I've been thinking about our modern day progression and what our "progressed" society looks like in reality. We think we have progressed, we have built machines that serves us well (computers). We plan for a bright painless easy future day by day. This bright "perfect" society future is nothing more than the dream of communism in its complete form.
But in what sense we have actually progressed ?? Everyone who really sees what happens around us notice the big changes we experience. On the surface it looks like our life has become much easier with all this technology surrounding us. The number of computers which is said to help us to leap towards this bright future increases day by day. With this however increases the need to support technology. Suddenly it happens that the old believe that computers are just a tool to make our life earier becomes a modern day slavery. Most of the developed or under development countries people are nowdays almost full time spending in front of the computer screen on the internet. We put our lifes in the mercy of man-created computers and it has become impossible that we live or exist independetly without them.
Computers are everywhere around us starting from the work Desk, at hand with a notebook, ipad, mobile phones, cars, airplanes. There is rarely to see any technology we use which works with not some kind of primitive or advanced computer embedded ,,, In the rise of computers as we know it computer was just a tool to help us along with the other overall thought and inventions development. Now from just being a tool to help us progress Computers become the common ground on which almost everything in life works.
I'm sure many people who started learning computer technology 15-20 years ago (like me) never imagined computers will integrate so heavily in our daily activities as they eventually did.
We use computers for the sake of planning which in "spiritual language" is predicting the future or prophecise what is about to come in the short future. In reality what we do mostly even not realizingly is to try to predict and modify the future through technology. This concept is also existing in most sci-fi movies, made in last 60 years. Mobile phones revolution give the humanity a tool through which telepathy we've seen in so many SCI-FI is reality. The mobile phone is just a platform through which (phone calls) or better said voice telepathy has become possible. In that manner of thoughts it is obvious that Video phone calls is a voice + visual telepathy. The Skype revolution and Video and voice conferences is brought was just until recently seen on the sci-fi movies where spaceship crews communicated with other spaceship crews by using a Visual conferences like skype.
It is really hard to believe that for just few years now everyone can speak with ease with everyone else on the planet in the same way just like we've seen in the movies as some foreign abstract concept!
Now suddenly most people on earth are equipped with technology with gives them the power to do everything but it is my firm believe people are not ready to wisely use this power. Therefore instead of using this higher technology wisely technology is used mostly senseless and the more technological advancement grows and becomes more accessible to the masses the more the tendency to use the technology for shit grows.
I'm sure people who have a good knowledge on programming and how computer works are already seriously aware of this enormous problem. Another severe problem with the raise of technology is the language slang it introduces. This tech-slang is adopted quickly all around the society and suddenly as a result the human language as we know it is seriously substituted by a vague tech words mambo-jambo words. Actually the adoption of tech buzz words in modern day society language makes a great harm for the reason communication between people becomes less descriptive and therefore harder. In short the result of this tech slang language inside our national languages is inability for people to communicate properly. This tendency is well seen if you for example try to make a comparison between old and newer movies. The newer the movie the less meaningful it is. It is true newer ones has much more as a visual adds than the predecessor but when talking about consistency the newer films are missing this point seriously.
As newer generations are born and raised up with this newer movies and "advanced" TV and computers this people doesn't even have most of the time the opportunity to see older human taped knowledge. Even for youngesters who have somehow a wise parents enough to teach them in a religious way or just have the "luck" to have parents with old world mindset it will be extremely hard if not impossible for this kids to understand the old knowledge, as most of their same age school / university fellows will only talk about the newer things.
Besides all this, computers as they grow needs more and more support "nurturing" so day by day more and more people has to be busy with managing and supporting tech stuff. Suddenly it is no longer clear if computers serve us or we serve them, this tendency is already somehow evident but not so clearly as it will be in the short 5 to 10 years. Therefore we slowly but surely are moving to a society which might become "enslaved by technology". Why I say here enslaved, because if we spend our time on fixing computers and technology and working with one virtual reality (which is non-reality) in essence this means we no longer have a physical freedom in the sense it was God given.
There is no doubt computers at present appears to do us a big good, but if you think a bit strategically it is obvious this good has it's price. By adopting all this technology without questioning ourselves on how this will impact our human freedom, we build a computerized jail around us. At first this jail appears to be so wide that it seems it does not interfere with our freedom, but with the introduction of newer and newer computer technology this jail becomes narrower as to the point where it could threat our physical existence freedom.
For those who could argue my thoughs I will ask two simple questions to show you how dependent we've become on technology;;;
What was the last time you switched off your mobile for a week ?
