Escape from QuickBooks (with data in hand)

When a small business contemplates getting away from a proprietary accounting tool like QuickBooks in favor of free software like GnuCash, the first order of business is usually finding a way to liberate that business's accounting data for input into a new system. Strangely enough, Intuit, the creator of QuickBooks, never quite got around to making that easy to do. But it turns out that, with a bit of effort, this move can be made. Getting there involves wandering through an undocumented wilderness; this article is at attempt to make things easier for the next people to come along.

Minuet – a guitar adventure

As you remember from my last post, minuet currently supports multiple plugins to display its exercises. To change from one plugin to another, all you have to do is to press on the desired instrument name: for now, only “Guitar” and “Piano” are available.

Available Now: Linux VDA 7.15 LTSR!

Originally, XenApp and XenDesktop releases occurred around once a year, similar to the Academy Awards, and contained significant updates. Many large enterprise customers needed to assess which version would be ideal to standardize their main production environment on for the coming years, unlike other customers seeking the latest features and capabilities who felt that the releases were not soon enough or feature requirements had changed over time.

[Video] YouTube screws us again and Linux is screwing itself.

Google is up to their old tricks again.They have figured how to ripoff their content providers with a new ad algorithm. Meanwhile, Linux podcasting is a clown show and I'm sick of dealing with it.

Fedora + Plasma + Unity = Nice looks?

Hybrid things aren't usually the best option around. Like hybrid cars, for example. Technically, when you marry concepts, you change the energy state, and while this could make sense in that you blend the best of several worlds, when this is done in a forced manner over a short period of time rather than eons of evolution, you end with the worst bits as the product of your mutation. I read about the United theme for Plasma a few months ago, and given that I've spent a fair deal of time fiddling with themes and icons and fonts and making different desktop environments look prettier than their defaults, I was intrigued. So I decided to see whether the notion of having Plasma look like Unity is a sane option. Let us.  Fedora + Plasma + Unity = Nice looks? [...] What is thy point, Vanessa, the astute among you may ask? Well, I have nothing against United or its creators, but I did come to the conclusion that too much tweaking is worse than no tweaking, if this statement makes sense. I like the notion of trying to overcome the inherent problems in each desktop through the use of themes and extensions. After all, I've been doing that profusely for the past few months. But it gets undone when you cross the desktop environment space. Making Gnome better yes. Making Plasma better, absolutely. Unity as an overlay for Plasma, well tricky. There's too much disparity for you to be able to hide the underlying workflow mechanisms and UI philosophies. Then, every little inconsistency glares. You notice things you do not expect, and you get angry because there are certain things you do expect. Some transformations work quite well because they build on the foundations, e.g. various Gnome panels or Macbuntu. But Plasma has its own special charm and flow and making it into a weird version of Unity, which itself is a weird version of Gnome misses the bigger picture. And so, if you're asking me, Plasma and Unity are two separate worlds, best enjoyed in isolation. United is an interesting notion, but it also signifies the upper limit for my own wild ideas and tweaking. Yes, you can make it work, then again, it means taking away from the beauty and style of what these two desktops do, and that's not the purpose of my pimping guides. So we shall stop here, and explore other colors and shapes. Have fun, little penguins.

Fedora Design Interns 2017

Here’s an update on internships. Older post linked to here. Quick recap: there’s been 2 long-term interns for Fedora design team since February, and one short-term guy, who came for 2 weeks at the beginning of June. Guys have been doing an amazing job, I can’t stress enough how happy I am to have them around.

F26-20170815 Updated ISOs released

Ubunsys – An Advanced System Utility For Ubuntu Beginners

How to Rename File While Downloading with Wget in Linux

Listen To Your Favorite Radio Station With A Single Command on Linux

Light - when xbacklight doesn't work

Note names

Carry your computer in your Pocket | Using USB Pendrive Linux

Make An USB bootable pen drive and then plug it and play !

Healing clone tool first healed image

How to Change Runlevels (targets) in SystemD

How to Connect to MySQL Without Root Password on Terminal

How to Manage CentOS 7 Server with Webmin

How to set up WiFi from CLI on Ubuntu Server

An alternative device-tree source language

gtop - System monitoring dashboard for terminal

What is Docker – How to install Docker on Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Hiding malware in boobytrapped replacement screens would undetectably compromise your mobile device

 

On the one hand, if you let an untrusted stranger install hardware in your electronic device, you're opening yourself up to all kinds of potential mischief; on the other hand, an estimated one in five smartphones has a cracked screen and the easiest, most efficient and cheapest way to get that fixed is to go to your corner repair-shop.  

How hackers {sic} are targeting the shipping industry [iophk: "Microsoft TCO"]

 

Whenever one of the firm's fuel suppliers would send an email asking for payment, the virus simply changed the text of the message before it was read, adding a different bank account number.  

Locky ransomware is back from the dead with two new strains [iophk: "Windows TCO"]

 

What hasn't changed, though, is the method of distribution.Rather than rifling through the trove of spilt US National Security Agency exploits, as the groups behind WannaCry and NotPetya did, Locky is distributed via phishing emails containing malicious Microsoft Office files or zipped attachments containing a malicious script.

Connected cars could have an airbag problem

 

"It's not the car manufacturers' fault, and it's not a problem introduced by them. The security issue that we leveraged in our research lies in the standard that specifies how the car device network (i.e., CAN) works," added Trend.

[...] To eliminate the risk entirely, an updated CAN standard should be proposed, adopted, and implemented. This whole process would likely require another generation of vehicles."

Code chunk in Kronos malware used long before MalwareTech published it

A chunk of code found in the Kronos bank-fraud malware originated more than six years before security researcher Marcus Hutchins is accused of developing the underlying code, a fellow security researcher said Friday. The conclusion, reached in an analysis of Kronos published by security firm Malwarebytes, by no means proves or disproves federal prosecutors' allegations that Hutchins wrote Kronos code and played a role in the sale of the malware. It does, however, clarify speculation over a Tweet from January 2015, in which MalwareTech—the online handle Hutchins used—complained that a complex piece of code he had published a month earlier had been added to an unnamed malware sample without his permission.

Secret chips in replacement parts can completely hijack your phone’s security

People with cracked touch screens or similar smartphone maladies have a new headache to consider: the possibility the replacement parts installed by repair shops contain secret hardware that completely hijacks the security of the device. The concern arises from research that shows how replacement screens—one put into a Huawei Nexus 6P and the other into an LG G Pad 7.0—can be used to surreptitiously log keyboard input and patterns, install malicious apps, and take pictures and e-mail them to the attacker. The booby-trapped screens also exploited operating system vulnerabilities that bypassed key security protections built into the phones. The malicious parts cost less than $10 and could easily be mass-produced. Most chilling of all, to most people, the booby-trapped parts could be indistinguishable from legitimate ones, a trait that could leave many service technicians unaware of the maliciousness. There would be no sign of tampering unless someone with a background in hardware disassembled the repaired phone and inspected it.