December 2017

You cSo, every year we see commercials for just about every type of Christmas gift one can think of...The sports equipment, the cars, the romantic getaway...

But what about the Linuxbeard guy behind the twelve monitors? What do you get him? Well, here are some awesome gift ideas for the techy we all know!

Star Wars Linux T-shirt

Reddit Wallpaper Changer is a free program for Microsoft's Windows operating system that pulls wallpaper images from Reddit to set them as the desktop background on Windows PCs.

Reddit is a treasure trove for all kinds of images including wallpapers. The site has hundreds of groups that focus on desktop wallpapers; many cater to different audiences that like space, nature or animal wallpapers, and some are general types of groups.

Vivaldi Technologies AS, the company behind the Vivaldi web browser, released a first build of the browser for Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based Linux devices today.

Vivaldi browser is currently available for the desktop operating systems Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

The new version, called Vivaldi for Linux ARM, adds ARM-based Linux devices such as the Raspberry PI 3 to the list of supported devices.

Mozilla plans to introduce Off-Main-Thread painting in the next stable version of the Firefox browser to improve the browser's performance significantly.

Basically, what Mozilla did was move rasterization to its own thread. When Firefox renders a web page, certain activities happen in the background.

Three of the four, making a display list, assigning layers and rasterization, happen in the main thread, while compositing happens in a separate thread.

CyberSight, a new computer security company based in California, released the first version of the anti-ransomware software RansomStopper yesterday.

RansomStopper is available as a free version for non-commercial use, and a paid version for commercial and Enterprise use.

The program is compatible with Windows 7 and newer versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and CyberSight promises that it will stop ransomware before encryption of data occurs.

If you run a device that is powered by Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, you may have noticed already, or not, that the system's update functionality may be broken completely.

A check for updates returns the error message "Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer".  The error 80248015 is displayed, but anything you try to resolve the issue on your end fails.

The developer of the popular Classic Shell application for Microsoft's Windows operating system released the last version of the program yesterday.

Classic Shell is a free program for Windows that restores classic versions of the Windows Start Menu, Explorer, Internet Explorer and Shell on user request.

It is used by many to restore the classic Windows 7 start menu on Windows 8.1 or 10 machines, and also to bring back the classic look to other core parts of the operating system.

Script Safe, a popular extension for the Google Chrome web browser, has been ported to the Firefox web browser by its author.

Tip: check out our review of Script Safe for Chrome if you use the browser, or another Chromium-based browser.

DNSTrails is a new Internet service that provides you with the tools to find any domain someone owns among other things.

The service has more to offer than that, as you may use it to display IP neighborhoods, display DNS and Whois records of any domain, and historical DNS data.

Microsoft removed updating controls when it released the Windows 10 operating systems so that it has become less trivial to set the updating process to manual or disable updates altogether. This is true especially when it comes to Windows 10 Home.

One of the better solutions to regain controls over updates was to disable the Windows Update service, and enable it only when you wanted the system to find and install updates.

Microsoft changed that workaround in the Fall Creators Update version of Windows 10 however closing that loophole effectively.