What was the last time you didn't used computers and the internet for a week time ?
Obviously rarely we can find someone that will answer positively to this question or even the thought of switching off from this so globalized society by dropping off tech stuff for a week seems scary.
This constant connectiodness that we're day-by-day heavily exposed to is scary, because it steals little-by-little our natural freedom for seclusion / pravicy / solitude.
This freedoms, were essential and especially for Christian saints and many of the people in the Holy Bible if we read closely we will find out they have used this freedom in parts of their lives especially the seclusion to hear and understand God's will for their life. Since technology is stealing us the freedom to seclude ourselves this means it steals our basic natural freedom to communicate with God and our natural self ,,,
The consequence of this separation from God and unification with "the world" surely will lead to spiritual blindness and lack of good foundation or higher life purpose, in other words lost path in life.
This is happening all along right in front our eyes now. Maybe the worst thing of globalization is it doesn't unite people on a soul level but rather separates them. The unification that tech boom gives to people is in the "virtual reality" but this is not a real unification as it is unification in a media which is not real.
Yes Virtual Reality is not real, that's why it is called Virtual isn't it? I've been thinking over all this problems more and more and I'm starting to come to conclusion that people who wish to keep their essential physical freedom need to GET OUT from this tech lie, we have lived in. For this however more people need to first realize that;;;
1. TECHNOLOGY LEADS US NOWHERE!
2. People who want to live without technology need to organize in groups – (and get used to a natural living growing food, being near to a natural springing water, taking care for each other, living in a Christian commune like – like in the old days)
Actually if we read the old testament's story of Moses escaping the upcoming flood, I believe what is about to come to us as a consequence of this out of boundaries technologization is pretty much like the old testamental flood (this should happen sooner or later).
Moses was wise enough to make himself an Ark and prepare himself for the storm. Today most people are so busy that they don't see the storm coming. I'll be glad to hear from people who has the same thinking as me and want to organize in a groups and live an old humble way of life without technology. I'm convinced people who have realized all this tech short future bad consequences on humanity, need to have a common communication media and share their knowledge on how we can find a way to live tech free in this age. I'm curious am I the only one with such thoughts or other get into this insight too. If you have come to conclusions I did please contact me in comments. Thank you.
Color mind influence has been longly researched. It is researched and there are some findingings on how we people react on colors. This researches are not much known and most of them are not put on the internet (??) One model claiming to have explained how colors influence is called HBDI – Herrmann Brain Dominance Instruments.
In the picture beginning of this post, I have presented a quick "Personal Profile" of HBDI on how one think in order to determine in "which colors" one tends to think more ___
In short HBDI model claims to explain how people think in another model. My personal view of it is it is like most science nowdays more based on faith than on a clearly conducted scientific research and facts. We know pretty well many people tried to explain how brain operates and many people give models to explain it however none of the models could grasp in completeness the complexity of human brain. Hence Businessman people who use this model in their daily life and they push it to us has put the model in action not that they know it is working but rather they believe it does .., Saying this few words as introduction I will contninue onwards to explain you about HBDI as in the business world it is considered as a "Strategic Asset" for a company success. Hence the use of richest companies of the model has a serious impact on us the common people and unknowing (uninformed) computer users.
Some of the companies who integrated the HBDI to their models we all know are of course not strangely Microsoft and Google ;;;
Below I present you a picture showing the HBDI The Whole Brain Model |||
Next I show you Microsoft Windows OS worldly "infamous" flag |||
You can see for yourself the basic color from HBDI WHOLE brain model are integrated in the Microsoft flag, only the order of colors present and the color gamma is different;;;;
The basic colors in HBDI model to explain how human brain works is separated in 4 segments as you can see from above screenshot. There are a number of tests one can do to determine what is his exact HBDI profile, and in abstract terms in which kind of colors he prefers to think.
There are a whole "army" of people involved into this sect like philosophy (I call it philosophy as surely every model that tries to explain everything is doomed to fail it is the nature in which God created the universe so complex and he put us be part of it and not controllers of it that any Universal model trying to explain it has never succeeded so far. The HBDI has some fruits for the only reason it is believed to work well by the people with money.
As you see in the colors HBDI claims there are 4 segments corresponding to four basic colors
BLUE
YELLOW
GREEN
RED
Each of the colors is an indicator on how the person tends to think the BLUE people as HBDI practicioners (believers) calls them are —
Now as you can understand this model though it looks like promising is based on a philosophy which rejects the existing of spirit realm God Angels or good or evil. It claims everything we're are or we want to be can be achieved following the HBDI to develop your own brain.
