpenSolaris fulfilled back then. Since, Solaris 10 & 11 became available without charge with support contracts becoming the revenue earner.
The demise of OpenSolaris saw a major new project emerge. Its basis is Illumos, itself a fork of the now defunct OpenSolaris, and a recent look revealed that it is maturing rather nicely. MATE is the chosen desktop environment so it should not be that unfamiliar to those coming from the Linux world. Initially, there is not so much software installed, but Firefox does get included and there is a graphical package manager, so there is little point in complaining.
The enterprise focus of this offering is plain on the website since virtualisation and the storage platform get a strong showing. Discussion of desktop environments and such like are conspicuous by their absence. Seemingly, this is infrastructural software above all else and there are support contracts available too.
The website for this Illumos distro has a retro, so it is easy to believe that the operating system could be similar. Since MATE, XFCE and Enlightenment are the available desktop environments, anyone coming from Linux should be thrown off very much once they figure out how to get things started.
With a moniker like “Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor”, this clearly is not a desktop computing offering. There is more than a hint of cloud computing about it and that hardly is a surprise given the age in which we work.
If a certain Richard Stallman had his way, Linux would be called GNU/Linux because he wants GNU to have some of the credit, but we’re lazy creatures and we all call it Linux instead. What still amazes me is the number of Linux distributions that are out there. This list captures those that do not fit into other lists that you can find in the sidebar, so do look at the others as well.
Many fit into the desktop and server computing paradigms while a minority are very distinctive. It is easier to write about the latter than the former, though personal experiences do add to any narrative. It is tempting to think that everything has become static after more than thirty years, yet that may be foolish given the ongoing flux in the world of technology. Only change is ever a constant presence.
The controversy about security agencies eavesdropping on internet communications has upset some and here are some distros offering anonymity and privacy. Of course, none of these should be used for unlawful purposes since there are those in less liberal countries who need invisibility to speak their minds.
It is harder and harder to create a Linux distro that is very different from the rest, but this one uses application virtualisation for added security. You can organise your software into different domains so that you work more securely when moving data between applications from different domains.
There is more than a hint of privacy-mindedness in this distro when you look long enough at what it offers. Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments are part of the offer and there is added software for extra privacy and security.
This is an option for those who are worried about being tracked online. All internet connections are sent via the Tor network and it is run exclusively as a live distro from CD, DVD or USB stick drive too, so no trace is left on any PC. The basis is Debian and the distro’s name is an acronym: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System. For us living in a democratic country, the effort may seem excessive but that changes in other places where folk are not so fortunate. The use of Tor may not be perfect but it should help in combination with the use of different sessions for different tasks and encrypting any files. There even is an option to make the desktop appear like that of Windows XP for extra discreteness of use.
Most Linux distros that have enhanced security and anonymity as a feature are not installable on a PC, but that exactly is what’s unique about Whonix. It’s based on Debian but all internet connections go via the Tor network. The latter is called Whonix-Gateway with Whonix-Workstation being what you use to work on your system. It may sound like being overly careful but it has me intrigued.
In many ways, these are appliance distros for anyone who just wants an install-it-and-go approach to things. That works better with dedicated devices than with multipurpose machines, so that is one thing that needs to be kept in mind.
The idea behind this offering is what it offers console gamers. Legacy games and peripherals will work and there even is support for Raspberry Pi as well.
The main purpose of this distro is to offer a home for the KODI entertainment centre on PC and Raspberry Pi devices. It follows from the now defunct OpenELEC project, which ran into trouble when developers’ voices were not given a hearing.
The acronym stands for Open-Source Media Centre and there is KODI here too. Though the distro also is based on Debian, one is tempted to wonder why anyone would not just install that and install KODI on top of it. The answer possibly has something got to do with added user-friendliness for those who do not need to deal with such things.
Mandrake once was a spin of Red Hat with a more user-friendly focus. In the days before the appearance of Ubuntu, it would have been a choice for those not wanting to overcome obstacles such as a level of hardware support that was much less than what we have today. Later, Mandrake became Mandriva following litigation and the acquisition of Conectiva in 2005. The organisation has declined since those heady days and it became defunct during 2015. Its legacy continues though in the form of two spin-off projects, so all the work of forebears has not been lost.
It was the uncertainty surrounding the future of Mandriva that originally caused this project to be started. Beginnings have been promising, so this is a one to watch, though you have to wonder if the now community-based OpenMandriva is stealing some of its limelight.
Of the pair that is listed here, it is OpenMandriva which is a continuation of the now-defunct Mandriva. Seeing how things progress for a project with user-friendliness at its heart will be of interest in these days when Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint are so pervasive. Even with those, there are KDE options, so there is a challenge in place.
