Posts Tagged ‘fun’

The Great Escape video – Why Money-less Visa, Mastercard etc. electronic transfers impose risk for our freedom

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

A friend of mine send me a video in skype. It is a representation of one sad reality. A pigs are living in a farm, being wake up with electronic signal. The pig start eating, playing, f*cking etc. It is a lot of fun happiness and freedom. Some of them which are more initiative possess the typical characteristics of middle age times explorer and the spirit of researchers and scientists who tend to explore the universe, research new things, learn and get to the limit of things. The poor animals comes up to electric fence with VISA Electroin. Though the video is intending to be anti-propaganda of use of VISA debit cards, same is more or like true for travel VISAs. Nowadays within the European Union everyone is free to travel freely, everywhere inside the EU, it seems so fun you can learn new cultures, earn money, enjoy yourself and dissolve yourself in happiness and joys forgetting your own culture language and nationality. You become part of one "happy farm" not knowing your once free land though being stretched is limited by electric powered "no escape" fence.
 

 The Great Visa Escape – The deception that moneless transfers makes you free – money-less transfers pose future risk to human freedom

 

Helpful Firefox / IceWeasel Plugins for Linux and Windows

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

firefox logo
I have a bunch of helpful firefox extensions that might be of an interest for any regular Firefox user.I’m putting a list of all the firefox plugins I use currently.

 

1. Adblock Plus
2. ColorfulTabs
3. Download Statusbar
4. DownloadHelpfer
5. Fasterfox
6. Firefox
7. Firebug
8. Greasemonkey
9. keyconfig
10. Kgen
11. SearchStatus
12. SwitchProxy Tool
13. User Agent Switcher
14. Web Developer
15. YSlow

 

Well I hope this might be helpful for you. Have fun.

SL Animated console train for your Linux – useless commans to cheer you up when you mistype ls

Tuesday, February 18th, 2014

sl-cool-program-to-cheer-you-up-when-you-make-a-mistake-on-linux-console

Some time ago I blogged about how to make your sysadmin more enjoyable with figlet and toilet console ASCII art text generators
Besides toilet and figlet another cool entertainment proggie is cowsay. On my home Linux router I use cowsay together with a tiny shell script to generate me a random Cow Ascii Art fun picture each time I login to my Linux. cowrand is set to run for my user through ~/.bashrc.

cowsay print cheerful pictures on your linux console / terminal login how to

In the spirit of ascii art fun arts today I've stumbled on another cool  and uselesss few kilobytes program called "SL". SL is very simple all it does is it cheers up you by displaying a an animated train going through the screen once you type by mistake "sl" instead of ls (list command).
To enjoy it on debian based distributions install it with apt:

# apt-get install --yes sl

SL 's name is a playful joke itself as well it stands for Steam Locomotive.

To get some more ASCII art fun, try telnetting to  towel.blinkenlights.nl – There is a synthesised ASCII Art text version video of Star Wars – Episode IV

# telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

watch all star_wars episode 1 in ascii art video

If you know other cool ASCII art animation scripts / ASCII art games or anything related to ASCII art for Linux / Windows, please drop me a comment.
 

How a monastery celebrates a brotherhood monk name day – the feast of (Saint Sergii from Radonezh) in Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

Saint Sergii of Radonezh Orthodox icon

Now it is my 4th day being in Pomorie Monastery with Kimba. The monastic life is not so boring as I thought back in the days 🙂
Yesterday I was drived to the Kamenar pub, by one of the workers here in the monastery (with the monastic car an old Ford);
We went to the restaurant in Kamenar village with the blessing of the abbot has blessed that we go and enjoy ourselves for few hours there with a group of tourists staying for (1 or 2) weeks in the monastery.

The pub was quite a news for me as it was a nice looking place with a lounge and swimming pool, this seemed quite unusual for especially since it was located in a village with 200 or 300 hundred of people living 🙂
The village pub had even a billiard table, the coin price there was on the shocking 25 stotinki (0.13) euro cents! 🙂
In the pub came an orthodox priest dressed like a casual person and started singing some traditional old Bulgarian songs (typical for singing in the different regions in BG). The guy was really talented and his memory seem to be very strong, since he was able to sing by heart about 10 songs in a row !