This model as every human made model however does reject the fact that besides internal factors and brains we're put into external environment most of which we cannot control and therefore even if we try our best to have certain goals and complete them the external uncontrolled facts can be a reason to stop us to complete our goals.
Now back to my point, that Google, Microsoft and probably many other products and physical goods are heavily using the HBDI color scheme ;;; Here is the Google Inc. Logo the color trait of HBDI is there:
For those doubting that Google Inc. and Microsoft Inc. are along the false believers of HBDI color scheme brain ideology I present below the Logo of Google Web Browser =- Google Chrome
It is evident 4 colors used as a main ones in the HBDI tool are present in Google Chrome just like in Microsoft Windows logo flag, the only difference is in the order of colors. Also it is interesting the name Chrome that Google Chrome took is most likely taken from Aldous Huxley's – Brave New World (A book depicting a short future highly conditioned society) , the book story line goes around a society programmed to do the things they do.
I assume it is very likely that Google's founders Sergey Brin or some of their subordinate working for Google are very much into the idea of conditioning people just like in the book and this is most likely the reason they choose the Chrome as a title for Google's browser ,,,
The 4 Colors from HBDIyellow, green, blue, red are embedded also in the google .ico file (the little icon showing in browser URL bar), below is a screenshot of a tab where google is opened showing the .ico image:
Do you remember the good old Windows XP start button, have you noticed the Windows flag embedded in it, if not let me show you;;;
But wait the Windows flag placed on the left bottom of Ms Windows-es is not only on XP it is also on Windows 3.11 cover, Winblows 98, Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 2007 and actually all the M$ operating systems ever produced since the very early days M$ become a top OS producer :::
Here is also the 4 colored (a bit like Nazi like looking) flag on M$ Win-doze 7 |||
Also the Microsoft Flag is positioned on the bottom left screen on purpose. It is well known fact that most of the world (except Arabic) are used to read the text from LefttoRight
, therefore it is natural for our eyesight to look for the text on the left side. I just wonder why they placed the START on the bottom and not on top. It is natural we read text and books from the most top to the most bottom ,,,.,
Even Apple Computers nowdays Macs has most likely used the HBDI as the main 4 colors and some gamma from rainbow colors are present on their Classical Apple Computer logo
Makes me wonder if Jobs employed the HBDI model in his company. Well what is the reason for people loving so much this rainbow colors combination. If we think for a second outside of HBDI's brainwashing ideology for what each color would stand for. Well it is simple is comes from our young years most of the people between age 2 and 50 years has been more or less exposed to the so colorful Kids Cartoons, which are all so colorfully painted. Since our very early age we've placed in us a love for colorfulness outlook (well again not all of us for example I prefer less colors, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like the heavy colors we see in almost everywhere around us).
The problem with this 4 colors use on purpose and all this unnatural color placing everywhere is that it is unnatural and not in good synergy with our surrounding natural environment. Therefore I personally think using a colorful color paintings on everywhere in both computer programs and the physical world plays us a bad joke and is one of the reasons so many people are on the virge to get crazy nowdays and many have already had already cracked out.
It is my firm believe more and more people should be educated on the harm of HBDI and the fact that, we're forced to 'live it' unwilfully every day by using even as "simple things" as computers and daily technology or buying food in the super market ,,,
Those who are in familiar with older UNIXes, UNIX BSD derivatives and GNU Linux should certainly remember the times, when we hackers used to talk to each other using talk service.
Those who don't know what talk command is it is a simple console / ssh utility to talk to another logged in users.
Talk is very similar to write and mesg one liner messasing utilities available for *nixes, the difference is it is intendted to provide interactive chat between the two logged in users. People who came to know UNIX or free software in older times most likely don't know talk, however I still remember how precious this tool was for communication back in the day.
I believe still it can be useful so I dediced to install ot on one FreeBSD host.
In order to have the talk service running on BSD it is necessery to have /usr/libexec/ntalkd installed on the system this however is installed by default with standard BSD OS installs, so no need for any external ports install to run it.
talk doesn't have it's own init script to start is not written to run as it own service but in order to run it is is necessery to enable it via inetd
Sys Admins managing QMAIL mail servers know, often it happens QMAIL queue gets filled with unwanted unsolicated SPAM e-mails due to a buggy WEB PHP / Perl mail sendingform or some other odd reason, like too many bouncing messages ,,,,
For one more time I’ve experienced the huge SPAM destined mails queue on one QMAIL running on Debian GNU / Linux.
