PingChecker Files

5 June 2026
Marcus Dean Adams (gerowen@pm.me)
- Spelling mistake in Changelog fixed
- Removed redundant mention of program name/version in a dialog message
- Removed accidental inaccurate comment.  I had copied/pasted the copyright
  notice from another project and forgot to remove that project's name and
  description from the comment.
- Converted some longer concatenated strings to fstrings instead.
- Rework colorama check.  It felt sort of backwards and might have been
  confusing to read.
- Renamed .desktop file to be all lowercase
- Slight adjustment to Debian package description

NOTICE TO WINDOWS USERS AS OF 26.6.4
=======================================================================
I'm not going to bother building Windows binaries any more.  Nobody
close to me uses Windows, the binaries get detected as malware by
Microsoft Defender because I compile them with PyInstaller, and if
you explicitly tell Defender to "allow" it, you then also have to
answer a prompt from Windows app control allowing an unsigned/untrusted
binary to run.  I can't even include PowerShell scripts because the
execution of unsigned PowerShell scripts is disabled by default in
Windows.  All this means that in order to ship a Windows release in
the same easy-to-use state as the Linux release would require me to
pay for a signing certificate instead of using my existing PGP or
MiniSign keys, or ask end users to start manually whitelisting my projects
and disabling built-in Windows protective measures.  So, since this is
just a personal project that I maintain mostly for myself, I'm not going
to spend hundreds of dollars a year building binaries for a platform I
don't even use.

Windows users can still freely use the Python source file with minimal
issues.  I'll still try to take Windows environment variables and such
into account in future development, I'm just not going to bother
compiling my own exe files.  For the best experience in Windows, when
launching the .py file directly, keep in mind a few things:

1) You need to have Python installed.
2) You should use pip to install some necessary libraries.
   After installing Python for Windows, you can install the necessary
   third party modules with:
   
python -m pip install --upgrade pip

python -m pip install --upgrade colorama

python -m pip install --upgrade easygui