Anything Russian may not be everyone’s choice given the state of world affairs at the time of writing, yet this still is an offshoot of Mandriva so it gets a mention in this list. Desktop environment options include KDE, XFCE and LXQt and there are various use cases covered by a range of solutions.
Not every distro falls in the above categories, and some that you find here may surprise you. There are some better-known names like openSUSE that go their way.
Aside from the founder’s dislike of ISO disk images for whatever reason, this distro has its own eccentricities. For example, it is container-friendly, runs in memory as root and much more. This is branded as an experimental distro, and it is that in many ways.
This project creates respins of openSUSE for the sake of a more refined experience. For instance, there are live booting ISO images as well as inclusion of media codecs. There is plenty of choice too when it comes to desktop environments.
From what I have seen, this project seems to be supporting the same needs as Arch, albeit with all software needing to be compiled, so there’s more of a DIY approach. The wiki also comes in handy for those users.
Billing itself as a lean independent distribution focussing on QT and KDE, this is built from the ground up without any dependence on other distros. Some tools, like pacman, naturally come from elsewhere in this otherwise standalone offering.
Here is another distro apart from Ubuntu that has an African name, the Zulu for big chief this time around. It came to my notice among the pages of the now defunct Micro Mart magazine and uses MATE, XFCE, Enlightenment and KDE as its desktop environment choices.
SuSE Linux was one of the first Linux distros that I started to explore and I even had it loaded on my home PC as a secondary operating system for quite a while too before my attention went elsewhere. Only for a PC Plus cover-mounted CD, it never might have discovered it and it bested Red Hat, which was as prominent then, as Fedora is today. When SuSE fell into Novell’s hands, it became both openSUSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition. The former is the community and the latter is what Novell, now itself an Attachmate Group company, offers to business customers. As it happens, I continue to keep an eye on openSUSE and even had it on a secondary PC before font resolution deficiencies had me looking elsewhere. While it’s best known for its KDE variant, there is a GNOME one too and it is this that I have been examining.
There was a time when this was being touted as an Ubuntu killer but it never seems to have made good on that promise. Recent troubles within the project haven’t helped either, especially with a long wait between releases.
This Turkish distro recently got reviewed in Linux Format and they were not satisfied with its documentation. It does not help that the website is not in English, so you need a translation tool of your choosing for this one.
Though there also is a spin using the MATE desktop environment, this distro is perhaps better known as the home for the Budgie desktop environment. All of this is for computing and not its business or enterprise counterpart. There is nothing to say against that and may make it feel a little more friendly.
The name sounded similar for some reason and I reckon that’s because Samsung has smartphones running Tizen on sale. The whole point of the project is to power mobile computing platforms with only the mention of netbooks sullying an otherwise non-PC target market that includes tablets and TV’s. It’s overseen by the Linux Foundation too.
For all the world, it looks like Microsoft has mined a concept from a not often recalled series of Windows: 3.x. Then, we had a Program Manager for starting all our applications with no sign of a Start Menu. That came with Windows 95 and I cannot anyone mourning the burying of the Program Manager interface either. It was there in Windows 95 if you knew where to look and I do remember starting an instance, possibly out of curiosity.
Every Windows user seems to have taken to the Start Menu regardless of how big they grow when you install a lot of software on your machine. It didn’t matter that Windows NT got it later than Windows 9x ones either; NT 3.51 has the Program Manager too and it was NT 4 that got the then new interface that has been developed and progressed in no less than four subsequent versions of Windows (2000, XP, Vista & 7). Maybe it was because computing was the preserve of fewer folk that the interchange brought little if any sign of a backlash. The zeitgeist of the age reflected the newness of desktop computing and its freshness probably brought an extra level of openness too.
Things are different now, though. You only have to hear of the complaints about changes to Linux desktop environments to realise how attached folk become to certain computer interfaces. Ironically, personal computing has just got exciting again after a fairly stale decade of stasis. Mobile computing devices are aplenty and it no longer is a matter of using a stationary desktop PC or laptop and those brought their own excitement in the 1990’s. In fact, reading a title like Computer Shopper reminds me of how things once were with its still sticking with PC reviews while others are not concentrating on them as much. Of course, the other gadgets get reviewed too so it is not stuck in any rut. Still, it is good to see the desktop PC getting a look in in an age when there is so much competition, especially from phones and tablets.
In this maelstrom, Microsoft has decided to do something dramatic with Windows 8. It has resurrected the Program Manager paradigm in the form of the Start screen and excised the Start Menu from the desktop altogether. For touch screen computing interfaces such as tablets, you can see the sense of this but it’s going to come as a major surprise to many. Removing what lies behind how many people interact with a PC is risky and you have to wonder how it’s going to work out for all concerned.