Besides that the priest voice was very beautiful. When I later had a talk with the guy it appeared, he learned professional singing before he became an Orthodox priest some years ago.
What really shocked me when the priest started singing in Italian Luciano Pavaroti, he sang it so well so you can hardly find out if it is not really the real authentic Luciano voice 🙂

This priest and the overall people in the pub had a great fun, as the place and people in were quite spirited; Actually I felt in a while like being in Emil Kosturica's movie 🙂 🙂 🙂

Being over with yesterday I will say few words on my monastic experience today ….
The Church bell rang early in the morning to summit the monks for the early morning prayer followed by a Holy Liturgy served. The Holy Liturgy today served was a co-memoration of the feast of Saint Sergii of Radonezh.

Cause it is weekly day here there were not too many people in the monastic Church. The monastery monks were there,few other people and some Russian pilgrim woman. By the way I'm more and more being convinced that many of the Russian people are very pious oriented and have strong faith in God than us bulgarians. Sadly it appears (from my observations so far) Russians generally are richer in faith.
It is sad that Russian Orthodox Christianity is stronger than ours in Bulgarian, especially when we take the fact historically Russians have received the Orthodox Chrisitian faith and language from us Bulgarians …

One of the key figure (brothers) monks Father Sergii is having a name day here, so due to that and because it is not a fasting day today (Thursday), the traditional monastic dinner was bigger and more rich than usual. Some youghurt mixed with cucumbers (Tarator) as we call it in Bulgaria was served with a little salad a few pieces of Banica and even little meat balls (for people eating meat).
The Abbot of the monastery was not served meat as I heard from the cook lady he is completely abstaying from meat since about 10 years already; some of the monk brother didn't eat meat as well.
The dinner started about 12:20 in the usual dinner room. For another day the food in the monastery was tasting super-delicious.
It is rather interesting that the food here is more delicious than the food we usually eat at home; Probably the food is so delicious because large portion of the food on the table is monastic-grown and besides that a food blessing prayer is said everytime before eat time. Earlier times I've heard many others who visited and eat food in monasteries that the monastic food is tastier and more delicious than we ordinary people have on our tables, however I was sceptical until I experienced it myself, these days.
Cause the food is so tasteful, I consume here usually twice more food than I usually eat at home 🙂

I recommend anyone who didn't eat a meal in a monastery (yet) to try this at least once in a lifetime ;;;

Life was easier when Blackberry and Apple were just fruits

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Life was much easier when blackberry and Apple were just fruits

Sad but true fact Life was much easier when BlackBerry and Apple were just fruits!.

I don’t know about others but I have difficulties to adjust my body to the fast pace life has taken. Life would was easy and more fun without all this technology. Now even going to a pub you can’t escape the “doom” of technology. If the tech hype continues the way it does or something drastic doesn’t happen I guess all people on earth will get completely crazy …

I thougth about how this techno-mambo jumbo can be stopped on a wide scale and the only idea I have is a weapon that blocks all tech equipment world-wide. I hope someone will develop it soon and press the destory button SOON ! 🙂

HasciiCAM supposed to stream ASCII video over the network on GNU / Linux

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Richard M. Stallman (RMS) Face portrait rendered in ASCII art from a video with hasciicam
To continue with my lately ASCII centered articles I found hasciicam
hasciicam is a program to stream ASCII video over the network on Linux and probably can be easily made working on FreeBSDtoo.

The project concept is interesting in a matter of fun (play) point of view, however not too usable as we all know ASCII character looking faces doesn't look too pretty.

Below is the Debian (Squeeze) package description:

noah:~# apt-cache show hasciicam|grep -i description -A 7
Description: (h)ascii for the masses: live video as text
Hasciicam makes it possible to have live ASCII video on the web. It
captures video from a tv card and renders it into ascii, formatting the
output into an html page with a refresh tag or in a live ASCII window or
in a simple text file as well, giving the possibility to anybody that has a
bttv card, a Linux box and a cheap modem line to show a live ASCII video
feed that can be browsable without any need for plugin, java etc.
Homepage: http://ascii.dyne.org/

On hasciicam Project webpage is it is stated as a hardware you need to have:
 

"As hardware you need to have a webcam or a videocard supported by "video 4 linux", most of the gear you can buy around should work well."

