Yesterday I and Alex went to an Opera. We watched Opera by Giuseppe Verdi called “La Traviata”.It’s the second time I see this opera, the first time was when I was still a puppil.Pretty awesome opera the actors were really good. And this classic music! Awesome!After the Opera performance I phoned to Ivo a.k.a. (Order)we went to a sort of pub which wasextremely cheap considering the fact it was near the center and the food and drinks were really good.After all this we had a walk around in Varna and hitted the road back to Dobrich.Kimmo My finish colleague is leaving for Finland and was organizing farewell party.Unfortunately because of the Opera I was unable to go to the party. Yesterday was a really niceday considering that nice opera show. The bad news for me yesterday was that I didn’t passedthe written exam in German and I have to go to the re-sit at Tuesday. With the Lord’s helpI hope I would pass it 🙂 Also I’m going to start for the Accounting exam because It’s at Monday.END—–
Nikwi Deluxe is another good quality jump and run game for Linux
The main actor you play with is a (Dexter like) looking kid who has to collect all candy items on the level screen. The game graphics are quite a good level if compared to the most Linux jump and run games.
Your game hero is not equipped with any weapon or (jump over the enemies like in Maries) and you not haven't got any mean to kill enemies, but you have to always avoid them. There are some funny looking crawl (birds) shitting from the above every now and then, if you're hit by a the bird's droplet you die. The game has 30 levels and after each level succesful completion you're provided with a password that can be used as a "Save Game" like if you quit from game and on next game run you would like to start directly from the last game level you reachedNikwi Deluxe is another good quality jump and run game for Linux
The only game downfall is the missing music as well as the not too brilliant sound. To boost my game experience, however put some background music and give the game a try 😉
Alex the Alligator is a Free Software (Open Sourced) arcade game licensed under the General Public License (GPL) The game is quite of fun and especially the music totally kicks ass! 😉
The game plot is simple but fun in the good Spirit of oldschool Super Mario like arcade games.
In the game you are a little cute crocodile whose (crocodile) girlfriend is kidnapped with a helicopter by the evil human poachers. As you love her too much and you're determined to grow a crocodile family with this croco-girl you start a long quest to save her from possible zoo slavery or killing for a crocodile skin boots.
The quest for kidnapped girlfriend (LOLA) liberation wents through the harsh jungles.
Alex The Alligator has a version for both Windows and Linux ports. The Linux port is available for most major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora etc.
To install the game on Debian and Ubuntu with apt-get issue:
debian:~# apt-get --yes install alex4
...
After installing the game can be run from command line using cmd:
alex4
The game controls are as follows;
Arrow Keys – Movement
Alt – Jump
Ctrl – Fire (if you have previously collected Eggs
Alex the Alligator is also equipped with a MAP editor, so if you really want to contribute the game development, take some time create some maps and submit to game's official website http://allegator.sourceforge.net/ . On the game website there are few other variations of the Alex the Alligator as well as extra game maps. Explanation on which keys can be used to create maps is found in the game manual, e.g.:
debian:~$ man alex4
If you have downloaded some extra game maps from the game sourceforge website, to load them you can use:
Shift+L
Will Alex succeed in saving his girlfriend ? It's up to you 😉
A friend of mine Plamen Panayotov is one of the best guitarists, I’ve ever watched live. He is self-taught musician and is one of the notable guitar composers of our times (in my view). As every genious he is not recognized on time and his music is not well known in Bulgaria.
Plamenko , he uses unique tunings not to be find in musicians official books. Plamenko’s music is highly charged with positivism and goodness as it also reflects his life as a Christian and his Christian views. He tried hard to make living with music and has issued a couple of music albums which are available for purchase in Amazon (just in case if you like his works).
Plamenko’s living is very interesting and he was actually the first person, I’ve met to publicly confess his faith in Christ. I found it nice to share some of his inspirational and highly spiritual songs here in hope they will bring some peace and spiritual joy to my readers.
