No worries. Here’s a very simple solution for you.

First, navigate to the Control Panel, click on Hardware and Sound. Under Sound, click on Manage audio device.

Then, make sure that your USB speakers is set as the default audio device, and click on Properties.

Under the Enhancements tab, tick Disable all enhancements and click Apply.

You’re ready to go! Play a song and try it out!

Your USB speakers should be up and running again! Viola~

If you want something simple and do not wish to install any additional gadgets to your computer, for instance, Google Desktop (it has the alarm clock feature), Naked Alarm Clock is always a good choice for you to set an alarm.

It’s good for those who let their computer on whole night while sleeping (not healthy to sleep with your computer, though). It will make a great alarm, you can choose from 4 different alarm tones. The interface is quite straight forward, need me say no more.

A great alarm tool if your alarm clock is temporarily out of service

Model: 201

1) 2.0 Megapixels chipset (1600×1200)
2) USB 2.0 interface
3) built-in led light with light adjust controller
4) built-in Microphone

Driver: TinyTech 201 download

The driver includes:

1. Chipset
2. Audio
3. Video
4. Lan
5. Wireless Lan
6. Card Reader

Download Driver: Joybook A32 Driver

This codec works well with Media Player Classic (one of my favorite media players).

QuickTime Alternative will allow you to play QuickTime files (.mov, .qt, .3gp and other extensions) without having to install the official QuickTime Player. It also supports QuickTime content that is embedded in webpages. The QuickTime Browser plugin supports Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla.

What is so good about installing the QuickTime Alternative codec rather than the original QuickTime player itself?

• Quick and easy install
• Ability to make an unattended installation
• No background processes
• No unwanted stuff and other nonsense
• Smaller size

Download QuickTime Alternative today and enjoy watching QuickTime movies without a QuickTime player.

Free Icons Download is a site that provides high quality royalty free icons for Windows, Mac and Linux, Offers Ico, Gif, Bmp, Png various icons format. It has many cute, funny icons from many categories that look like this:

Make sure to check it out.

Iconfinder is a free icon “search engine”.  You can also get high quality icons in PNG that look like this:

Another free icon “search engine” is ICONlook.

It provides high quality icons in various sizes in PNG or ICO format.

Hope you can look for custom free icons that you like from the above websites.

[ via HongKiat, MyTechQuest ]

If you spot blinking light, means there is an error occur. When the orange light appear,  it’s probably insufficient paper or something related to the ink catridge. When you get the orange light blinking all the way, eventhough paper is load, ink catridge is not empty, it is probably the printer recongized the ink catridge as empty (although it’s not empty!).

Some will suggest using the printer reset software (mostly for Windows user). Before you busy searching for the reset software, try to following.

Press and hold on to the resume button (the button beside the orange light) for about 6 seconds and let go. The printer now should be able to be in the stable normal state. If fail, do try again and hold the resume button for a longer time.

I’ve tested this on a Canon PIXMA iP1880 connected to Ubuntu Linux 7.04, and it worked.

Find out how to setup Canon PIXMA iP1880 in Ubuntu Linux.

If you want to input Chinese character (or other Asian languages like Japanese or Korean), the first thing you have to ensure is your Windows XP has the additional language installed. First, you will have to go to the Control Panel.

Click on Start > Control Panel.

For the sake of this tutorial, I suggest you to switch your Control Panel to Classic View if you haven’t. To do so, just click on the Switch to Classic View on the upper left of the Control Panel window.

Next, look for the icon and double click on it.  Then, in the Regional and Language Options window, navigate to the Languages tab. Then tick the Install files for East Asian languages. (Note: If you already can see Chinese character, means you already have this feature installed. Therefore you can skip this step.)

You will see a Windows message something like this:

You choose to install the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language files. This will require 230MB or more of available disk space. The files will be installed after you click OK or Apply on the Regional and Language Options dialog box.

To setup the language input, you have to click on the Details button.

To add the input language, follow these 4 steps:

1. Click on the Add button.
2. Select Chinese (PRC) for the Input Language.
3. Select Chinese (Simplified) – Microsoft Pinyin IME 3.0 for Keyboard layout/IME. (Assuming that you are using Pinyin 拼音 for Chinese input.)
4. Click OK to confirm.

By default, to input Chinese character, you will have to press on the left Alt + Shift key. If you don’t want the default setting, you can always do your own setting by clicking the “Key Settings” button.

Once you have finish install this, you may want to restart your computer (or during the earlier stage). Then you should be able to see the language bar at the right bottom of your desktop with the letters “EN“.

When you want to input Chinese character, just press on the left Alt + Shift key (for default settings), then the EN will change to CN. Vice versa, if you want to input English character again.

IF you can’t see this at the bottom of your desktop, you probably haven’t enable the language toolbar. To do so, right click on your taskbar, choose Toolbars > Language bar.

Lastly, you can now input Chinese characters.

Voila~

Tip: This is not only limited to Chinese input. You can use the same method to setup other supported languages, as long as you install the corresponding input language.

Failed to start the X Server (your graphical interface). It is likely that it is not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X Server output to diagnose the problem?

Then, you are given a “Yes” or “No” option, and you are stuck. What to do next? This is probably due to your graphical interface, meaning your graphic card driver. In Windows, you can easily install the motherboard driver which includes the onboard VGA driver.  Whereas in Ubuntu, you cannot do that with the motherboard driver given by the manufacturer (because most are built for Windows).

All you have to do is to reconfigure the X server. Type sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and answer the questions accordingly. If you are not sure which option to choose (especially on the preinstall graphic driver), I suggest you to use the trial and error method.

Please take note that you can solve this problem by typing the command above if you are just using an onboard graphic card. I’m not sure how will it work with additional graphic cards like nVidia or ATI.

They look something like this:

HJSplit is what you need to join these files as one.

What is HJSplit?

HJSplit is a popular set of freeware file-splitting programs created by Freebyte.com in collaboration with various programmers. HJSplit supports many platforms (Windows 3.x/95/98/ME/2000/NT/XP, DOS, Amiga, Java, etc.).

HJSplit will enable you to split the large file into smaller chunks, which can be much more easily sent and stored. HJSplit can join these split parts back together again, so that the original file is restored.

How to use HJSplit?
Say, you have several split files with the same name but in consecutive numbers at the end. All you need to do is install HJSplit, a very light-weight program around 304KB, launch it and click on the Join button.

After that in the input field, navigate to the directory that you have stored your split files, choose the one that ends with .001. By default, the output location will be the same location of your input file, you can change to your desire directory if you wish.

Then click on the Start button and it will start joining those files. The duration depends on the file size.

When it’s done, you will see an confimation message like this:

Then you can access your file now. If you are joining an .AVI file, now you can view it in any media players that support that format as usual.

Easy, isn’t it?

Download HJSplit.