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Category: Update (Page 4 of 7)

How to restore Firefox Quantum passwords after an update?

2019-05-10 / / 0 Comments
The new Firefox is amazing, it’s been renamed Quantum since version 57 back in 2017. I used to use an add – on to import and export passwords, however it’s no longer supported in the new version of Firefox.

An update that does some damage!

However I’ve noticed that sometimes after an update, the saved passwords are erased, and I have to enter them manually, which is a real pain!

How to import and export passwords without an add – on?

There is a very simple way which is creating a Firefox account and using that to sync your information across different devices: Passwords, bookmarks and history.

You must have more than one device for this method to work: Your phone and your computer for example. Or two computers: Your work computer and your house computer.

The fix

From the main menu go to: Edit Preferences Sync

Click Disconnect, then sign again with your login information. Firefox will sync the information from the other device and you will get back your passwords in no time!
Please note that clicking disconnect would erase any data you had stored in Firefox, so watch it!

Final words

That’s how you restore saved passwords and bookmarks for Firefox Quantum. I hope you found this post useful. Please leave a comment if you have a question.

Metamorphosis

2019-03-29 / / 0 Comments
No, this isn’t the a review of the novella by Franz Kafka! I’m addressing some personal changes and feel like reflecting on them in this post.

 

Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis

People come and go

This is a difficult one to process – for me at least – , that the people in my life are temporary – In sense everything is – and for that reason, I must not rejoice when new people enter my life, or feel like it ended when others leave my life. I started to think of it more like a public transit vehicle where people come on the cart and others go off of it. I also left some people’s life and left a place, that’s how things go.


I’m not always right

While this one seems like a no-brainer, it took me a while to comprehend that the other party might have a more convincing argument than mine, and that I might be completely wrong. It’s true that I’ve been treated unfairly in the past, however that doesn’t mean I have a fair cause all the time!

The change is real!

I no longer resemble my former self, I have enough self awareness to tell that much. Am I better or worse however? Have I made progress or have I regressed as a person? I cannot answer this clearly from this perspective and level of consciousness. Quite frankly I don’t know what to think or how to feel about these changes? Should I succumb to the overwhelming changes?  Or should I resist and hold on to scraps of an old identity?

“The only constant in life is constant change”

Trying to resist change is a change in itself – no matter how nonsensical this phrase sounds -, people change and I am no exception to the winds of change. It’s both exciting and terrifying to morph into someone new, even if it happened gradually and almost unnoticeably.

“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.”

I am a result of my actions and choices. All those little things I gave no thought, and the major life changing events fall like the sand in an hourglass, shaping my identity and the course for the rest of my life. And that is something I must learn how to deal with.

The path

If things were as simple as having two clear paths to choose from, one for the “light” and the other for the “dark”. Life is so much more complicated than a binary choice setup, and the former choices are often shrouded in doubts and clouded in mystery.
I only hope that when the dust settles, I maintain what matters of myself and lose all negative traits and flaws. The term purify by fire comes to mind.

A complete transformation

In moments of weakness I prayed to wake up changed into another man, stronger and more confidant in myself. Such a drastic change can’t possibly occur overnight. If only things were that simple!
However as the old saying goes: “Careful of what you wish for”.. Now the wish is granted, but not for the man who made the said wish!
With change our motives and wishes change as well, that’s why timing is critical, I do believe that dreams and wishes have an expiry date to them ..


Searching for the holy grail

A question I ask myself often is: “Who am I?”. I am beginning to think that there is no definite answer for this question. Identity is ever changing. ever shifting, being shaped by everything a man encounters and experiences. The answer itself changes from the time the question is asked to another.
Finding the one true answer would be like finding the holy grail, the greatest treasure a man could find in himself.

Until the day I find what I’m looking for, I’ll continue asking, searching and growing.

I’m back to using Atom Editor

2018-07-02 / / 0 Comments
Not a fan of the green icon.

Life is all about discovery, learning and not being afraid of making mistakes, with that being said, I say that I’m back to using Atom after a rocky relationship, of love and hate!

Why I am bothering to give Atom a second chance, the reasons are detailed below.



1. The only “free” editor of the bunch.

I’ve identified Sublime text as the best text editor for development purpose, let’s not forget that Sublime is not free, I know that they allowed using it for those who are under-privileged, but it’s still a Freemium that costs 70$ (free if you can handle the annoying pop up telling you to register every now and then), after changing the licensing plans in early 2018, I don’t know the current status of Sublime text and don’t care very much to be honest!
Atom editor is free and open source under the MIT license, and despite of Microsoft making a money grab for GitHub, Atom will remain free and open source for everyone to enjoy.

2. It’s down right beautiful!

Of all the text editors available on Linux (I use Linux on my everyday laptop), Atom the best looking of the bunch! Not just the color schemes and themes, everything in Atom is designed to look awesome, from user interface to the website, even the shirts and mugs look great (never got any but my birthday is coming up ;), and the user experience is great, even compared to Microsoft VS code (who is based on coffee script and javascript as well), despite my love for efficiency, I value a beautiful GUI. 

Atom Editor interface
Ain’t that a beauty?

3. Very customizable

Atom has a ton of themes and packages available for download, which makes it more expandable and versatile, and with some knowledge you can develop your own themes and packages, all what you need to know is in the Atom flight manual (released in 2015 but still very informative). You can even change the key-map of Atom to whatever editor you migrated from and customize it as you like to decrease the learning curve.