To install and test it I run:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install hasciicam

Though it is stated on the project website supposed to work display video fine with most 'linux ready' webcams, it didn't with this very standard one.

Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:

noah:~# dmesg|grep -i camera
[ 1.433661] usb 2-2: Product: USB2.0 Camera
[ 10.107840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102)
[ 10.110660] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input11

By the way, I use the very same CAM daily on for Skype video calls as well as the Camera is working with no problems to save video or pictures inside Cheese

Here is the exact WebCamera model as identified to the kernel:

noah:~# dmesg|grep -i camera
[ 1.433661] usb 2-2: Product: USB2.0 Camera
[ 10.107840] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102)
[ 10.110660] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input11

The just installed deb has one binary file only /usr/bin/hasciicam. To test it with the camera I issued:

noah:~# hasciicam -d /dev/video0
HasciiCam 1.0 - (h)ascii 4 the masses! - http://ascii.dyne.org
(c)2000-2006 Denis Roio < jaromil @ dyne.org >
watch out for the (h)ASCII ROOTS

Device detected is /dev/video0
USB2.0 Camera
1 channels detected
max size w[640] h[480] - min size w[48] h[32]
Video capabilities:
VID_TYPE_CAPTURE can capture to memory
!! error in ioctl VIDIOCGMBUF: : Invalid argument

Unfortunately as you see from the output, it failed to detect the web camera model.
The exact camera besides its kernel detection naminf is a cheap external USB 2.0 (fake brand / nonanem) "universal" Web PC Camera (SUPER .3mega pixel)

For those who have a further interest in building and installing hasciicam on other Linux platforms than Debian and Ubuntu or whoever wants to look in the code check check Project webpage is. For those who are less of programmers (like me) the project is written in C programming language and uses aa-lib in order to render the video to ASCII.

On the site you will notice two totally schizophrenic looking pictures of presumably the project head developer …

hasciiart video streamed ASCII screenshot of some crazy looking guy smoking marijuanna or smth

As I read in man hasciicam manual page it's said to be able to generate ascii plain text and html files as well as directly to write the output to console, which later probably can be streamed via the network.
Pitily as it didn't detect my camera I couldn't make some testing of its network capabilities.

A Streaming of ASCII couuld be done through pushing the .html output to a webserver and setting a php or javascript to loop through and refresh the browser over the uploaded files every sec or so.

Also I assume the ASCII video output saved in plain console could be streamed via netcat or some tiny scripted perl or bash script and directly observed via a telnet or ssh connection.
One playful way I can think of checking a stored video without the use of FTP is to login via ssh and do:

$ ssh someuser@somehost
$ watch -n 1 "cat video-ascii.html"

🙂

Well something disturbing about hasciicam from a (purely Christian point of view) is it was developed by some kind of non profit organization called RastaSoft on the project website, some of its authors has written JAH BLESS.

As I didn't succeeded seeing it working, I'll be interested to hear if someone who red this article and give it a try can report the web camera model used.

How to increase brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PI22515 notebook with Slackware Linux

Friday, March 9th, 2012

Increase LCD screen brightness on Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop with Linux Slackware

A friend of mine has Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop and is full time using his computer with Slackware Linux.

He is quite happy with Slackware Linux 13.37 on the laptop, but unfortunately sometimes his screen brightness lowers. One example when the screen gets darkened is when he switch the computer on without being plugged in the electricity grid. This lowered brightness makes the screen un-user friendly and is quite tiring for the eye …

By default the laptop has the usual function keys and in theory pressing Function (fn) + F8 / F7 – should increase / decrease the brightness with no problems, however on Slackware Linux (and probably on other Linuxes too?), the function keys are not properly recognized and not responding whilst pressed.
I used to have brigtness issues on my Lenovo notebook too and remember how irritating this was.
After a bit of recalling memories on how I solved this brightness issues I remembered the screen brigthness on Linux is tunable through /proc virtual (memory) filesystem.

