Category: software

Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox

I’ve been reviewing several Intel Bay Trail, Cherry Trail, and Braswell mini PCs in the last year or so, and I always end up recommending Microsoft Edge browser over Firefox or Chrome for people wanting to watch YouTube videos, as the last two browsers always drop many frames with the video stuttering regularly. However I noticed that while Edge is playing MP4/AVC (H.264) video, the other two browser would normally stream WebM/VP9 videos, and it could be the cause of the problem as H.264 can be hardware accelerated, but VP9 not, and the low power processor might not quite powerful enough to handle 1080p VP9 video decoding smoothly.

Source: Improve YouTube Video Playback on Low Power Intel mini PCs by Disabling VP9 Support in Chrome or Firefox (CNXSoft – Embedded Systems News)

Make live bootable flash drive or SD card disks easily with Etcher

NOTE: The article referenced below is about the Linux version, but the program itself is cross-platform, with Linux, Mac, and Windows versions available.

Making live USB disks on Linux has always been hit or miss. You could use dd and the command line, and it’s mostly a good tool, but a lot of times the dd tool can destroy a drive. Other GUI tools like Unetbootin or Gnome disks are good too, but they’re mostly hit or miss, and sometimes the flashing gets messed up.

This is why Etcher is such a great tool. It’s elegant, so anyone can use it easily, and it doesn’t mess up when you flash an image. There is no more making a bootable flash drive with Unetbootin only to find out that a .c32 menu file is missing or some other error.

Source: Make Linux Live Disks Easily with Etcher (Make Tech Easier)
Software web site: http://www.etcher.io/

The thing we like most about this software, besides the fact that it’s free, is that it is smart enough to try to prevent you from accidentally overwriting one of your hard drives by mistake! And also, we like the fact that the Linux version is packaged as an AppImage, which means it should just run on whatever Linux distribution you use, once you have set permissions. At the worst you may need to install FUSE, if it’s not already installed in your distribution. That only applies to the Linux version; the OS X and Windows versions are installed just like any normal software package for those platforms.

We can think of several other Linux applications that we wish were packaged like this, particularly ones that have a higher than usual risk of breakage any time you apply an update. But, that’s a whole other article for another time.

Free Driver Lets You Print From Any Program to a PDF File

If you ever read PDF files on your computer and you don’t have the official (free but huge) Adobe program installed, it’s a fair bet that you’re using Nitro PDF instead. This free program, loved by tens of millions of people around the world, opens PDF files quickly and efficiently but doesn’t suffer from the unnecessary bloat that the Adobe product does.

Source: Free Driver Lets You Print From Any Program to a PDF File | Gizmo’s Freeware

Get Weather Information From A Terminal Using Nothing But cURL

wttr.in is a web frontent for Wego, a weather app for the terminal. Using nothing but cURL and wttr.in, you can get weather information from a terminal, without having to install anything (well, except for cURL).

Source: Get Weather Information From A Terminal Using Nothing But cURL ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog (Web Upd8)

Quitter for Mac Automatically Quits or Hides Apps After Inactivity 

Mac: It’s easy to let the amount of Mac apps you have open at any given time spin out of control. Quitter’s an app from Instapaper developer Marco Arment that’ll quit or hide any app you want after a period of inactivity.

Source: Quitter for Mac Automatically Quits or Hides Apps After Inactivity  (Lifehacker)

Stop Opera’s New VPN from Leaking Your IP Address

Last week, Opera added a VPN to the dev version of its browser, which was certainly good news. The bad news is that unlike the more robust VPNs it tries to replace, it leaks data that should be encrypted all over the place, namely your private IP address. Here’s how to fix it.

Source: Stop Opera’s New VPN from Leaking Your IP Address (Lifehacker)

10 Easy Ways to Restore Your Linux System

Reverting your operating system to a previous state without consequences sounds almost like magic. You can quickly return to your work as if nothing happened, even when you don’t know what caused the problem. That’s why the System Restore feature is among the top things ex-Windows users want from Linux. Some go as far as proclaiming that Linux will never be as good as Windows because it lacks System Restore.

(Or as good as OS X because it lacks an equivalent to Time Machine, which was around long before Windows added System Restore.)

Those users should read the manual, or even better, this article, because today we’ll present the tools that bring System Restore functionality to Linux. True, they’re not always available by default, but neither is System Restore in Windows 10. You could also argue that they don’t behave exactly the same as their Windows counterpart, but then again, the way System Restore works changed between Windows versions.

Source: 10 Easy Ways to Restore Your Linux System (MakeUseOf)

With Snaps, Ubuntu 16.04 Makes App Updates Easier, Secure

One of the (few) sucky things about sticking with an Ubuntu LTS release is when newer versions of apps you love are released and you can’t install them.

Well, prepare to bid that pang of disappointment goodbye.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will come with support for Canonical’s (relatively new) Snap packaging format.

Snaps are the aspirin to the headache of dependency-addled app upgrades.

Source: With Snaps, Ubuntu 16.04 Makes App Updates Easier, Secure (OMG! Ubuntu!)
Related: Adding snaps for secure, transactional packages in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Ubuntu Insights)