There’s a new version of the Debian 8 Jessie series. The latest release is Debian version 8.7 which includes 87 miscellaneous bug fixes and 86 security updates. If you’re running version Debian 8 now, the updates are going to be automatic. If you’re new to Debian, you can install the fresh Debian version by downloading it directly from Debian.com.
Intel i7-7700K
Intel just released their seventh generation of CPUs called Kaby Lake. If you read the latest reviews of the new chip sets, the improvement over Skylake is not much. It’s essentially the same CPUs with slightly faster clock speeds. However, the latest chips will have support for 4k media, allowing you to play 4k Netflix. The i7-7700K looks like the direct replacement for the i7-6700K, with higher clocks speeds at 4.2 Ghz and boost at 4.5 Ghz. Benchmarks are slightly higher. If you already own i7-6700K Skylake, there’s no reason to upgrade, but if you own an older CPU, then it makes sense to purchase the i7-7700K for $40 dollars more.
Drought Is Over
The drought in California is over! Five years of very little rain. This year is another story. It feels like it hasn’t stopped raining since October. And we barely into winter. Last year was supposed to be El Nino year for California, but it didn’t rain much. This year, California has received more rain on a non-El Nino year. NOAA just made the announcement that the drought is over. However, a large swat of Southern California continue to remain in drought. In the north, most major reservoirs are above average. Heavenly Ski area received 12 feet of new snow just this past week.
Norway Killing FM
Norwegian officials have decided to replace FM with DAB or Digital Audio Broadcasting. The decision is a move towards the digital age over the older FM analog format. Hurray for progress! Norwegian officials are saying that the move will save broadcasters over $23 million dollars. In addition, it will give listeners a clearer digital sound.
Sixty six percent of Norwegians are oppose to the move, mainly because many Norwegians cars don’t have DAB receivers. Hey, nothing like listening to your voters! To get around the problem, DBA adapters can be installed in cars for $176. Ouch! But, a business opportunity for someone to make money. At the end of the year, there will be 15 million FM useless radios in Norway.
Here’s the the article from Mashable.
Leaving Yahoo Mail
Yahoo Mail has been hacked numerous times the last couple of years leaving me with no recourse but to abandon it. I’ve used my Yahoo account for years, signing up on just about everything that had a presence online. So, it was extremely important for me that I stop using Yahoo Mail for my security.
Over the last couple of months, I have been slowly switching my online accounts over to another email. The migration has been slow and an arduous process. It took me roughly a couple months to complete the migration. Here’s how I did it.
- First, I cleared all spam.
- I then deleted all emails that were not important to me, including what was in the Send folder.
- I compiled a list of important websites that had my Yahoo account.
- I logged in to those sites and changed them to my new email address.
- I kept all the important email messages and placed them on a couple of folders.
- I then archived them and secured them to a local drive.
- I then deleted all the remaining messages on my Yahoo account. It now has zero messages.
- However, the account is still active. I need it for my Yahoo Fantasy Football. 🙂
- Occasionally, I still get email, but nothing of anything important.
Amazon Light Sail
Amazon announced today a new product called Light Sail. It’s a virtual machine that’s preconfigured with either Amazon Linux AMI or Ubuntu Server. It’s comes with SSD storage, DNS management and a static IP address.
You can choose your developer stack whether it’s LAMP, LEMP, MEAN or Node.js. You can then run applications such as Drupal, Joomla, Redmine, Gitlab and countless others.
The pricing is flat-rate starting at $5 per month all the way up to $80 per month depending on number of vCPUs, memory and storage.
Running small virtual machines was an impediment to most independent developers due to steep price of running EC2 instances. With Light Sail, it opens up for smaller websites to be hosted at Amazon.
Read Amazon’s blog about the new Light Sail offering.
Mozilla 2015 Revenue Report
Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser reported that it made $421 million dollars in 2015. The reporting is one year behind. It’s not bad for a browser with a market share of just 11 percent. Google Chrome dominates the browser market at 55% followed by Internet Explorer at 23% and Microsoft Edge at 5%.
Netflix Offline Player
Netflix is now allowing certain movies to be downloaded and watched offline. It’s perfect if you’re on a plane or on the road when you don’t always have access to a fast internet connection. Netflix allows you to choose between standard or high quality. Standard quality is lower resolution, smaller size, and faster to download. The high quality is much more sharper, a larger file size, and you need a longer time to download. Here’s the official announcement from Netflix.
Hackers Can Steal a Tesla
Hacking a Tesla car from the Android phone is possible:
Hacking a Tesla is a thing we’ve seen before, but this time a team of security researchers at company Promon managed to locate, unlock, and steal a car using just an Android app. Every Tesla model comes with a companion smartphone application for Android and iOS that allows owners to do basic things such as checking the battery level and the charging status, locate the vehicle, and flash the lights to find it in the parking lot. And while these certainly come in handy, they can also be used by hackers to drive away by simply compromising the Android application.
Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Officially Released
Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop is now available:
Later, we were also the first to report on the first point release of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, but now everything is official. “On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.2,” said Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, in the official release announcement.
There are many goodies shipping with the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, and among the most exciting ones we can mention support for vertical panels, sound effects for notifications, revamped Keyboard applet, Qt 5.7 support, setting for the new menu animations, a brand-new screensaver, and many Nemo and Control Center changes.