Tech Updates Mid-February 2016

I think I got DNSMasq working as intended. All I really wanted was an internal name caching server to speed DNS queries. I could have gone the route of Bind9 but that’s just a little heavyweight for mere name-caching. So now stuff is loading in my browsers a little quicker than before.

Speaking of browsers, I’m pleased with what I see in the Vivaldi browser project. I don’t care for the hype on their website, but I do like the strong effort to bring back some of the better features in the old Opera browser and it runs on 32-bit, unlike the new Opera browser. But Vivaldi is in Beta, so it’s a little rough around the edges. Still, all the extensions from Chrome install and work just fine.

The Mozilla Project itself and their Firefox browser is compromising too much with advertisers. They’ve decided to take money from the floundering Yahoo and made some anti-user choices because of it. Defaults are going to annoy anyone privacy conscious and will be increasingly difficult to change. Good features are being outright removed. So your best bet is Seamonkey or Pale Moon because they do not depend on advertiser dollars. Seamonkey is currently a little easier to update when the time comes, but Pale Moon has a nice set of features that includes removing Firefox junk that nobody wants. Most of the add-ons work, too. If you run Debian, Iceweasel is still safe.

I find it almost funny that the older Opera series (12.16) is a much smarter mail client than anything else I’ve used recently. For example, it pulls IMAP from Gmail faster than Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Evolution, etc. For Windows you can download a current version of Opera Mail that is essentially the free standing version of the same client. There are some limitations (still no support for in-line encryption) but it works for my needs. The older browser functions okay, but chokes on some of the heavy JScript sites.

I messed up something on the FTP server, as I found when someone actually tried to use the guest account. You have to understand that once you enable that service on a Linksys router, the guest account is almost wide open; the default password is “guest.” You can’t delete the account, but you can assign a more secure password. However, I forgot to assign a folder on the external hard drive as the properly designated shared files folder. That seems to work now (thanks for your patience, Benjamin).

Here’s a frightening thought: I may actually figure out what I’m doing one of these days.