Yes, again web browser. I am using Firefox. Only sometimes Chromium (Google Chrome). Mainly Firefox. If someone ask me, which one I choose, I definitely answer Firefox. But, if someone ask me, which one I prefer, then it will be difficult to answer.

Firstly, I would like to go through why I choose Firefox as my primary web browser.

Because of DownThemAll. There is no alternative extension in Google Chrome like DownThemAll. Why I like DownThemAll so much? I use DownThemAll with GreaseMonkey to download my favourite mangas (comics). This is something Google Chrome still cannot do it, based on my current knowledge. GreaseMonkey generates the links, right-click, then I DownThemAll.

Recently, just created a Chinese blog. The reason is, I have a lot of philosophical thinking, difficult to express in English, because my mother tongue language is Chinese. When I do reasoning, I am using Chinese in my mind.

Use Arch Linux quite a while, I like the “pacman” command-line, simple and easy installing packages. Then I think about the other package managers such as deb with aptitude, rpm with yum or zypper or urpmi, how will they look like? Because of this, I tried several LiveCDs/LiveDVDs with VirtualBox: LinuxMint 13, Ubuntu 12.04, Fedora 17, OpenSUSE 12.1, Debian 6.0, CentOS 6.2, PCLinuxOS 2012.02, and Mageia 2.

I didn’t go through all the distribution thoroughly, just tried the installation, a web-browser, and the package manager.

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.

In Arch Linux Wiki page, it mentioned that OpenJDK is nearly perfect which we need not to install Oracle proprietary Java. But sadly to know, there are some Java applet which needs Java Runtime Environment version 6 instead of 7. That means, neither OpenJDK nor Oracle proprietary Java 7 works.

Therefore, I need to replace the jdk7-openjdk, jre7-openjdk, and jre7-openjdk-headless with AUR jre6 and jdk6. Besides that, icedtea-web-java7 is also no needed.

Previously I mentioned about playing games in WINE and enabling Ibus input and CJK fonts. Recently, I solved another problem, that is installing the game with ISO images.

We know that, in Linux, we can mount the ISO image easily. However, some old games will need to install with several discs, that means we need to change discs during the installation. When my disc 1 was completed, I tried to unmount, it failed. Even I tried with symlink, the disc 2 with the symlink is not detected by the installer, failed also.

[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.

In the previous post, I mentioned about rooting the Android emulator. Now, rooting the real Android phone is another thing, quite different from rooting Android emulator.

What is the main difference? In the Android emulator, once we “adb shell”, it is “#” as root. That is why we can remount the filesystem, and do whatever as root. In the real Android phone, once we “adb shell”, it is “$” instead of “#”. That is the main difference. That is why we cannot remount the filesystem or do whatever.

Introduction

What is rooting actually? How does it work? I tried to figure this out these days. Now, I know how to at least root an Android emulator including creating ROM image. Since I am using emulator only, the following explanation is only applied on emulator. I have not tested on real mobile phone.

Before I begin, the followings are my working environment:

OS: Arch Linux Packages: android-2.2 r03-2 - required for the Android platform android-sdk r16-1 - required for emulator android-sdk-platform-tools r10-2 - required for adb command

I like FreeFileSync, a syncing utility. There are several reasons for me to consider it is a good syncing utility,

• Allows preview
• Mirror, destination exactly as source
• Update, update destination based on source, no deletion
• Sync, allows propagate deletion, detects conflicts.
• Delete to Trash can (or Recycle bin)
• Multiple pairs of folders
• Swap directions
• Allows to edit the direction of specific files, or ignore the files.

All the bold features are which I prefer the most, especially the last one. That means, after the preview (or comparing), I can decide to change the direction of the files to be copied, left-to-right or right-to-left.