What reminded me of this was a piece on CNET by Mary Jo Foley. Interestingly, software is turning up that returns the Start Menu (or Button) to Windows 8. One of these is Classic Shell and I decided to give it a go on a Windows 8 Enterprise evaluation instance that I have. Installation is like any Windows program and I limited the options to the menu and updater. At the end of the operation, a button with a shell icon appeared on the desktop’s taskbar. You can make the resultant menu appear like that of Windows XP or Windows 7 if you want. There are other settings like what the Windows key does and what happens when you click on the button with a mouse. By default, both open the new Start Menu and holding down the Shift key when doing either brings up the Start screen. This is customisable so you can have things the other way around if you so desire. Another setting is to switch from the Start screen to the desktop after you log into Windows 8 (you may also have it log in for you automatically but it’s something that I believe anyone should be doing). The Start screen does flash up but things move along quickly; maybe having not appear at all would be better for many.
Classic Shell is free of charge and worked well for me apart from that small rough edge noted above. It also is open source and looks well maintained too. For that reason, it appeals to me more that Stardock’s Start8 (currently in beta release at the time of writing) or Pokki for Windows 8, which really is an App Store that adds a Start Menu. If you encounter Windows 8 on a new computer, then they might be worth trying should you want a Start Menu back. Being an open-minded type, I could get along with the standard Windows 8 interface but it’s always good to have choices too. Most of us want to own our computing experience, it seems, so these tools could have their uses for Windows 8 users.
Being ever curious on the technology front, the release of the first build of a Technical Preview of Windows 10 was enough to get me having a look at what was on offer. The furore regarding Windows 8.x added to the interest so I went to the download page to get a 64-bit installation ISO image.
That got installed into a fresh VirtualBox virtual machine and the process worked smoothly to give something not so far removed from Windows 8.1. However, it took until release 4.3.18 of VirtualBox before the Guest additions had caught up with the Windows prototype so I signed up for the Windows Insider program and got a 64-bit ISO image to install the Enterprise preview of Windows 10 into a VMware virtual machine since and that supported full screen display of the preview while VirtualBox caught up with it.
Of course, the most obvious development was the return of the Start Menu and it works exactly as expected too. Initially, the apparent lack of an easy way to disable App panels had me going to Classic Shell for an acceptable Start Menu. It was only later that it dawned on me that unpinning these panels would deliver to me the undistracting result that I wanted.
Another feature that attracted my interest is the new virtual desktop functionality. Here I was expecting something like what I have used on Linux and UNIX. There, each workspace is a distinct desktop with only the applications open in a given workspace showing on a panel in there. Windows does not work that way with all applications visible on the taskbar regardless of what workspace they occupy, which causes clutter. Another deficiency is not having a desktop indicator on the taskbar instead of the Task View button. On Windows 7 and 8.x, I have been a user of VirtuaWin and this still works largely in the way that I expect of it too, except for any application windows that have some persistence associated with them; the Task Manager is an example and I include some security software in the same category too.
Even so, here are some keyboard shortcuts for anyone who wants to take advantage of the Windows 10 virtual desktop feature:
Otherwise, stability is excellent for a preview of a version of Windows that is early on its road to final release. An upgrade to a whole new build went smoothly when initiated following a prompt from the operating system itself. All installed applications were retained and a new taskbar button for notifications made its appearance alongside the existing Action Centre icon. So far, I am unsure what this does and whether the Action Centre button will be replaced in the fullness of time but I am happy to await where things go with this.
All is polished up to now and there is nothing to suggest that Windows 10 will not be to 8.x what 7 was to Vista. The Start Screen has been dispatched after what has proved to be a misadventure on the part of Microsoft. The PC still is with us and touchscreen devices like tablets are augmenting it instead of replacing it for any tasks involving some sort of creation. If anything, we have seen the PC evolve with laptops perhaps becoming more like the Surface Pro, at least when it comes to hybrid devices. However, we are not as happy smudge our PC screens quite like those on phones and tablets so a return to a more keyboard and mouse centred approach for some devices is a welcome one.
What I have here are just a few observations and there is more elsewhere, including a useful article by Ed Bott on ZDNet. All in all, we are early in the process for Windows 10 and, though it looks favourable so far, I will continue to keep an eye on how it progresses. It needs to be less experimental than Windows 8.x and it certainly is less schizophrenic and should not be a major jump for users of Windows 7.
