Whew! That's a long title, but it's definitely worth it! Corel has a bad history of unstable programs and bad customer support. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. As a Mac user, I don't use much of their program. Except Painter. And today, out of the blue, it decided to crap out on me. Yep. I got one of those:
This installation of Painter has been damaged or illegally modified.
To the untrained eye, this might seem that I have either done something stupid and delete a file, or may have pirated (*Gasp!*) the software. Well, whoopde-fuckin-do. You know what? Corel treat people with both disorder the same way: With a cold shoulder.
After trying multiple time to install and uninstalling the damn thing, I scoured the internet. One guy/gal in a forum posted that s/he has fixed his/her copy by downloading a crack(!!) off of a hacking site. Well, that's a solution, Corel! You should distribute cracks to fix your brokkin software! But that solution is neither elegant, nor Mac-worthy.
The thing about a Mac, is we're outnumbered by the dumb people who choose to deal with viruses and all those windows crap instead of switching to a beautifully designed hardware with a revolutionary and well thought-out OS X. But enough about you PC users.
To fix the problem on a Mac, you don't need to install or uninstall or do anything, just go to your HD > Library > Preferences folder and delete the file named nTitles Product Licenses IV.
Then just load Painter! You will have to re-register so I hope you haven't thrown out your hard copy. *grin*
Now, on a PC, we have to delve a little deeper into the horrid entanglement that is the Windows Registry! *Dun-Dun-Dunnnn*
Oh, yes, this baby may look tame now, but watch out! Y'all artsy-artsy people are in for an ascii headache.
The rest of this solution is basically lifted from here. I got rid of my Windows headache so I won't have to deal with this registry shit anymore. Did I say shit? I meant crap.
you have to delete the Protexis files afterinstallation, but before trying to open the program.
So after uninstalling and then reinstalling Painter, do START>>RUN>>typeREGEDIT Search for all PROTEXIS files [two of them] and DELETE (being careful that's all you delete - remember to backup the reg first just in case). And only then open the program.
Also, the one reply to that blog post was;
hey, the nudes were weird but I liked the other stuff you can draw
I mean, FULLY WORKING not those half working tablets where the pressure don't work 100% and the expresskeys and the touch strip not working. I mean this guide is to help non-programmer artists get their ubuntu system working with their wacom tablets. Just like they do in their Apple Macs and *shudder* windows.
The first thing I'd like to point out is that, this guide is not intended for programmers. This guide is for computer dummies like myself who wanted to escape to a free OS. If you're just trying out to see if wacom works under ubuntu, don't waste your time. The tablet is not as easy to setup as in a Mac or Windows. No complete installer is provided by wacom. However, your tablet will work with Ubuntu out of the box. There's no extra setup needed. But the expresskeys and the touch strip will not work by default.
To get a wacom tablet fully working, the only mental faculty you need is already present if you have ever finished a Legend of Zelda game. Except zelda II that one just sucks. I'm sorry if you ever played that one. Or the CD-i Zelda.
Now, some of the instructions presented here will be in the form of codes. It'd be nice if you try to learn and understand what they mean. They will be very useful to your Ubuntu future. But if you're intimidated by strings of nonsensical characters randomly strung up by an evil genius geek deep in his dragon infested dungeon, just think of it as looking for a particular icon in other OSes like OS X or windows. Or just looking for the any key. Only, in this particular OS, it's already provided for you to copy paste.
I hope you're running Ubuntu 7.10 or higher. The codename for that version is Gutsy Gibbons. If you're not, please run your automatic software update till you run Gutsy. (If you're already running previous version of Ubuntu, you wouldn't need to read the dumbingdowness parts of this guide)
So, anyway, let's begin.
Although Wacom tablet runs out of the box in Ubuntu, you'll need to enable it in Ubuntu. That's just how linux works. If something is unnecessary, it just won't load it. Unlike windows which becomes bloated because it loads practically everything at starts up.
Part 1. Running a wacom tablet. This part is lifted from ubuntuguide. You might want to use that one if you already know what you're doing. And return here for the second part. First, you'd have to fire up the terminal. Go to Applications > Accesories > Terminal And boom! You got this terminal window: Hooray! You've just prepared yourself everything that is necessary to complete this howto guide. Isn't that easy? Even mere mortals can do it. Most people are just too chicken to try.
