But Is Smart Launcher a good alternative to Nova Launcher? Nova Launcher is one of the most popular launchers on Android with over 100 million downloads since 2011. I started using Nova Launcher sometime in 2012 on my Galaxy Nexus, brining my configuration over to newer Android devices I’ve owned ever since. Nova Launcher was sold to Branch Metrics in 2022. This seemed far from ideal for a launcher that will always be running on your device, given Branch’s business model revolves around “analytics, attribution and user engagement measurement”. Nova however ended up pretty much abandoned under Branches ownership. As of 2026 Nova has been sold yet again to Instabridge, gaining even more trackers bundled with the launcher. When scanned with εxodus, a privacy audit platform for Android applications the trackers included with Nova Launcher include: Some are legitimate from a development point of view, such as Google CrashLytics and Google Firebase Analytics. However for me personally I felt it was time to move on to a new launcher as I don’t feel something running all the time on my phone should have all these trackers embedded. Enter Smart Launcher, which only has trackers for Google CrashLytics and Firebase, which…
If you had told me at the start of 2025 I’d have moved my main PC over to Linux by the end of the year I don’t think I’d have believed you… however here we are. I’ve been on a bit of a privacy journey in 2025, swapping out various things for more privacy focused alternatives. That’s going a bit off topic though, lets just say Windows was a casualty of this journey. I’ve actually been impressed how smoothly my transition over to Linux went, so thought i’d share my experience as someone who’s pretty much used Windows every day since our family first got a PC in 1998. That said I have dabbled with Linux over the years, the first time I ever remember using it was via a Mandrake Live CD in 2004. I did think it was amazing an entire OS could boot from a CD. I did also install Gentoox on my original Xbox, mainly as it seemed like a cool project to the teenage me, however trying to use a desktop OS on a CRT TV was far from ideal from what I remember. Since then I have used Ubuntu Server for various personal projects…
How to remove the recommendation section from the Windows 11 start menu appears to be an incredibly common question asked by people using Windows 11 for the first time (or even people who have been using Windows 11 for a few years and dislike the current state of the start menu). Microsoft seem to really want people to see their recommendations… however all is not lost, their is a registry tweak which can disable the recommended section of the Windows 11 start menu. At the time of writing this works on the latest Windows 11 24H2, all you need to do is create a few registry keys. To do that the most simple way is to copy the text below in to Notepad: Then save the file to somewhere such as your desktop as startmenufix.reg Then simply double click on startmenufix.reg to add the above keys to your registry: After doing so log off, log back on and the recommended section of the Windows 11 start menu will be gone! Now why can’t this just be a simple toggle in the settings app? You can also deploy this registry tweak via group policy, so anyone who logs on to a…
The CWWK Q670 is certainly an interesting motherboard, especially if your goal is to build a low powered home NAS with up to 8x SATA hard drives. In summery I can get my CWWK Q670 NAS build to idle at 18w, that is with 4x hard drives spun down and various Docker containers running an NVMe drive. That is with some tweaking however, so do read on if you are interested in why I chose the CWWK Q670, the hardware I used and the tweaks I did to get down to 18w at idle running UnRaid. Firstly why the CWWK Q670? The CWWK Q670 supports 8x SATA hard drives natively via the Alder Lake-S PCH SATA Controller on the Intel 600 Series Chipset. In short this is ideal as this SATA controller supports ASPM, meaning we should be able to significantly reduce power usage when our NAS is idle and the hard drives are spun down. In addition we also do not need to use a PCI-E SATA controller to use all 8x drive bays, which would increase power consumption. Other cheaper Intel 11th or 12th Gen “NAS Motherboards” from Topton, BKHD and CWWK seem to use the JMB585 SATA…
The user boxes on Konica Minolta Bizhub Printers are handy to quickly print additional copies of common office documents, however what happens when the printer has been in service for over a decade and time comes to replace it? you’ll probably find no one has any idea where the (essential) data on the printer originated from. So the question than becomes if its possible to get a digital copy of the user box data off the printer, so it can be stored on the new printer. Although its not immediately obvious this is indeed possible using the Web UI of the printer. The printers Web UI does offer the option to download a PDF, however on our Bizhub C220 this process was very slow as it had to be done for every document in the user boxes individually if you didn’t want them to all be combined in to one huge PDF. Thankfully their is another way, although not perfect it does allow you to export the user boxes in batched of 10, all to individual PDF’s named exactly as their were on the printer. Below I have detailed how I managed to do this for over 100 documents relatively…