The release of CentOS 7 stoked my curiosity so I gave it a go in a VirtualBox virtual machine. It uses GNOME Shell in classic mode so the feel is not too far removed from that of GNOME 2. One thing to watch though is that it needs at least version 4.3.14 of VirtualBox or the Guest Additions kernel drivers will not compile at all. That might sound surprising when you learn that the kernel version is 3.10.x and that for GNOME Shell is 3.8.4. Much like Debian production releases, more established versions are chosen for the sake of stability and that fits in with the enterprise nature of the intended user base. Even with that more conservative approach, the results still please the eye though attempting to change the desktop background picture managed to freeze the machine. Other than that, most things work fine.
Even so, there are unexpected things to be encountered and one that I spotted was that network connectivity needed to switched on every time the VM was started. The default installation gives rise to this state of affairs and it is a known situation with CentOS from at least version 6 of the distribution and is not so hard to fix once you know what to do.
What you need to do is look for the relevant configuration file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and update that. Using the ifconfig command, I found that the name of the network interface. Usually, this is something like eth0 but it was enp0s3 in my case so I had to look for a file named ifcfg-enp0s3 and edit that. The text that is sought is ONBOOT=no and that needs to become ONBOOT=yes for network connections to start automatically. To do something similar from the command line, CentOS had suggested the following:
sed -i -e ‘s@^ONBOOT=”no@ONBOOT=”yes@’ ifcfg-enp0s3
The above uses sed to do an inline (and case insensitve) edit of the file to change the offending no to a yes, once you have dropped in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory. My edit was done manually with Gedit so that works too. One thing to add is that any file editing needs superuser privileges so switching to root with the su command and using sudo is in order here.
I have a free subscription to Microsoft‘s Microsoft Learn but with the onset of Vista and the latest issue dangles a carrot in front of me: the idea of a Technet Plus subscription. Trouble is that it is £283 per annum in the UK, not cheap. Nevertheless, that does rather neatly compare to the price of Windows Vista and that comes as part of the package. I think that I’ll revisit the idea when upgrading time comes and that will be a while after the Vista launch date of 30/1/2007. Given the security changes in the latest Windows incarnation, I’ll wait to ensure that I will not be put out too much before making the jump.
When it comes to the technology that I carry with me on trips away, I have begun to start weighing devices on my kitchen scales. The results are a little revealing. The HP Pavilion dm5 that has gone with me to Ireland and other places weighs between 2.5 and 3 kg while my Apple iPad Mini 2 comes in at 764 grams. My 12.9″ iPad Pro with its Logitech keyboard weighs between these at 110 to 1200 grams. The idea of consolidating computing devices for travel has been discussed on here before now and the main thing stopping my just going with the iPad Pro was the viewing of photos without filling up its 32 GB of storage space.
Since then, I just may have found a workaround and it is another gadget, this time weighing only a few hundred grams: a 1 TB WD My Passport Wireless portable hard drive. Aside from having a SD card slot that allows the automatic backup of photos, it also can connect with tablets and phones using WiFi broadband.
It is the WD My Cloud app that makes the connections to mobile devices useful and it works smoothly on iOS and Android devices too. Nevertheless, there is more functionality on the latter ones such as DNG file support and an added slide show feature that works with JPEG files. Both of these are invaluable for viewing photos and I feel a little short-changed that they are not available on iOS. Hopefully, that will get resolved sooner rather than later.
Thankfully, my Pentax K5 II DSLR camera can be persuaded to save DNG and JPEG files simultaneously so that they can be viewed full screen on both types of devices without having to transfer them onto the tablet first as you would with Apple’s SD card reader. Usefully, that gets around my oversight in buying iPads with only 32 GB of storage each. That now looks like a false economy given what I am trying now.
Such is the weight difference, just taking along my Apple iPad Pro and the WD device will save around 1 kg and there is less fuss at airport security screening too. While my HTC phone would suffice for seeing photos as slide shows, I am wondering if my battered Google Nexus 9 could come too. The only dilemma then would be how to pack things since I am not sure how a large iPad screen would seem to cabin crew or other passengers during take off and landing. That makes using the Nexus 9 onboard more of a proposition and the iPad might go into the hold luggage to make life a little easier. Still, that choice is a minor concern now that I can try travelling overseas without a laptop to see how I get along.
There are times when I just need to share some links outside the fleeting environment of Twitter, and this is where they might appear. The practice is very much in the spirit of the original weblog idea when it was about link sharing and not about writing down one’s thoughts as it subsequently became before sharing of photos, videos and other multimedia content became a mainstay of (legal) sharing for some people.
