FOSSPicks
Brightness Controller
Like many people who use a screen for long periods of time, I've found using the wonderful Redshift makes a marked difference in both reducing eye strain and with the mental adjustments necessary when day turns into night. In case you've not seen it, Redshift changes the color temperature of your screen to match your surroundings, and in particular, reduces the amount of blue/white light projected from your screen as dusk begins. It's the kind of feature you can now find elsewhere, from your iPhone and Android devices to Mac OS, but Redshift brought the features to open source users long before it became cool.
Brightness Controller gives you more fine-grained control over the color balance of your screen, without linking those changes to your environment. Thanks to X11's xrandr
, you can quickly change the color temperature of the output from a comprehensive list of presets, including candlelight and 20000K Clear Blue Sky. Sliders also let you control the amount of red, green, and blue manually, alongside a brightness slider to adjust the overall brightness. What's even more impressive is that if you have more than one monitor, you can adjust their brightness levels separately, with up to four displays being supported in the latest beta version. You can even save and load these values as a settings file. The quality of the brightness adjustment matches that of a monitor's direct controls and yet gives much finer granularity to the overall levels. Changes of 10 or even 5 percent are never adequate when you're working in the dark, and a utility like this is a great alternative to playing with both Redshift and your monitor's menu interface.
Project Website
https://github.com/lordamit/Brightness
Secure web browser
Tor Browser 7.0
Firefox is a wonderful web browser, but it's currently going through something of a transition. This is because it's partly on its way to implementing sandboxed tabs for each site you visit. This is a badly needed upgrade because many of us experience memory and performance issues with Firefox, and we all need it to remain a strong browser to keep the Internet as open as possible. But, it also means some things are currently broken. So this is a good time to look at alternatives, and you could do much worse than using the Tor browser, at least more often.
The reason why Firefox is important is because it's used as the browser foundation for vital projects like the Tor Browser, which has just hit version 7.0. The Tor Browser wraps the stable, long-term support version of Firefox (currently version 52) with the seriously capable anonymity of Tor. This means anyone can get potentially private Internet access without knowing or configuring any of the wider Tor options, which can get complex quickly. Simply download an executable of the browser, verify you have the same binary provided by Tor, and run in-place, or even better, off a live-booted USB stick. You get all the stable features of Firefox with a hopefully untrackable Internet browsing history. And what's even better about this release is that it's already using Firefox's imminent multiprocessing and sandboxing, making it faster and more secure. Tor disables WebGL2, Web Audio, Social, SpeechSynthesis, and Touch APIs so that it's much harder for sites to generate a fingerprint for you and use this to track you across pages and domains. It hardly feels like you're making a compromise, yet your Internet access is much harder to track than with Firefox alone.
Project Website
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Find SysAdmin Jobs
News
-
MNT Seeks Financial Backing for New Seven-Inch Linux Laptop
MNT Pocket Reform is a tiny laptop that is modular, upgradable, recyclable, reusable, and ships with Debian Linux.
-
Ubuntu Flatpak Remix Adds Flatpak Support Preinstalled
If you're looking for a version of Ubuntu that includes Flatpak support out of the box, there's one clear option.
-
Gnome 44 Release Candidate Now Available
The Gnome 44 release candidate has officially arrived and adds a few changes into the mix.
-
Flathub Vying to Become the Standard Linux App Store
If the Flathub team has any say in the matter, their product will become the default tool for installing Linux apps in 2023.
-
Debian 12 to Ship with KDE Plasma 5.27
The Debian development team has shifted to the latest version of KDE for their testing branch.
-
Planet Computers Launches ARM-based Linux Desktop PCs
The firm that originally released a line of mobile keyboards has taken a different direction and has developed a new line of out-of-the-box mini Linux desktop computers.
-
Ubuntu No Longer Shipping with Flatpak
In a move that probably won’t come as a shock to many, Ubuntu and all of its official spins will no longer ship with Flatpak installed.
-
openSUSE Leap 15.5 Beta Now Available
The final version of the Leap 15 series of openSUSE is available for beta testing and offers only new software versions.
-
Linux Kernel 6.2 Released with New Hardware Support
Find out what's new in the most recent release from Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel team.
-
Kubuntu Focus Team Releases New Mini Desktop
The team behind Kubuntu Focus has released a new NX GEN 2 mini desktop PC powered by Linux.