Now let's open the editor and edit xorg.conf. All you need to do is copy this:
gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
And paste it to the terminal by pressing Ctrl-Shift-V. Then just press enter to open the editor with xorg.conf. You might be asked for password now. Just put in your login password and it'll open the editor. Look for the part that says:
#Section "InputDevice" #Driver "wacom" #Identifier "cursor" #Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" #Option "Type" "cursor" #Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4"# Tablet PC ONLY #EndSection
And remove the # sign before each line until the three parts looks like this: Then save. And we're done with part 1! All you have to do is restart and you'll have a fully working tablet now! Or, if you're smart, just press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
Part 2. Getting to drive the expresskeys. If you restarted as told, and done playing with your working pen, you'll notice that the expresskeys and the touch strips don't work. If you have a Graphire 3, then you can immediately draw in Gimp. Have fun! But the rest of us, we have to increase our productivity by utilizing these touch strips.
The first thing is to launch the Terminal as we did in the first part.
Then you paste this code:
sudo aptitude install xlibs-dev
Run it by pressing enter, and it'll display a jumble of things. Don't worry about it. After it's done, just paste in and run this code:
sudo aptitude install wacom-tools
Those two codes will ensure that your computer is fully prepared to compile the program that will run expresskey and touchstrips.
Now, launch your firefox browser, and head to Expresskeys. And get the latest tar/gz thing. As of this writing, it's expresskeys-0.4.1.tar.gz.
Then you just right click on it and select extract here . After that, in your terminal, go to the folder that you've just extracted. In short, paste and run this code:
cd Desktop/expresskeys-0.4.1
Change the version number as necessary. And inside that, run these commands line by line. Don't try to do it all in one go, copy one line and past it then run it, after that run the next line. It's maybe tedious, but if anything goes wrong, you'll know which part went wrong and it'd be easier to fix.
./configure make make install
After that, we'll need to open xorg.conf again, so like before, just run this command:
gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
And add this section immediately above or below (it doesn't matter) the three we edited in the first part.
And that's it, we have set up the necessary programs to get the touch strip and the expresskeys to work. Just save and reset your machine or press Ctrl-Shift-Backspace.
Part 3. Near instant gratification. Just like in part 1, start your terminal. And run this code:
expresskeys -d
If you did everything right, it wouldn't spit out any thing and returns to the terminal like nothing happened.
Fire up gimp and try out your touchstrips and expresskeys!! :)
But wait, what if you want to customize the expresskeys and the touchstrip?
It's easy, you just need to know the key combination and edit the expresskeys config file.
To edit the config file, first you must be able to see it. Go to your home folder: Just select Places > Home Folder. If you're running ubuntu, I don't need to illustrate this anymore. In your home folder menu, press Ctrl-H to show some hidden files and folder (Ctrl-H again to hide them. Look for a folder named .expresskeys (with the . (dot) before the expresskey) and inside, you'll find a file named intuos3.conf1. Just double click to open it.
Follow the instructions in the file to edit each and every function of the expresskeys and touchstrip.
Oh, and one more thing, to get the keycode, start your terminal and enter:
xev
A small window will appear and your terminal will be spitting a bunch of code. Put your pointer inside the small window and leave it there. Don't move even for a pixel. If you're using the tablet, just lift your pen. Press the key that you want the keycode of on your keyboard, and immediately it will appear on your terminal as marked:
Good night good luck, and most of all, have fun with your fully functional tablet! :)
UPDATE for Ubuntu 8.04 HARDY HERON: ***FOR THOSE OF YOU USING UBUNTU 8.04 HARDY HERON*** before you install expresskeys u have to edit a file before you compile and install. its not that hard... what u have to do is download the latest version of expresskeys which is of today 5/23/2008 expresskeys-0.4.1 (here is the link...if link is broken just google expresskeys-0.4.1 and download file). http://freshmeat.net/projects/wacomexpresskeys/ after u download the tar/zip file, you will untar/unzip it into ur home folder...and then Change line 462 of the file src-expresskeys/get_device.c from:
if (xdevice_list[i].use == IsXExtensionDevice) {
to these two:
if (xdevice_list[i].use == IsXExtensionDevice || xdevice_list[i].use == IsXExtensionPointer) {
after that save the file and close it. and proceed with the installation as described in the tutorial...but if ur too lazy to back track like me then just open terminal and copy and paste below...
sudo aptitude install xlibs-dev
...this installs the files u need to configure and install express keys...then in terminal...you cd into the directory of the expresskeys folder that u untared/unzipped into. which should be your home folder and
sudo ./configure sudo make sudo make install
restart your PC then open terminal type in
expresskeys -d
your keys should work...u could also add this to your startup session by going into system>preferences>session u restart your computer and then open terminal again and....