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08:16 November 17, 2021
09:05 November 13, 2021
13:18 November 9, 2021
13:18 November 9, 2021
09:01 November 5, 2021
How to Enable clipboard and folder sharing in Qemu/KVM on Windows Guest
08:59 November 5, 2021
08:50 November 5, 2021
“Error 1067: The process terminated unexpectedly” on Windows 10, 7 & 8
16:38 November 4, 2021
Error: No CurrentVersion entry in Software/JavaSoft registry
10:00 November 4, 2021
20:40 November 2, 2021
20:38 November 2, 2021
20:37 November 2, 2021
20:37 November 2, 2021
13:43 November 2, 2021
How to Change the Default Browser in Windows 11, Even for Widgets and Search
How to Move the Taskbar to the Top in Windows 11
How to Replace the Start Menu in Windows 11
13:57 October 30, 2021
20:09 October 26, 2021
16:15 October 26, 2021
16:15 October 26, 2021
16:14 October 26, 2021
17:09 October 24, 2021
17:09 October 24, 2021
17:08 October 24, 2021
How To Convert VirtualBox Disk Image (VDI) and img to Qcow2 format
17:08 October 24, 2021
17:07 October 24, 2021
17:06 October 24, 2021
21:07 October 22, 2021
How to Enable HTTP/2 in Apache Web Server on Ubuntu and Debian
10:29 October 21, 2021
10:29 October 21, 2021
15:46 October 19, 2021
How to Run Windows 11 on a USB Drive (and Take it With You)
How to Bypass Windows 11’s TPM Requirement and Upgrade from Windows 10
13:12 October 12, 2021
15:31 October 8, 2021
15:30 October 8, 2021
15:29 October 8, 2021
Enable Virtualization-based Protection of Code Integrity in Microsoft Windows
15:28 October 8, 2021
18:25 October 5, 2021
17:05 October 5, 2021
11:47 October 2, 2021
11:46 October 2, 2021
19:21 October 1, 2021
13:26 September 29, 2021
14:48 September 28, 2021
15:14 September 25, 2021
Whitelist an IP using WAF -- ModSecurity Whitelisting IP addresses
10:59 September 25, 2021
14:56 September 24, 2021
14:56 September 24, 2021
09:03 September 24, 2021
09:03 September 24, 2021
09:02 September 24, 2021
09:02 September 24, 2021
13:07 September 23, 2021
13:06 September 23, 2021
13:06 September 23, 2021
09:10 September 23, 2021
09:09 September 23, 2021
17:09 September 22, 2021
17:08 September 22, 2021
17:07 September 22, 2021
17:07 September 22, 2021
09:12 September 22, 2021
16:22 September 21, 2021
08:35 September 20, 2021
Integrating AbuseIPDB with Fail2Ban -- Automatically Report Bad IPs
21:10 September 19, 2021
21:09 September 19, 2021
13:24 September 17, 2021
12:19 September 4, 2021
09:46 September 4, 2021
16:58 August 31, 2021
How to backup and load Cron Jobs from a File in Linux and UNIX? Crontab Command Example
16:58 August 31, 2021
14:19 August 27, 2021
14:19 August 27, 2021
08:46 August 18, 2021
18:26 August 17, 2021
18:26 August 17, 2021
18:25 August 17, 2021
Webmin: One big drawback to using this data centre management tool
10:32 August 13, 2021
18:09 August 12, 2021
18:05 August 12, 2021
How to prevent the “are you sure you want to leave this page?” prompt on Facebook?
