Can't change screen brightness with nVidia drivers? Here's a fix

After installing proprietary nVidia drivers on my Lenovo Thinkpad T530, the screen brightness was stuck at 100% and was  frying my eyes. Fortunately for those with such a laptop, or those who use a 5400M graphics card with Ubuntu 12.04/14.04, there is a fix. This AskUbuntu page helped me, and here are the instructions, summarised and curtailed to a computer with an nVidia 5400M graphics card:

Open up a terminal, as we will need to create a configuration file. Enter,
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-brightness.conf

A new file will be created. If there is something there already, overwrite it with this,

Section "Device"

    Identifier     "Device0"

    Driver         "nvidia"

    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"

    BoardName      "NVS 5400M"

    Option         "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

EndSection

I don't know how this works, but my eyes are blessed by this bit of code. Save it, and reboot your computer. If the problem persists, follow these steps (non Lenovo/Thinkpad users, replace "thinkpad_acpi" with "vendor"):

1. sudo nano /etc/default/grub
2. change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight= thinkpad_acpi"
3. sudo update-grub
4. sudo reboot

This tutorial was tested on Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04.

League of Legends - No sound in Ubuntu Wine Fix

When I first installed League of Legends on Ubuntu with PlayOnLinux (with wine 1.7), there was sound in the game lobby, but none ingame.

What didn't work
First, I tried disabling mmdevapi.dll. That made things worse by disabling all sound, so I re-enabled it.
Then I tried restarting pulseaudio,
killall pulseaudio
pulseaudio -k
Nothing happened.

What worked
Lastly I installed an audio package which was missing on my machine,
sudo apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386

BAM! It worked! The audio is fixed in-game as well as in the lobby.

Enable Chrome App Launcher in Linux (Elementary Luna/Mint/Ubuntu)

As of Chrome 35, Linux users can now enable the App Launcher and use Chrome Notifications.

These features are now available because Chrome for Linux now uses Aura - a Google-built graphic stack to draw the user interface, which replaces GTK+. Aura allows Google to design a more unified user interface independent of the operating system it is run on.

Enabling Chrome App Launcher

This tutorial will work on any Debian-based OS (eg Ubuntu/Mint/Luna).

First step is to enable some flags. Head to chrome://flags and search for "Enable the App Launcher." Enable it.
Next, look for "Enable App Launcher sync" and enable that too.
That's all the flags we need. Restart the browser and you should see the app launcher in user applications. If not, visit the web store:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/launcher

Gallery

Here's what the app launcher looks like in Elementary Luna: