Free Friday! I found a virus and malware free screensaver that's just gorgeous. This is what Arial will look like on your desktop. Check it out on Github.
Happy Friday! I'm here to spread some freedom!
In May (weekend of the 4th and 5th) Firefox had a problem that broke almost of their extensions. I am a heavy user of those extensions. The loss of those extensions broke the internet for me. It left me using Chrome and Chromium, which isn't bad, but it's not what I prefer. So, I decided to give Waterfox, a fork of Firefox, a try! I also said that I'd give you all an update on my experiences with various browsers. I've been using Waterfox as a daily browser since May and I love it. It behaves exactly like Firefox and I'm able to use all of my lovely extensions. Some of the extensions take a bit of fiddling, but if you aren't a power user, you probably won't need to. One of the nice things about Waterfox is the lack of corporate apps included on install. There's no Pocket. I like it because it lends itself to choice and risk. It doesn't tell you what you are allowed to do because you will be taking a risk. I can easily install extensions and plug-ins that are not on the Firefox white-list. Waterfox treats you like a grown-up. In addition to the extensions available at the Mozilla site, Waterfox maintains a collection of archived addons. The devs are responsive and have a subReddit for support. They post frequently on their blog. Waterfox is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. All in all, it's a great substitute for Firefox. It's Friday! Yay!
Is there anyone who hasn't heard of (Get)Paint.net? You haven't? Oh my. You are in for a treat. Have you ever looked at Adobe Photoshop and thought that it would be nice, but it's too expensive? Looked at Microsoft Paint and said to yourself, "Well, it's okay for making 4chan memes." GetPaint(dot)net is in between. It's free and it's a powerful, yet simple image and photo editor tool. It's extendable and has loads of intuitive features, including easy to use special effects. There is clear documentation and support for a wide userbase, including an active online community that posts tutorials and plugins. I used GetPaint.net when back I used Windows and I was always happy with the program. If you are looking for a full-featured, native image editing program that's free and a step up from MS Paint, but not quite Photoshop (or The GIMP), GetPaint.net is probably what you are looking for. Click on the screenshot below to take you to GetPaint(dot)Net. Have you ever tried to upload a photo or other image only to have them rejected because of size? I certainly have. It's annoying.
There's a remedy for that at Online Image Compressor. It's super simple to use. Just drop your image or images into the area marked "Drop Your Files Here" or click on the button "Upload Files" and let the image compressor do the magic. When it is done, you will see a comparison of the original and compressed images. You will have a choice of redoing the compression or uploading a zip file of the image or images that you've compressed. When you are happy, upload the images and unzip them. They should be small enough to share them on the website of your choice. I was able to reduce two images of over 8mb to around 430K. There was color loss and some edges were jagged, but it was more than acceptable for the reduced size! The ZIP file went through a VirusTotal scan before being opened and came back clean. It contained two images, which was exactly what I expected. The website has a couple of sane, still advertisements and no pop-ups on Firefox with no adblocking. The instructions and site tools are clearly separate from the ads. It's Friday and time for something free! Today, it's a great website for kids.
I'm not sure how many people know about the odd problem that YouTube had a while ago with kid's videos. It was a strange one. Mixed in with perfectly ordinary kid videos were bizarre Elsa/Spiderman/Joker/Etc videos with adult themes of self-harm, inappropriate toileting, strange pregnancy and sexual innuendo. YouTube has tried to slap down the offenders, but the videos are still popping up occasionally on the YouTube Kids feeds. The feeds are auto-generated by an algorithm rather than curated by humans, so yeah, that's going to happen. Parents have to be super aware of what their kids are watching on YouTube Kids because it can get weird really fast when it moves to the next video on auto-play. This site is the remedy to that. The Kid Should See This is an awesome site with all kinds of educational and fun videos curated by real humans. You can hoover over any of the categories at the top and you will be treated to a drop down of a few videos in that category. Click on it and see a plethora of educational and fun videos like "Playing Piano Under A Sleeping Cat" in the music category. Clicking on Random is also fun. There are also curated collections by the staff. They include topics like Legos, The Human Body and Poop (but not the inappropriate kind as above). Or just click on the first link you come to and follow the links below. I watched "The Very Hungry Maggot" thinking that if I was going to get something that kids would like, it would be this. Yep, starts out with puppies as a sort of eye-bleach at the beginning and then you go to a lab dealing with the food-chain. We eat chicken, maggots eat our food waste and chickens eat maggots. Beautifully explained with squiggly, wriggly maggots. The ads are small and unintrusive. Clicking on one, even by accident will not result in unintended consequences. Give the site a try. Hand it to your kid on your tablet, laptop or even your phone. It's really cool. It's yet another FOSS Friday! This is a long one and I'm breaking it up into parts.
While reloading Windows 7 on a very old, very slow 32-bit laptop yesterday I got my first pop-up saying that support for Win7 will be ending in January of 2020. It's sad for sure. Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS that I used and I still like it quite a bit. But, we all have to move on and update to new things in the digital world. There is no standing still. OTOH, there's an incredible amount of waste out there with old computers that simply can't handle the new operating systems and the tremendous amount of CPU power that is required to keep them running. Sure, you can upgrade to Win8 or Win10, but will your computer handle all of that? It might. But probably not. You can't make Windows 10 run on a computer that was made to run Windows XP. It's just not going to happen. Fortunately, there's an answer for outdated hardware that still functions like it was meant to - And old hardware can have a very long life. The answer is Linux. There are a lot of distros (Short for distribution, distro is a term used to describe a specific distribution of Linux that is built from the common Linux operating system and includes additional applications. Red Hat, Debian and SuSe are all examples of a distro. - From Webopedia) out there. Some are high end and run rings around Win10 for productivity and looking good. (They are also much more private.) There are also distros that are specifically made for old computers that simply can't run all of the things modern tech throws at them. One of my favorites is Peppermint OS. It's a gorgeous OS that I have on my little Toshiba laptop that was made in the mid-00s. The laptop is 32-bit, has 3.5 gigs of RAM and has 80 gigs of storage. When we took it in, it was running XP. Badly. It ran out of memory and crashed frequently. It couldn't handle basic tasks with all the things that XP needs to keep running in the background. So, I installed Peppermint 6 (the most recent at the time). It ran beautifully. Peppermint OS is a small footprint distro that's easy to use straight away. Install it and go. Everything you need is right in front of you. The desktop is intuitive for Windows users with an easy walk through to set up your desktop and explore with a Whiskers Menu at the bottom (it looks like the Win7 start button). See the image below. Peppermint is also very kid friendly and it can be run from a USB if you want to experiment with it. If you like what you've heard and seen so far, stop by the shop to check out an older computer running Peppermint 9 (the current version). We think you will like what you see! |
The Authors
Tim and Joy Clines are the upkeepers here. Please subscribe. Archives
May 2021
Categories
All
|