The laptop (Amilo) Fujitsu Siemens video card is:

lspci |grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 03)

I took a quick look in /proc and found few files called brightness:
 

  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness
  • /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD05/brightness

cat-ting /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD01/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD03/brightness, /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD04/brightness all shows not supported and therefore, they cannot be used to modify brightness:

bash-4.1# for i in $(/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD0{1,3,4,5}/brightness); do \
cat $i;
done
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>
<not supported>

After a bit of testing I finally succeeded in increasing the brightness.
Increasing the brightness on the notebook Intel GM965 video card model is done, through file:

/proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness

To see all the brightness levels the Fujitsu LCD display supports:

bash-4.1# cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness
levels: 13 25 38 50 63 75 88 100
current: 25

As you can see the dark screen was caused cause the current: brightness is set to a low value of 25.
To light up the LCD screen and make the screen display fine again, I increased the brightness to the maximum level 100, e.g.:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

Just for the fun, I've written also a two lines script which gradually increases LCDs brightness 🙂

bash-4.1# echo '13' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness;
bash-4.1# for i in \
$(cat /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness|grep 'levels'|sed -e 's#levels:##g'); do \
echo $i > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brightness; sleep 1; \done

fujitsu_siemens_brightness_fun.sh script is fun to observe in changing the LCD screen gradually in one second intervals 🙂

Here is also a tiny program that reduces and increases the notebook laptop brightness written in C. My friend Dido, coded it in just few minutes just for the fun 🙂
To permanently solve the issues with darkened screen on boot time it is a good idea to include echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness in /etc/rc.local:

bash-4.1# echo '100' > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/DD02/brigthness

I've also written another Universal Linux Increase laptop screen brightness Shell script which should be presumable also working for all Laptop models running Linux 🙂

My maximize_all_linux_laptops_brightness.sh "universal increase Linux brightness" script is here
I'll be glad to hear from people who had tested the script on other laptops and can confirm it works fine for them.
 

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Yesterday I spend a lot of time outside with Lily. We went to the fountain we watched film at home. The film was called”Wild Hogs” it was supposed to be a fun commedy (only supposed to be). This week is going to be a taugh one.We have to present a project at Marketing Research.

I have to write a 600 words resume about International Enterprice,also we have to make a presentation in Culture. Today in the morning i was on a Liturgy again. God’s grace ishere ! The week passed without serious server issues (Thanks God). Today I checked some logs of one of the serversand I observed oddities there. I checked the crontab and I realized it’s because of a crontab. The dumped databaseis a HUGE one 2.6G (bzipped).

I asked in irc.freenode.net #mysql, and the guys there pointed me to a similar issuewhich was supposed to be an MySQL bug when dumping large database. Since the dumping databases were of a type MyISAMI ofcourse could have used mysqlhotcopy.

But in the end the solution to the problem was removing “–opt” option fromthe backup opts of mysqldump and passing “–skip-opt” to it (I suspect this would slow the dumping process a lot).But I don’t care it is much better (a slow dumping), than hanging the whole Webserver and interrupting the site’s visibilityover the Internet.

Btw I started playing Quake 2, it’s cool but a little annoying there are too many tunnels and veryoften after I kill most of the bad guys I spend a lot of time searching for keys and stuff .. :).END—–

Wine in The Central Park

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I and Alex Drunk Asenovgrad’s Mavrut in the central park it was very cold, but at least an experience. Right now I’m a little hot (cause of the wine). I’m urinating too often recently and it drives me mad. Also I’m a kind of lost I told Sasho about Torsion fields and stuff but he make a fun of that no matter I think that’s a serious matter here is an interview with Nikolay Palushev that may be of an interest to the reader
http://www.spiralata.net/kratko/articles.php?lng=bg&pg=128 .

Today I had English in the college pretty boring haven’t had a lot of work I had to fix few binary permissions part of a postfix also delete some old backups and create a new samba share some mail server problems for few minutes I think that’s all … I hate this world so much everything is so useless and awful. I hope to meet God soon …