Plamenko – The Wisdom from Abvove
Plamenko – Renewal / Revival
Plamenko – First is Pure
Plamenko’s music is very unusual and I believe it would not be of an interest to people, who are after pop culture. Also his music is not a music one can listen everyday, (because of its high music diversity and complexity of composings is not easy for to be comprehended by the unskillful eye), however I’m sure his music can be appreciated well by professional musicians, spiritual seekers and unique music connoisseurs.
Plamenko’s living is as unsual as his music. He spend many of his years playing his guitar and traveling throughout Bulgaria’s mountain areas, waterfall regions and the wildest places in the country.
He shared with me his stories on how he lived, almost like a hermit for few weeks in abandoned old houses, vineyeards, meadows located in the wild. During his tiny periods of “hermitage”, he told me how much he enjoyed the birds singing, crickets voices at night, the winds etc., while wandering in the mountain goaty pathways. The most unique story, I’ve heard from his mouth comes like this. He was travelling in the mountain as always and once loved a certain mountain area place, he liked an abandoned house nearby and stayed and lived there (in high ridges of Rodopi Mountains) for two weeks time. During the two weeks he spend there his food was wild blueberrys and other kind of fruits many of which wild foods located he can find naturally growing nearby the place.
There is no doubt Plamenko like kind of people, are hard to meet in todays crazy life, when money are considered the highest good and people forgot that the essence of life is not in eating and drinking as our saviour Jesus Christ told in the gospels.
People like Paca are probably almost impossible to find in the developed Western Countries. If you like Plamenko’s works and you have the financial wellness to afford buying his works, support him and help him to continue making and producing his wonderful music by buying some of his albums in Amazon.
Plamenko is currently living and working in Copenhagen Denmark, as he found it’s nearly impossible to earn enough money in a legal way in Bulgaria to afford fulfilling his dream of buyig a house situated in the mountain. In Copenhagen presently he is working as a postman, distributing newspapers at night with bike. Last time, I saw him just about few weeks ago he went back for a Holiday in Bulgaria and said he haven’t seriously played his guitar for about a year because of being busy with his distributing newspapers works. He also told me doesn’t feel passion for playing. This is quite normal, I guess since he couldn’t find appreciators of his music. Plamenko’s music is produced without any company label under by himself. He is manually copying his music to CDs producing CD covers etc. This kind of music producing is quite unique for today’s world, where most of the music is only done via mass production in factories. If you’re living in Copenhagen, you can see Plamenko on the streets and tell say Hi. Plamenko’s artistic pseudonim (Plamenko) comes after his passion to play Flamenco music and mix it with other music styles. Plamenko’s band in which he is the only member is called Symphology and means Logic of the Somphony. He works in city center of Copenhagen an unusual job just like his music. His daily job there consists of standing still for hours, holding a big Advertising sign of a famous Copenhagen Tatoo Studio.
A friend of mine has sent me a link to awesome videos produced with an open source tool called Gource
The tool is really awesome as its capable of producing amazing graphical visualizations from source tree repositories obtained from software SVN or GIT repositories
Someone used it to create a wonderful videos and relate the graphical visualization with wondeful music to show graphically the Software development for the main Free Software Projects. 😉
The points which move around in videos are graphical representation of the repository source, the nodes which buzzle around are users who commit source in the project repositories. The whole graphical representation is being generated based on all the latest source hold inside the software repository, on top of the videos its visible the date of each of the source commits. Below are few of the nice videos, the rest are available for checkout in Youtube, Enjoy! 😉
OpenOffice Development – Graphical representation
PHP Development – Graphical representation
History of Python development since 1990 with Gource
Development of MySQL 2000-2010 – Graphical representation
Perl development history in less then 4 minutes. Visualized with gource.
I remember about Johny Cash’s Hurt song as the nine inch nails cover was a very favourite one to me for quite a few years, in the meantime I reviewed Johny Cash’s musical works and decided to check some biographic info about Johny Cash I was surpirsed to find out Johny Cash used to create a lot of music about the Lord Jesus Christ and shocked by the fact he had a long period in his life in which he was a devoted Christian!
I’m really happy to find out this info as one I’m a christian myself and two he is one of the most influential musicians of the last 150 years, not to say of all times.