18:05 August 12, 2021
Extending a Logical Volume on a Linux Virtual, Cloud or CloudNX server
11:41 August 11, 2021
11:41 August 11, 2021
11:40 August 11, 2021
18:00 July 27, 2021
17:59 July 27, 2021
17:59 July 27, 2021
19:07 July 24, 2021
11:03 July 23, 2021
Change user password in MySQL 5.7 with “plugin: auth_socket”
11:03 July 23, 2021
How to enable AMD Virtualization on the Aorus X570 Motherboard
09:30 July 15, 2021
08:04 July 15, 2021
18:09 July 13, 2021
08:16 July 13, 2021
13:58 July 11, 2021
08:36 July 8, 2021
08:35 July 8, 2021
15:40 July 6, 2021
09:28 July 3, 2021
09:06 July 2, 2021
10:13 July 1, 2021
How to install Windows 11 Insider preview on unsupported devices
14:55 June 28, 2021
13:30 June 24, 2021
23:47 June 5, 2021
16:38 June 3, 2021
13:27 June 3, 2021
10:02 June 1, 2021
11:00 May 28, 2021
10:59 May 28, 2021
10:58 May 28, 2021
10:58 May 28, 2021
10:57 May 28, 2021
dbxcli: A command line tool for Dropbox users and team admins
09:00 May 27, 2021
08:58 May 27, 2021
08:57 May 27, 2021
How to stop loading Microsoft Edge processes at startup on Windows 10
13:50 May 16, 2021
13:49 May 16, 2021
13:46 May 16, 2021
13:42 May 16, 2021
09:34 May 13, 2021
09:33 May 13, 2021
10:47 May 12, 2021
17:01 May 11, 2021
16:55 April 22, 2021
16:54 April 22, 2021
16:48 April 22, 2021
16:48 April 22, 2021
16:47 April 22, 2021
16:46 April 22, 2021
14:19 April 22, 2021
10:02 April 22, 2021
10:00 April 22, 2021
10:00 April 22, 2021
11:37 April 16, 2021
11:37 April 16, 2021
11:36 April 16, 2021
11:33 April 16, 2021
11:32 April 16, 2021
11:30 April 16, 2021
11:30 April 16, 2021
11:29 April 16, 2021
11:29 April 16, 2021
11:16 April 16, 2021
12:52 April 15, 2021
12:59 April 13, 2021
13:08 April 8, 2021
09:42 March 17, 2021
09:09 March 16, 2021
09:08 March 16, 2021
14:06 March 9, 2021
18:38 March 2, 2021
13:48 January 27, 2021
13:46 January 27, 2021
13:39 January 27, 2021
13:38 January 27, 2021
13:37 January 27, 2021
13:35 January 27, 2021
13:34 January 27, 2021
Connecting to Microsoft Exchange Calendar from Mozilla Thunderbird
13:03 January 27, 2021
11:10 January 10, 2021
11:09 January 10, 2021
11:08 January 10, 2021
11:07 January 10, 2021
11:07 January 10, 2021
09:26 January 7, 2021
09:41 December 17, 2020
Using mod_security2 with WordPress
WordPress – Mod_security problems with posts and comments fixed
17:59 December 14, 2020
17:46 December 12, 2020
20:54 December 6, 2020
20:53 December 6, 2020
14:51 November 23, 2020
How to force your computer to download the Windows 10 May 2020 Update
14:44 November 11, 2020
16:00 November 10, 2020
09:18 November 9, 2020
09:27 October 19, 2020
14:16 October 18, 2020
09:31 October 18, 2020
13:36 October 10, 2020
16:12 October 7, 2020
14:59 October 7, 2020
10:55 October 6, 2020
15:15 October 1, 2020
14:03 September 29, 2020
14:02 September 29, 2020
12:36 September 18, 2020
12:35 September 18, 2020
12:34 September 18, 2020
12:33 September 18, 2020
Everything you need to know about DNS -- Plus a list of free public DNS servers
12:27 September 18, 2020
Securing DNS across all of my devices with Pi-Hole + DNS-over-HTTPS + 1.1.1.1
10:47 September 18, 2020
16:11 September 17, 2020
17:04 September 11, 2020
Improve Firefox Performance on Linux by Turning WebRender On
16:46 September 9, 2020
How to Embed an External RSS Feed in WordPress Posts via Shortcode
13:43 July 31, 2020
19:03 July 18, 2020
13:43 July 13, 2020
17:51 July 4, 2020
09:33 June 16, 2020
Linux Mint 20 Blocks Snap App Installs, So Here’s the Workaround
09:30 June 16, 2020
08:11 June 10, 2020
09:31 June 4, 2020
13:48 March 8, 2020
17:11 March 2, 2020
14:27 February 29, 2020
17:05 February 26, 2020
14:55 February 23, 2020
14:51 February 23, 2020
10:35 February 20, 2020
Change User’s MySQL Password | Reset MySQL Root Password Guide
12:38 February 19, 2020
09:35 February 17, 2020
09:34 February 17, 2020
09:32 February 17, 2020
13:14 February 16, 2020
13:10 February 16, 2020
20:34 February 15, 2020
14:29 February 14, 2020
14:29 February 14, 2020
09:46 February 14, 2020
09:45 February 14, 2020
How to move docker data directory to another location on Ubuntu
09:45 February 14, 2020
The Complete Guide to “useradd” Command in Linux – 15 Practical Examples
09:43 February 14, 2020
09:42 February 14, 2020
20:30 February 12, 2020
How to Optimize and Compress JPEG or PNG Images in Linux Command Line
17:41 January 29, 2020
20:21 January 28, 2020
18:37 January 17, 2020
12:45 January 17, 2020
12:44 January 17, 2020
12:43 January 17, 2020
12:43 January 17, 2020
12:42 January 17, 2020
12:41 January 17, 2020
21:01 January 16, 2020
20:59 January 16, 2020
At the time of writing, this website uses an older version of TLS so you may see browser messages on visiting it. Hopefully, that will get sorted since it looks out for a security tool website.