Package installer interface

4. Ease of use

User experience should be always considered when evaluating software, and VIM for example despite being the most efficient and the most praised text editor in all of the Linux ecosystem, however it’s not easy to use at all, the learning curve is steep, I read the book titled “A byte of VIM“, but I still don’t see why or how can it be better than Atom or anything, as I don’t do anything “professional” with VIM. As a matter of fact, I’m not too keen on the whole terminal as a one tool for all.

5. Consumes more resource, so what?

Yes, Atom is heavier than Sublime or VIM, but does it really matter at this point? In the year 2018 laptops are getting faster and RAM is getting bigger, a few hundred megabytes almost seem like nothing when considering all the reasons mentioned above, it might not be the most resource efficient, but it’s the most usable editor of the bunch.
A well tweaked laptop (both hardware and software) can handle Atom like a breeze, and it’s getting better as time goes by. Speed won’t be an issue if you use an SSD (although using an SSD in itself can be an issue at times!), you could say it’s the price of enjoying a beautiful interface and ease of use.
Besides, converting to a less consuming Linux distro has spared some memory to spend (I’ll blog about it later and link back).

6. The devil you know!

I’ve been using Atom (On and Off) for the past three years, I’ve read the Atom flight manual and even reviewed it on my blog in a few posts (this is the fifth), so for the most part I’ll stick to Atom being the familiar editor that I’ve known and loved (sort of) for the past three years. I’m not alone, as it’s one of the most popular text editors on Alternativeto.

Have you ever used Atom before? What are your impressions about it? What do you use to edit prose and code, and if you use VIM, please take your rants to /r/VIM, because they would be appreciated better by fellow VIM zealots than me.

And yes, this post was written in Atom 1.28, so that you know!

Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS released

2016-02-28 / / 0 Comments
Ubuntu 14.04.4 was recently released and it comes with a bunch of bug fixes and security features since 14.04.3

What are the new features in this release?

  • Support for new hardware and stability.
  • One of the hardware features that really captured my eye is the Hardware stack,.
  • Ubuntu 14.04.04 had the same kernel as Willy werewolf 15.10 of Linux 4.2, which is a huge jump from the 3.19 that Ubuntu 14.04.03 has! 

I confirmed that myself by typing in the commanduname -r into terminal after install. I decided to download Ubuntu Gnome 14.04.04 and give it a test on a virtual machine before installing it, the test was encouraging so I decided to install it.

But, what about 16.04?

I could just wait for Ubuntu 16.04 to roll out in April, but I had too much issues going on anyway. The reason is I had so much troubles with my system, I couldn’t continue with it they way it was. So I decided to remove the system I had and install a fresh one.

The end of Dual booting!!

To make space for the distro I decided to drop Windows and the idea of dual booting all together, did you notice I even changed my domain a while back? It’s just not working for me. I found myself constantly jumping from one OS to the other, as I had two systems, two documents, and two bookmarks, and syncing those wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. I was dysfunctional and unorganized, almost the same of having two laptops running side by side, which was the main reason to start the dualboot saga! I use the same tools on Ubuntu and Windows, so having two instances of LibreOffice and Gimp isn’t really working! 

Virtualization

Since I don’t own licenses to software (except Windows itself) it made the decision much easier to follow. I have a solution, visualization! Instead of having two systems living side by side, I decided to move the Windows license to the virtual machine I made, and then to delete the partition all together, because I barley use Windows anymore, but at the same time I could use it, so that’s why I’m using Virtualbox, for the moments I wish I had Windows. I had a clear plan and I was on to execute.

Getting to work!

I decided to remove Windows, install the new Ubuntu and make sure it had plenty of space to run. Deactivating Windows I started by following the steps in this post, which was easy because I have done it several times before, I removed the activation and then activated Windows on the virtual machine, all in under 10 minutes! Then came the fun part! 

Preparing install media

I downloaded my distribution of choice, Ubuntu 14.04.04 from the server as a torrent download, which was much faster than regular download, I put it on a USB drive using Yumi and I was good to go. Setting up the HDD I used Gparted on Partedmagic to repartition the HDD (it’s crucial to take a copy of the data and keep it in a safe place), I made sure that Ubuntu gets over 50 GB of free space because over time you are going to need the space, I merged the old Windows partition with the Linux partition and rebooted to begin the install. 

Installing Ubuntu

Installing Ubuntu is one of the easiest installations you can ever have, it’s user friendly and super fast, you can finish it all in under 15 minutes and you are good to go! I installed Ubuntu, and proceeded to reinstall my software and tools. I noticed that Libreoffice was 4.2 which is out of date, even for the stable release! I had to remove it and install the latest 5.1 to enjoy the performance and newly designed interface! I also had to add VLC and Gimp manually, as well as Zimwiki. 
I also installed Pomodro timer, it works very well with Ubuntu Gnome 14.04.
All and all it took less than a day to get my computer back to normal.

mpression after installing Ubuntu 14.04.4

I must say that running a native Ubuntu gnome is much better than adding Gnome interface to any Ubuntu installation. It runs much smoother and many of the bugs I noticed are long gone! 

Ubuntu 14.04.4 Screenshot
Screenshot from Ubuntu 14.04.4 after install

Final words

Looking back, my main goal of installing Windows alongside Ubuntu was to enjoy gaming on my computer, looking back I hardly did any gaming and I had Windows installed for almost 2 years! I can still play on Ubuntu and if must use the Virtual machine to play (I tested for that and it wasn’t promising). I’ll be keeping you posted about anything I notice!

P.S: I no longer use this awesome distro, I’m on Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and it was an excellent distro to use, so good I almost didn’t upgrade!

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