His biography is quite a bizarre one full of falling and standings, anyways i would skip the talks now and suggest for my readers to enjoy Johny’s Cash few notable songs:
Johny Cash – Hurt Video
Johny Cash – Ring of Fire Video
Johny Cash – San Quentin (Live From Prison)
Johny Cash – Redemption Video
Johny Cash – I walk the Line Video
Johny Cash – God’s Gonna Cut you Down Awesome music ain’t it ? 🙂
Are you looking for free software version of the old-school absolute Nintendo classic Super Mario Bros. ? 🙂
If you’re an old-school geek gamer like me you definitely do 😉 I was lucky to find Secret Mario Chronicles a Linux version of Super Mario while I was browsing through all the available for installation Linux games in aptitude .
The game is really great and worthy to be played. It’s even a better copy of the classical arcade game than SuperTux (another Mario like Linux clone game)
Both Super Mario Chronicles and Super Mario Bros are available for installation as .deb packages in the repositories of Ubuntu and Debian and most likely the other Debian direvative Linux distrubtion.
To install and play the games out of the box, if you’re a Debian or Ubuntu user, just issue:
linux:~# apt-get install smc supertux
The other good news are that both of the games’s engine, music and graphics are GPLed 🙂
To Launch the games after installation in GNOME I’ve used the menus:
Applications -> Games -> Super Mario Chronicles
andApplications -> Games -> Arcade -> SuperTux
The games can also be launched from terminal with commands:
debian:~$ smc
debian:~$ supertux
The only thing I don’t like about Super Mario Chronicles is that it doesn’t have a good music and only sounds, just to compare SuperTux has an awesome level music. Along with being an absolute classic I should say that these two games are one of the really good arcade games produced for Linux and if I have to rank them as a gamer among all the other boring arcade games today available for Linux this two ones ranks in the top 10 arcade games prdocuced for Linux
Here are two really nice videos produced by Daniela Popova.
One is called Black and White Story and the other one is with the funny name To Download an Apple
The videos was produced for her Graduation assignment in NATFA (National Academy of Theater and Film arts). Even better the Black and White Story Video has been selected for the Festival of the Orthodox Christian Cinema in Moscow. The movie was selected by a the jury on the festival (a professor) who realized there is a deeper spiritual meaning behind the Black and White Story
The Black & White Story Video has also an outstanding bulgarian national folklore music combined with some modern day music, just check it out and enjoy.
The second movie To Download an Apple is a humorous one and I believe presents the sometimes stupid and serious efforts we do to follow fake imaginative goals.
As Daniela is a Christian the movies contain also a hidden Christian messages 😉 I greet her for the great work! Considering the uniqueness of the videos it’s obvious Daniela is really talented! I’m looking forward to see some more from her works.
In my quest to know Linux better and use it capabilities to fulfill a multimedia tasks I came across the question:
How can I extract audio sound and music from Flash Videos .flv file format?
After a bit of investigation online I’ve found out in order to achieve this task the quickest way is via the handy ffmpeg conversion tool .
It’s rather easy actually, all necessery to do the conversion is to have the ffmpeg installed. FFMpeg is part of Debian and Ubuntu repositories, so if you haven’t installed it yet, go straigh and install it with:
debian:~# apt-get install ffmpeg
...
Many modern day Linux distributions already have the ffmpeg pre-installed by default, ffmpeg even have a Windows version so this little tutorial should be directly applied on a Windows host with installed ffmpeg.
Convertion of a .flv file to .mp3 file for example is a real piece of cake to so do issue the command:
When talking about conversions, another very useful application of ffmpeg is in case if you want to:
Extract Audio from online streams
Let’s say you have a favourite radio, you often listen and there are a podcast you want to capture for later listening, or just catch a few nice songs, using ffmpeg it’s a piece of cake by using the command like:
The possible ways of use of ffmpeg is truly versatily, you can use it for instance if you have to convert some kind of audio or video format to another one I have given a very simple example of converting a .flv file to .avi and vice versa in my previous post