Report your own bug/problem!

Problem with your PC or mobile? Describe it in the comment section and I may have a look at it.

What I am most likely to look at:

• general problems that impact many people (example: windows bug when creating an ad hoc connection)
• problems I can reproduce myself (example: blogger.com displays an annoying error message when used with opera)

What I am less likely to look at:

• problems that are badly described (example: my smartphone does not work... what do you mean by that? What is it that is not working? In which scenario? What version of software?)
• problems that I cannot reproduce (not that I don't trust you, but I need to reproduce the issue to document the solution)
• problems with a solution available with an easy Google search (first result)

How to change the language of Mypaint in Windows

Mypaint definitively needs some tuning about language settings. I downloaded the software, ran it and it was in... Norwegian! My OS is in English, every programs I use are in English. I have no idea where this software got the idea it should use Norwegian.

Looked in the settings: no way to change the language. Looked in forums: nothing worked. Many people said you only need to rename a folder. Believe me, I change the name of every possible folder with no, NO, norway, or whatever that looked like Norwegian.

Nothing helped. It can be that the language was cached somewhere and that the program would have worked in English after a restart of the PC but I found another solution:
1) Uninstall your program (be careful if you already have done some work with it, you may lose all the data)
2) Reinstall it and be careful. At what point, you will be asked what you want to install
3) Simply uncheck "Translations"
4) Enjoy :-)

How to get the product ID of something on Amazon?

So you are writing for Hubpages, Squidoo or whatever writer community website and you are wondering where to find the Amazon product id of an object you want to promote (and get some percentage of the sale through your Amazon affiliate link).

The answer is simple. Look for the product you want to promote on amazon and look at the URL. The URL should be something like:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086DBE62?ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0086DBE62

You may need to highlight the URL to see it complete but the most important, the product id is probably visible. It is the code that follows product. In our case B0086DBE62:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0086DBE62?ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=B0086DBE62

Don't include the question mark.

If, for some reasons, the URL does not look like this at all, you will have to find the product ID in the "product detail" part of the page. Here it is called ASIN:

If you want to link to a book, you have to provide the ISBN-10, not the ISBN-13

So, in this example: 0345529057.

That's it. Don't hesitate to ask if you have more questions. Also, if you are only writing for Hubpages, you are welcome to join me on InfoBarrel (great community, nice forum, ...). Here are more details about InfoBarrel and why you should join. If you want to join Squidoo (quite fun to write there with achievements, level, ...), you can use this link. Also, don't hesitate to have a look at my article about how to get more readers.

Higgs Boson joke

Just a small joke inspired of agrovista, bzishi, Jason Weisberger and Brian Malow...

Opera and Blogger compatibility issue: get rid of the warning message

If you are using Opera and Blogger (Blogspot), you may have noticed recently the warning message: "Your browser is no longer supported by Blogger. Some parts of Blogger will not work and you may experience problems. If you are having problems, try Google Chrome. | Dismiss."

The warning message in itself is fine. It simply warns you that some parts of Blogger may not work as intended. But, how to get rid of this message? You can dismiss it but it will appear again and again until you give up and download google chrome... Unless... Here is a simple trick to make the message disappear. Warning: you will then have problems editing your posts (viewing them, checking the stats, etc... will still be fine).

Principle of the work-around:
Blogger knows you use Opera because your browser tells him so. What if your Opera browser were to tell blogger "hi, I am Internet Explorer" or "hi, I am Firefox"? Then you won't get the error message anymore. Well, some parts of blogger will still fail (posts editing), but at least, you won't get this annoying warning message anymore. In the IT world, we call the identity of your browser the "user agent". It is a known fact that you can change it to more or less whatever you want and the good thing with Opera is that you can do it for a specific website and don't need to change your register for that.

Work-around, step-by-step:
1) Go to blogger.com (or actually any websites you have problems with, it can be adsense in the future for example)

2) Right click on the page (around the middle of the page should be fine)

3) Select "Edit site preferences"

4) Verify that the site address is correct (for example, if you wanted to change the behaviour of Adsense, put "www.google.com/adsense" instead of just "www.google.com"). Here, "www.blogger.com" is the correct address.

5) Go to the tab Network

6) Change the Browser identification parameter. You can ask Opera to identifies itself as Internet Explorer for example or  Firefox. "Identify as Internet Explorer" is the one I use to get rid of the warning message. When I want to edit my posts, I get back to "Identify as Opera" (message editing is then working fine but the warning message comes back).

The good thing about this fix is that it only concerns the website you have problems with. It will not change anything to your normal surfing experience in general. The bad thing is that you will experience problems with Blogger, especially with posts editing... Oh well, at least, you were warned.

Thanks in advance for everyone giving a +1 to this article (google button above)