I downloaded some PSD files, which is a file format by Photoshop. I tried to open it with GIMP, can be known as most popular open source image editor. However, opening the file showed some error message,

Error loading PSD file: Unsupported color mode: CMYK

Then I tried to install the “gimp-plugin-separate”, but it does not work. According to this post, the author also mentioned that “gimp-plugin-separate” does not work. But, the author mentioned some solutions. One of the solution is using “imagemagick” to convert the file into several PNG files.

[Added 2012-10-16] Read this first: Quite a lot of readers asked me how to hack this game or hack that game. Sorry to say, I am not that expert in hacking those games, and I don’t have much time to play and hack the games. And what I shared here is only how to hack the games in general way, without permanent root the Android. So, if you are asking about a specific game, please find it on other channel. Thank you.

I am still currently using Xfce4. I tried GNOME3 sometimes after some updates released. However, GNOME3 is still not satisfying. There are a lot problems. The new interface can be learnt, but the problems are not the interface problem.

The following list is the problems I faced:

1. ibus can be added to the notification area with ibus-gjs, but after installing ibus-gjs and restart GNOME3, ibus doesn’t start as expected.
2. Toolbar problem. In evince (I haven’t tried others), if add a button to the toolbar, I cannot remove that button anymore.
3. If the network connection is disabled, eg, Wired network is disabled, I cannot change the options. I can only change the options for those which is connected.
4. When changing the options of Wired network for all users, there is no authentication prompt, thus, I cannot change any options.
5. Keyboard shortcut problem with Windows key (Mod4). Cannot work properly.

The only feature I like in GNOME3 is the aero snap feature. But there is nothing more.

When downloading the files contain Chinese or Japanese characters using JDownloader in Linux (for my case, Arch Linux), I found that all the Chinese or Japanese characters are shown with boxes. There are a lot of suggested solutions I found from Internet, especially adding !font=Dialog to the language file. I also tried to edit the fontconfig.properties file, adding path to JAVA_FONTS, etc. But all the solutions do not work.

So, my solution is, just change the user interface style to non-Synthetica style, eg, Substance or Light. Both types of style work well, allow me to see the file names with correct characters. Problem solved.

I tried to synchronise my Thunderbird address book with GMail manually. So, I need to export the contacts  into CSV format. However, there is encoding problem after exporting to CSV, because my contacts contian Chinese characters. The text file has encoding error if viewed by Gedit. I tried to import it from GMail, these errors still exist.

To solve it, I use the command-line to run Thunderbird with:

env LANG=en_US.utf8 thunderbird

This solves the problem after I tried to export the contacts to CSV format again. Actually, the Arch Linux is already set the locale (in /etc/rc.conf) as en_US.UTF-8.

When I run Firefox of Linux Mint, using the default Google Search from the search bar, it shows an old fashion search result. We can add search engine plugin manually. When we visit Facebook, Youtube, etc, there is a highlight on the search bar icon, click it we can add our own search engine. However, when we visit Google Search, it does not highlight the icon. Then, how?

1. Visit searchplugins.net.
2. Enter " http://www.google.com/#q=TEST " (without quotes) for Search URL
3. Enter “My Google” (without quotes), or whatever name you want, but not the name already existed in Firefox search engines
4. Click “Create Plugin”
5. Then, you will see that your search bar icon is highlighted.
6. Add the search engine plugin to your Firefox.

With that, we can use the new fashioned Google Search engine in Linux Mint.

My laptop has a built-in webcam. I was doing video capturing using webcam. Suddenly, the webcam could not function. Then I tried to restart, hopefully fix the problem. After restart, there was a taskbar notification mention that there is an unrecognized malfunction USB device. (I am using Windows 7)

So, how to solve this problem? This was not a driver problem. And I thought that maybe the webcam was broken or some hardware problem.

Huawei Mobile Broadband, which I bought about 2 years ago, is failed to run properly on my HP Mini 1000 series with Ubuntu 10.04. It will keep trying to connect to internet, yet failed. And I also found a “MOBILE_CONNECT” icon on the desktop. If I tried to click it, it will immediately missing.

So, to solve this problem,

1. I right-click the NetworkManager Applet,
2. Edit Connections…
3. Goto Mobile Broadband tab
4. Click Add button
5. Then it will show the Huawei broadband device
6. Continue the steps for my service provider, which is Celcom
7. Can connect to internet properly.

I do this whenever I cannot connect to internet properly using the Huawei Mobile Broadband.

I tried to install Flash in Ubuntu. But there is a problem when installing “flashplugin-installer”. I cannot finish download the installation file from Ubuntu server. So, I tried alternative way to install Flash plugin.

I go to Adobe website, and download the Debian package. Then
sudo dpkg –install [filename].deb

Right, now can view Flash in web browser.

Previously on booting PC-BSD through USB flash drive, I mentioned that I used Linux to perform “dd” operation towards the pendrive.

Yesterday, I just found that, my 8G pendrive now only 2G. There are 6G storage missing. I used Windows’ Disk Management Utility to check, then I found that there were two partitions in USB pendrive. And we know that, we cannot perform partitioning in Windows platform. Try to search from Internet about some information for partitioning USB pendrive, but none of them works.