I've been using my MacBook Pro as my sole compute device for the past few years. It's an old model with a 1280x800 screen. Serves me very well indeed, but I do development on this thing. The screen is a mood killer, 110%. 

Well, I had an old Lenovo G710 (2.5 ghz dual core haswell (4th gen) i5, 16 gigs of RAM, 240 gig SSD), and the thing is gigantic. 17 inches, 1600x900 display, and otherwise a terrible design. Horrible battery life, heavier than the most heavy gaming laptop, and gigantic in just about all regards. 

Windows doesn't exactly boot on this thing, so I started finding some linux distributions. I settled with Deepin, very much by surprise. It's a Chinese linux distribution that isn't particularly popular here in America. From my past couple weeks of rumaging around reddit, it seems like very few people actually use it in the English-speaking community. This was almost a turnoff to me, but I decided to use it for a variety of reasons. I started off very skeptical, but let's just say the experience managed to change my mind.

• The d*** thing is stable as all hell. Even more stable than a fresh install of Mac OS on my Mac. I'm very pleasantly surprised by this. I have had absolutely ZERO issues whatsoever. 
  
• It's extremely fast compared to Windows and Mac OS. Relatively good performance, even for a Linux distro.
  
• The desktop environment is a custom, in house desktop environment from the Deepin team. It is, by far, the most beautiful desktop environment I have ever used. Extremely functional, very well polished and very stable. It somewhat mimics Windows and Mac OS, and is somewhat of a fusion of the best elements of both. 
  
• They included applications for things that often need to be done, such as installing fonts, finding graphics drivers, etc. Most distributions require you to go to a terminal for this. Deepin has it built in the box. These are small details, and are applications you don't think you'll need until you find that you actually do need them. They've actually come in handy for me. Saves me from being in the terminal too much.
  
• Despite being a small distribution, its packages and repositories are great. It's based on Debian, so just about anything that's compatible with Debian will work in Deepin. For better or for worse, Debian (and debian based distros) are well known to have some of the largest repositories available in the Linux community. It seems that Deepin gets most of its packages upstream and has an equally large selection. Considerably better than Ubuntu in that regard, interestingly.
  
• Surprisingly, you can install Unity (game engine), Pycharm, Chrome, and a ton of other applications straight from these repositories and the app store. I was shocked. In Ubuntu, this is only possible by going to the terminal and copy/pasting commands to add unofficial PPAs. These are only compatible with certain releases of Ubuntu, and can break your system if they are poorly maintained. I've never seen a linux distribution offer all of this out of the box in the repositories. 
  
• It somewhat feels like Windows, and is every bit as easy to use. Overall, highly polished. 
  

Shoulda done this way sooner. It's astonishing how much they all try to spy on you.

In short, the pi-hole is a DNS server that acts like your 1GB hosts file on its own by blocking whatever domains you feed it. You can use it as an adblocker, a malware domain blocker or something that just blocks all sorts of gov't/telemetry servers from botnetting you.

I already use ublock origin, so I don't really get any requests to advertising servers, meaning my blocked request log is pretty small so far. But in 12hrs, Microshit has tried to send away my data a total of 400 times:






I strongly advise you set something up like this ASAP.
https://pi-hole.net/
It's a one-line install script on most major linux platforms. Use it on a Pi, one of my friends is currently setting it up on his Ubuntu Laptop. Doesn't matter, just get it up and running.

Hello Makestation,

My name is Andy and I live in the UK. I primarily work with code (PHP, HTML, CSS) but also dabble with graphics in Photoshop as time and skill permits..   

I look forward to learning things from other members, and perhaps sharing one or two things that I've picked up myself.

after the nes mini, and the mess that was the PS mini, a lot of people were kinda disappointed in the original corporations efforts to get in on the retro market... though Virtual console was nice.

however there are two retro remake companies I'm super excited about.

first is analogue.

they have released FPGA based hardware clones which bring HD quality with near 100% hardware emulation, and they're compatible with both the original cartridges and controllers.

if you haven't heard of them yet their retro remakes are the NT mini, super NT, and the recently released Mega Sg.

in order they emulate the nintendo, super nintendo and the sega genesis.

but wait it get's better, the last one actually has an edge connector and plugs into the Sega CD, and can use adapters to play games from every sega console before the genesis... mind blown.

you can find them here: https://www.analogue.co/

they're pretty pricy though, for just one of those I can buy a sega genesis, sega CD, a super NES, an NES, a SCART to HDMI adapter, and scart cables for all 3, in fact that's what I did a couple years back.

the other retro remake device, and one I'm most excited for however is the polymega.

https://www.polymega.com/

what this thing is... man where do I begin, it's basically a retro game playing console, that's modular, and plays every game... yes you heard me right, EVERY game.

or to be more accurate, all 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen consoles, so no atari, commodore, or amiga... yet.

it does this by having dedicated modules for each one ensuring hardware compatibility with more planned and a lot of room for expansion.

currently in pre-order status.

these are my two favorites based on what's going on, has anyone else heard of or tried a retro throwback/remake console?

Greetings, I just wanted to get this out there because it's super useful.

I'm sure a lot of people have run into a problem where their BIOS will not boot whatever media for whatever reason right?

well there's this nifty tool called Plop Boot Tool.

basically you burn it to a CD, write it to a floppy, or set it up on a flash drive and it does the boot manager work for your BIOS.

I mostly use it when trying to Boot on a PC that doesn't see flash drives as bootable media like my win XP machine (weird I know but it's a PITA otherwise).

or that Pentium 3 I have, or hell my 486 with a USB PCI card.

it's super handy, you can get it here.

oh yeah, and as far as boot manager's go, it's really cool and cyber/scifi looking.

Close Google Chrome if you have it open, and make sure its updated. 

https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime...r-browser/

Check: chrome://version/

Make sure version is: 72.0.3626.121

I've been writing an adult "graphic" novel for quite awhile starring this big dude who also likes to kill people.  Here's a concept render I did of him with Daz Studio:

   

I'm going to be building a bot for one of my servers soon, just to help do certain things automatically, but I honestly don't know how many features to put into it. I'm taking a more security-oriented approach, so features will likely have something to do with that.

This is what I've got so far:

• Google Dorker (drops first page of results from a dork)
  
  
• Update MOTD from source (Send it a raw pastebin, it updates the ircd.motd itself)
  
• Check is website is up (Either by API or making ping from itself)
  
• Simple IP lookup
  
• Run python/ruby/perl/shell script from server and get output
  

hey so I recently re-discovered this site, thought I'd share it here.

basically this is a distilled archive of computer knowledge from zeens to usenet to places like the now defunct TOTSE (temple of the screeming Electron) of which I was a proud member a decade ago.

http://www.textfiles.com/directory.html


feel free to browse through it, there's tons of interesting stuff, and a lot of "lost" knowledge

my favorite is the cyberspace sub section.

it's kinda neat to see what sorts of things were being done in the 90's and early 2000's...
for example, someone managed to hook up a nintendo power glove to a serial port, and make it work with the sega master system VR glasses for visual input XD

now granted that seems quaint and archaic now thanks to oculus and such but back in 2010 that would have still been state of the art.