The Tech Influencer

Fixing the latest bugs and exploits in Android every month. Google has detailed the latest Android Security Bulletin and released the fixes for Nexus and Pixel devices. These are exploits and other security concerns that affect Android as a whole. Issues with the operating system, kernel patches, and driver updates may not affect any particular device, but these need to be fixed in the Android base by the folks maintaining the operating system code. That means Google, and they've detailed the things they have improved for this month. Updated factory images for Pixel and Nexus devices that are supported are available, and over-the-air updates are rolling out to users. If you don't want to wait, you can download and flash the factory image or OTA update file manually, and here are some handy instructions to get you started. How to manually update your Nexus or Pixel The company that made your phone uses these patches to send an update out to you. These changes have

Get the latest version of Android on your phone on your own terms. Update March 2018: We now have a whole new version of Android to try as the Android P Developer Preview has begun. All the steps and methods here still apply; the only difference is if you're looking to sign up for the Android Beta Program, when it begins, you'll get P and not O. And hey, if you're looking to be a beta tester you wanted the latest bleeding edge anyway, right? We're also pretty sure these steps for manually flashing your phone aren't going to change once Android P (please let it be Pringles) becomes an official not-beta thing. We'll make sure to get everything up to date as soon as we have the skinny on it all, because we flash our phones on day one, too. Now that we're well into the cycle of Android Oreo updates, Pixel and Nexus owners are clamoring to get the latest updates to Android 8.1 as soon as possible. But Google doesn't always push these over-the-air upd

The Nokia 7 Plus marries Nokia's industrial design with the simplicity of Android One. HMD Global revived the Nokia brand last year, initially focusing on the budget segment with the Nokia 3, Nokia 5, and the Nokia 6. While the manufacturer rolled out the Nokia 8 to cater to the premium category, it wasn't quite as good as the OnePlus 5T or the Mi Mix 2. For its 2018 portfolio, HMD is introducing several phones aimed at different price points in one go — there's the Android Go-based Nokia 1 for the entry-level segment, the Nokia 6 2018 for the budget category, the Nokia 7 Plus at the mid-range segment, and the Nokia 8 Sirocco is the company's flagship. The Nokia 7 Plus is the most interesting device of the lot, as it is the first Nokia-branded phone to feature an 18:9 form factor. The 6-inch FHD+ (2160x1080) IPS LCD panel has vivid colors and decent saturation levels, and it gets sufficiently bright that I didn't face any issues trying to read the co

Xiaomi could be going after the Razer Phone with its upcoming Black Shark device. Xiaomi is getting ready to launch a gaming-oriented phone, similar to what we've seen with the Razer Phone. The phone is slated for an official unveil next Friday, April 13, and a new teaser out of Weibo (via Gear ) gives us a glimpse at the design language. There isn't much to see, but at least we can look forward to a phone with rounded corners on all sides. Unlike previous Xiaomi phones, the upcoming device will feature the Black Shark branding and not the Mi label, suggesting this could be the first phone in a new gaming-focused sub-brand. Little is known about the device itself, other than the fact that it will be powered by the Snapdragon 845. Being a gaming-oriented device, it'll be interesting if the phone offers a similar 120Hz refresh rate as the Razer Phone. We should also see up to 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage, and it's likely the phone will feature a sim

In the next article we are going to take a look at Teleconsole. This is a free service to share our terminal session with people we trust. Your contacts can join through the command line using SSH or through your web browser using HTTPS. This service is very interesting to ask for help. We will also be able to forward local TCP ports to your contacts. Use this feature to allow them to access web applications that run on your local server. You may already know the popular remote desktop applications that are available on the market, such as Teamviewer, Skype, Join.me, Chrome Remote Desktop, Real VNC, Apache Guacamole, etc. These are used to share the whole system, but in some situations it may be of interest to share only our terminal session quickly. Due to a situation like the one described, teleconsole and tmate were born. Teleconsole is built on Gravitational Teleport. This is a modern SSH server to remotely access clusters of Gnu / Linux servers through SSH or HTTPS. It is an

The repositories of Ubuntu are being the center of the controversy of Ubuntu during the last months. After the serious error that appeared in the wake of the Ubuntu 17.10 kernel, appeared the error of Specter and Meltdown. An error that made Ubuntu have to remove the latest versions of Intel's microcode in order to give stability and security to the distribution. Over time, Intel has managed to create a safe driver or microcode for Ubuntu and that is why Ubuntu decided to work with it to offer a secure update for all platforms of Ubuntu users. So far, the solution was only on 64-bit platforms. Days after the release of that update, we can say that the security update is available for all Ubuntu architectures, especially for the 32-bit platform, a platform that many users still use (although many Ubuntu developers do not create it) and that at the moment was unprotected against these security bugs that allowed the appropriation of the machine through the kernel. This update wil

In the next article we are going to take a look at Zeal. This is a tool that will provide us with an offline documentation browser for software developers. Zeal is inspired by Dash, which is a commercial application developed especially for Mac OS. Zeal provides documentation sets (docsets) for a large number of programming languages ​​and different software. You can read them all, online or by downloading the documentation to your team. This will allow any developer to find everything they need without having to search Google or check the official documentation page. You just have to download the set of documentation that we want to use. Zeal will take care of everything else. At the time that I am writing this article, there are 192 sets of useful documentation for all kinds of developers. You can consult the languages ​​available in the following screenshot. All those documents are generously provided by Dash. These documents are updated and maintained with great care. Bu

In this article we will take a look at Nitrux, this distribution of Linux based on Ubuntu with an excellent design and I bet that more than one will give you the desire to try it. Nitrux comes with its Nomad desktop environment which is built on KDE Plasma 5 and QT, Nomad takes the best of this environment to present a visually appealing desktop, which personally reminds me a lot of Pantheon. The distribution also takes some KDE applications and makes use of the application appimage format with which it happens to differ a lot from other distributions based on Ubuntu. This is the interesting thing about Nitrux, because its developers venture to offer the user something new and that without doubts from my perspective and many distributions should begin to offer. Nomad Desktop The Nomad desktop improves the user experience, since it includes other additional functions which make it more functional, since its objective is to be adaptable without losing its aesthetics or functionali