20:57 January 16, 2020
12:19 January 15, 2020
12:17 January 15, 2020
The most important steps to take to make an Apache server more secure
12:17 January 15, 2020
How to Implement Security HTTP Headers to Prevent Vulnerabilities?
12:16 January 15, 2020
21:38 December 31, 2019
21:37 December 31, 2019
14:41 December 24, 2019
14:24 December 24, 2019
How To Protect an Apache Server with Fail2Ban on Ubuntu 14.04
This may refer to an older Ubuntu version but the advice contained in the article remains relevant to current ones. In fact, I have used it to harden some VPS systems that I have. Now, I only need to see what impact this action might have.
13:12 December 23, 2019
16:47 December 6, 2019
16:01 November 26, 2019
21:28 November 7, 2019
15:40 November 7, 2019
12:51 August 31, 2019
22:09 July 6, 2019
14:16 June 11, 2019
14:14 June 11, 2019
14:46 June 10, 2019
10:55 June 8, 2019
How to disable Sign-in screen acrylic (blur) background on Windows 10 May 2019 Update
11:47 May 22, 2019
11:39 January 30, 2019
Psensor – A Graphical Hardware Temperature Monitoring Tool for Linux
13:34 January 29, 2019
20:03 December 8, 2018
How to commit changes to a docker image
Five Ways to Slim Your Docker Images
09:59 December 8, 2018
09:58 December 8, 2018
14:04 December 6, 2018
15:53 December 5, 2018
Show the slide number and total number of slides on every PowerPoint slide
21:28 December 4, 2018
19:53 December 4, 2018
18:03 November 26, 2018
Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using Gmail and Google Apps on Debian or Ubuntu
18:02 November 26, 2018
Configure Postfix to Send Mail Using an External SMTP Server
18:01 November 26, 2018
18:01 November 26, 2018
18:00 November 26, 2018
11:09 November 26, 2018
11:07 November 26, 2018
How to Setup a Complete Mail Server (Postfix) using ‘SquirrelMail’ (Webmail) on Ubuntu/Debian
14:51 November 25, 2018
11:43 November 25, 2018
How to Configure WordPress to Use SMTP For Sending Emails Tutorial
11:42 November 25, 2018
11:41 November 25, 2018
11:41 November 25, 2018
11:39 November 25, 2018
11:38 November 25, 2018
11:38 November 25, 2018
11:37 November 25, 2018
10:51 November 25, 2018
10:45 November 25, 2018
20:31 November 24, 2018
20:30 November 24, 2018
17:44 November 24, 2018
17:37 November 24, 2018
Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS Using .htaccess File: Step by Step
21:45 November 22, 2018
21:43 November 22, 2018
12:10 November 17, 2018
12:08 November 17, 2018
apt-get install linux-image-extra getting “W: mdadm: /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf defines no arrays.”
12:04 November 17, 2018
15:40 November 4, 2018
Here are the 13 most useful Mac shortcuts that will help you do everything faster
11:02 October 21, 2018
09:05 October 13, 2018
11:48 September 22, 2018
16:12 September 20, 2018
Use an Easy PowerShell Command to Search Files for Information
12:20 September 19, 2018
10:06 September 9, 2018
21:18 August 5, 2018
13:42 July 22, 2018
17:27 July 21, 2018
14:27 July 15, 2018
16:27 July 13, 2018
10:13 June 25, 2018
11:35 June 21, 2018
17:17 June 8, 2018
12:24 June 8, 2018
15:13 May 31, 2018
15:13 May 31, 2018
20:48 May 29, 2018
20:47 May 29, 2018
11:02 May 28, 2018
10:26 May 28, 2018
09:54 May 28, 2018
16:02 May 25, 2018
Performance optimizations you can apply today to load the Matomo JavaScript tracker faster
16:01 May 25, 2018
Different ways of embedding the Matomo tracking code for faster website performance
11:24 May 16, 2018
23:18 May 13, 2018
23:15 May 13, 2018
23:13 May 13, 2018
11:02 May 12, 2018
10:59 May 12, 2018
10:52 May 12, 2018
10:32 May 12, 2018
10:30 May 12, 2018
10:27 May 12, 2018
21:42 May 5, 2018
12:23 April 18, 2018
How to troubleshoot the error code “SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER” on secure websites
09:34 April 15, 2018
10:08 April 14, 2018
22:25 April 13, 2018
18:20 April 10, 2018
Write your best resume in Word with help from LinkedIn in Resume Assistant
09:59 March 29, 2018
16:37 March 28, 2018
15:58 March 28, 2018
14:12 March 28, 2018
14:00 March 28, 2018
10:35 March 27, 2018
10:33 March 27, 2018
14:03 March 26, 2018
14:05 March 17, 2018
14:01 March 17, 2018
13:59 March 17, 2018
11:11 March 17, 2018
13:53 March 7, 2018
10:17 November 25, 2017
10:17 November 16, 2017
Diving Into the New Gutenberg WordPress Editor (Pros and Cons)
19:11 November 15, 2017
19:09 November 15, 2017
16:44 October 31, 2017
23:34 October 25, 2017
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
23:32 October 25, 2017
23:31 October 25, 2017
19:20 October 24, 2017
19:19 October 24, 2017
19:18 October 24, 2017
23:37 October 22, 2017
23:36 October 22, 2017
23:32 October 22, 2017
23:31 October 22, 2017
23:30 October 22, 2017
23:29 October 22, 2017
23:25 October 22, 2017
10:19 October 14, 2017
17:03 October 7, 2017
17:01 October 7, 2017
Get rid of those extra TIFFs & PSDs in your Lightroom Library fast!