expresskeys -d
and ur expresskeys should work play with the strip to see
When your blog post came up to the hundreds or even thousands, one day you'd want to let people click on random post. Or, maybe if your blog is a personal blog, and not a spam blog that aims only to suck traffic, you might one day want to flip thru your blog randomly, just like when you speed read thru your personal diary. There are many ways to add this capabilities to blogger. One popular way is by adding a random I'm feeling lucky widget to your blog. However, I find that these clickable links are best put near your navigation buttons, not somewhere in your sidebar. In blogger, that is the older post, newer post and home button. Besides, it looks horrible to see a lone navigation button hovering in the middle of those stuff on the right.
So, what other ways can we use to achieve this? The most obvious is a blogger hack. I have sampled several blogger hacks that allowed this, however, some would get deleted if you change some layout and stuff on blogger. This hack has survived several blogger changes.
So, what you do, is, edit your templat HTML, make sure that expand widgets is selected, then add the following right before the </head> tag.
<script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ var _yourBlogUrl = "http://insertblogurl.blogspot.com"; function randomPost() { var script = document.createElement("script"); script.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript"); var theUrl = _yourBlogUrl +"/feeds/posts/summary?alt=json-in-script&callback=getTotalPostsCallback&start-index=1&max-results=1"; script.setAttribute("src", theUrl); document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(script); };
function getTotalPostsCallback(json) { var totalResults = json.feed.openSearch$totalResults.$t; if (totalResults > 0) { getRandomPostNumber(totalResults); } };
function getRandomPostNumber(totalResults) { var randomNumber = Math.floor((Math.random() * totalResults) + 1); getRandomUrl(randomNumber); };
function getRandomUrl(randomNumber) { var script = document.createElement("script"); script.setAttribute("type", "text/javascript"); var theUrl = _yourBlogUrl +"/feeds/posts/summary?alt=json-in-script&callback=getTheUrlCallback&start-index=" + randomNumber + "&max-results=1"; script.setAttribute("src", theUrl); document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(script); };
function getTheUrlCallback(json) { var theUrl = json.feed.entry[0].link[0].href; window.location.href = theUrl; } //]]> </script>
And then, add the following where you'd like the random link to appear in your blog.
<a href="javascript:randomPost();">View Random Post</a>
In my blog, I put it under
<div class='blog-pager' id='blog-pager'>
Please thank Purple Moggy for creating this code. :)
UPDATE: This hack is no longer valid as you will not be able to add it to your blogger template.
When you search for a post in a blog, say, with google, does the search result shows the title of the post? Or the name of the blog? If you say the latter, which is the default condition for blogger, then you'll need to swap the blog title and the post title on your blog.
What is this, exactly? To put it simply, it's turning this: Into this: Now why would anyone try to do that? One might wonder. It doesn't seem to worth the effort. However, this little change can mean a lot. Putting the title of the post before your website title means that when people search for something and google returns your site, the title of the page presented to the user will not start with the title of your site. Which in my case would mean, because of the title's length, it'll take up most of the space available on google search to show the title of the page, like so: Which means that the user would less likely to click on it because they don't see the title of the page representing the topic they'd want to see. Not only this is SEO, this is just common sense.
Now, to remedy this, you'll need to swap the titles. To do that, you'll just need go to your blogger dashboard, go to template > edit html. You will then need to select expand widget template, and then look for:
<title><data:blog.pagetitle/></title>
Like so: That single line is the only thing you'll need to replace. However, the hack to achive our purpose, is not that simple. The code is provided on Jack Supit's blog post, however, some users (like me) has reported that it returns an XML error, like so:
Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: Open quote is expected for attribute “{1}” associated with an element type “cond”.
So, after a bit of investigating, the code apparently contains some minor bugs. I think it's due to blogger's habit on changing punctuation marks. A little tweaking, and I managed to get the code to work on this blog. Here's the code that I end up using.
In this episode we show you how to charge your iPod (or other mp3 player) for up to 20 minutes using electrolytes derived from Gatorade or Powerade which are then stored within the cells of an onion.
You will need:
1. 1 White onion 2. 2 cups of Gatorade 3. Screwdriver 4. iPod and USB cable
Check out our website! http://householdhacker.com
Disclaimer: This and other videos produced by HouseholdHacker are controlled experiments performed by professionals and unless you are an expert should NOT be attempted at home if you don't know what you are doing!
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