How many days and nights did this problem torment me? Finally solved! Ecstatic.

Recently, whenever I took a screenshot with Shutter, it would crash the moment it captured anything…

VNR: Visual Novel Reader, a hooking tool that grabs text from visual novels and immediately translates and displays it. Granted, I haven’t touched it in ages, but VNR is still my go-to recommendation for anyone who wants to learn Japanese and play visual novels in the original language. Recently someone told me the thing doesn’t work anymore. VNR hasn’t been updated in years, but it always kept working. And the only translation engine in it that actually works is Baidu Translate — its Japanese output is the most reliable; the rest of the features don’t matter. Problem is, the Baidu Translate engine is dead now. Looked around online, and apparently the reason is: Baidu Translate’s API switched from an http URL to https! Holy shit, Baidu actually uses https now.

This bug is filed on Launchpad: Elantech touchpad stops working after suspend. Every time you wake the laptop from suspend, you have to “unload and reload the psmouse module by hand.”

I’ve been using Windows 10 a lot lately. Personally I’m looking forward to Red Stone 4 and hope it ships soon. Why Windows 10? Because Linux still doesn’t handle fractional scaling well, and Windows 10 does it best. The one with the best shot at supporting it is obviously GNOME Shell. But using GNOME Shell feels like this:

A recent batch of Unity and Compiz updates landed on Ubuntu 16.04, and it broke my fractional scaling. Someone already filed a bug, but nobody seems to give a shit. So what do you do? Roll back, obviously. Except rolling back Unity isn’t that simple — too many dependencies, plus core components like Compiz. If you’re going to roll back, you might as well go big.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th couldn’t use its TrackPoint under Linux at all. Plenty of people were discussing the problem, but nobody had actually fixed it. Then a while back, with the X280 and X1 Carbon 6th entering internal testing, the issue finally got some attention, and it got solved.

What the hell, you just putting up with this? My GIFs have no previews anymore. I can’t even see my cute panda!

If you use Firefox in fullscreen as much as I do, you’ve probably hit the same problem I have. What happens is this: while I’m browsing fullscreen in Firefox, I click some other popup window and it opens underneath Firefox instead of coming to the front. WiFi status, uploading images to Weibo, all sorts of stuff. And it only happens under Unity. Annoying as hell. Well, there’s a fix now.

My Acer C720 running Ubuntu has never given me any trouble — it’s just been a terminal netbook for configuring switches and servers. But recently I figured it’d been a while since I updated, so I got the itch and ran an update. Which is when I hit this. “The file list of package XXX contains an empty filename” No idea why this happens. From poking around some Debian docs, it’s probably from a flaky connection pulling down an incomplete package or list and then force-installing it.