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Showing posts from December, 2018

Annoying Adobe Updater

The most annoying thing on my Mac is ( was! ) the Adobe Flash Updater .  This annoying program will pop up and steal the focus and it doesn't actually work.  It never succeeds in updating the Adobe Flash plugins. The only way to do an update is to go to the Adobe web site with a web browser and download their apps again and install them manually. Man will only be free,  once the last computer has been strangled  with the power cable of the last router. — With apologies to Didero. There are many pages on the wild wild web that suggest how to suppress this atrocious thing, but I have not seen a method that actually works.  So I hunted all Adobe updaters down with the top , kill and  find commands and then rooted them out with brute force: $ sudo su - password # find / -name "Adobe*app" ...  # cd /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/ARMDC/Application/ # mv "Adobe Acrobat Updater.app" "Adobe Acrobat Updater.bad" # cd /Applicatio

GQRX SDR on Ubuntu Linux Server 18.04

GNU Radio on Linux Software Defined Radio requires a reasonably fast computer and won't work properly on a virtual machine.  The heart of Free SDR is of course GNU Radio, from here https://www.gnuradio.org/ and here https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/Main_Page. I like the GQRX program which I use with the RTL-SDR and Great Scott Gadgets HackRF One and these are all very well supported on Linux and Mac as described here http://gqrx.dk/tag/hackrf.   While I can make this work on my Mac, whenever Apple releases a large OS update, I have to re-install the whole house of cards all over again.  This gets very tiring after a while. So to get this lot working and keep it working, I bought a nice new Intel NUC https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc.html and installed Ubuntu Linux Server 18.04 LTS on it. This is a long term support (10 year) Linux version which means that it will get security updates, but the essentials will remain more or less