11:57 September 15, 2017
09:47 September 11, 2017
09:45 September 11, 2017
17:11 August 13, 2017
14:21 July 22, 2017
12:13 July 8, 2017
20:03 July 1, 2017
18:58 June 21, 2017
17:03 April 24, 2017
12:01 April 2, 2017
Windows 7: Windows 7 Not Updating
Windows Update error “0x80070002” or “0x80070003”
Fix Windows Update errors by using the DISM or System Update Readiness tool
18:17 March 22, 2017
23:25 March 12, 2017
22:08 March 7, 2017
Review: Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 (and how to make it work in Ubuntu)
11:14 February 25, 2017
18:38 February 16, 2017
18:34 February 16, 2017
10:35 February 5, 2017
00:45 December 3, 2016
16:02 July 18, 2016
18:21 June 9, 2016
15:22 May 13, 2016
15:13 January 15, 2016
Get rid of the annoying formatting pop-up when you paste in Word
11:15 December 5, 2015
16:23 December 4, 2015
14:08 December 3, 2015
14:07 December 3, 2015
22:16 November 12, 2015
11:08 November 12, 2015
Fedora 23/22/21 nVidia Drivers Install Guide
09:56 October 30, 2015
20:15 October 29, 2015
20:10 October 29, 2015
20:06 October 29, 2015
21:01 October 2, 2015
22:02 September 28, 2015
11:28 August 7, 2015
16:14 July 27, 2015
11:18 July 24, 2015
18:40 July 10, 2015
15:16 July 9, 2015
18:41 July 6, 2015
07:24 July 2, 2015
The Command Prompt is Outdated: 2 Command Prompt Replacements for Windows
6 Great Windows 10 Features You Can Get Today on Windows 7 or 8
07:35 June 23, 2015
20:12 June 18, 2015
12:08 May 8, 2015
20:00 May 4, 2015
20:00 May 4, 2015
11:07 May 4, 2015
10:51 May 1, 2015
10:44 April 16, 2015
10:39 April 13, 2015
09:45 April 12, 2015
09:45 April 12, 2015
15:04 April 11, 2015
12:42 April 6, 2015
14:01 April 3, 2015
How to fix “System program problem detected” error on Ubuntu
19:27 March 28, 2015
11:34 March 27, 2015
11:21 March 27, 2015
11:04 March 27, 2015
16:51 March 26, 2015
16:53 March 18, 2015
04:00 March 7, 2015
02:39 March 5, 2015
Google Translate CLI Lets You Translate Text From The Command Line
01:51 March 5, 2015
23:19 February 21, 2015
14:25 February 19, 2015
11:56 February 16, 2015
22:29 February 9, 2015
15:45 February 5, 2015
Switch Windows by Hovering the Mouse Over a Window in Windows 7 or Vista
10:32 February 4, 2015
15:30 January 30, 2015
10:17 January 21, 2015
12:56 December 31, 2014
10:05 December 11, 2014
17:05 December 9, 2014
16:22 December 6, 2014
18:45 December 5, 2014
The crop tool is stuck in a fixed shape. How can I make it work properly?
14:55 November 26, 2014
22:12 November 18, 2014
How To Install MATE Desktop on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Cinnamon 2.4 Debuts With New Features, Here’s How To Install It In Ubuntu
FSF-Endorsed Linux Distro ‘Trisquel 7.0′ Released
19:53 November 11, 2014
21:54 November 4, 2014
21:52 November 4, 2014
22:30 October 30, 2014
21:34 June 11, 2014
18:57 January 24, 2014
Archive area of old releases of Java for those who need them.