= … Hence I needed to clean up the qmail queue. For this there is a little tool written in PERL called qmhandle
qmail-server:~# cd /usr/local/src qmail-server:/usr/local/src# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/qmhandle-1.3.2.tar.gz
B=) STOP QMAIL As it is written in the program documentation one has to be very careful when cleaning the mail queue. Be sure to stop qmail with qmailctl or whatever script is used to shutdown any mail sever in progress operations, otherwise there is big chance the queue to mess up badly .
C#) Check extended info about the mail queue:
qmail-server:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmhandle -l -c 102 (10, 10/102) Return-path: anonymous@qmail-hostname.com From: QMAIL-HOSTNAME To: as1riscl1.spun@gmail.com Subject: =?UTF8?B?QWNjb3VudCBpbmZvcm1hdGlvbiBmb3IgU09DQ0VSRkFNRQ==?= Date: 1 Sep 2011 21:02:16 -0000 Size: 581 bytes ,,,, 1136 (9, 9/1136) Return-path: werwer@qmail-hostname.com.tw From: martin.georgiev@qmail-hostname.com To: costador4312@ukr.net Subject: Link Exchange Proposal / Qmail-Hostname.com Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 07:58:52 +0100 (BST) Size: 1764 bytes ,,,,.... 1103 (22, 22/1103) Return-path: anonymous@qmail-hostname.com From: SOCCERFAME To: alex.masdf.e.kler.1@gmail.com Subject: =?UTF8?B?QWNjb3VudCBpbmZvcm1hdGlvbiBmb3IgU09DQ0VSRkFNRQ==?= Date: 2 Sep 2011 00:36:11 -0000 Size: 578 bytes ,,,,,, ,,,,.... Total messages: 1500 Messages with local recipients: 0 Messages with remote recipients: 1500 Messages with bounces: 500 Messages in preprocess: 300
D-) Delete the Queue qmail-server:/usr/local/src/qmhandle-1.3.2# ./qmHandle -D ...... ......
We’re constantly being said to reduce energy consupmtion, they sell us new bulbs to save energy, new TVs with energy saving. The newer the computer equipment microwaves or whatever home electrical equipment we buy the more it is said to be saving energy.
So far so good it is true we can reduce energy consumption by producing gadgets which consume less. However there are also another approach to the “green problem” which we never are said about.
It is rather simply instead of saving energy on technology base, we can save energy on physical base. One simple thing to do to save energy with no need to spend money on latest advacement gadgets is to simply make it the old school way.
a -= Learn to switch off your lamps and home equipment whenever its not necessery
If you’re about to go to sleep, you can simply switch off the mobile and use a mechanical clock to wake you up on the morning, this way you have 3 benefits.
1; Less energy will be discharged by the mobile in the time you’re not awake, so you don’t need to charge so frequently the battery and therefore you will draw less energy from the Electrical network hence saving energy.
2; You will not be radiated with a bit less radiation produced by the Mobile phone in order to stay connected to the GSM local located cell.
Though the good this does will not be dramatical it for sure will be better for your health than if the mobile is switched on the whole night.
3; You will not be awakened in morning by some crazy person who just decided to call you early in the morning. Often this morning unexpected and desired phone calls make you jump off the bed rapidly and hence giving a large dose of stress to your organizm.
-=- Of course switching off the mobile has some disadvantages if you can receive a crucial phone calls during all time of day or night you can’t afford to simply switch off the mobile, this is however not true for most people who work in an OFF-ICE.People working in offices can simply wake up at a scheduled time, get a shower do their morning hygiene and jump to a car or bus to the office so the need for having the mobile switched ON at night is not really needed.
Of course thinking in the same direction, it is logical that switching off the computer earlier when not needed, the wireless home router or the TV is another place from where a huge energy savings can be achieved.
If large amount of people re-learn their energy in-efficient habits to be more energy cautios a HUGE amounts of energy can be saved. This of course can have a positive impact on the monthly energy bills and hence can save you money in monthly expenses.
The TV is surely another big energy draining source, many people have the habit to sleep with a Television switched on. Besides this has a negative impact on the conscious since vast amounts of information are being stored and processed by the conscious and unconscious mind, also the lights emitted from the TV screen prevents the persons body to not have a pieceful rest.
Its rather stupid that companies are constantly ranting on how they improve their products to be energy friendly but they don’t invest even a penny to educate the masses that energy saving does not only depend on how good the technology is produced to save energy but also on how much the people are educated how to use the technology with energy saving in mind.Probably there are plenty of other ways a households can change their habits to save energy. I’ll be glad to hear some other suggestions ,,,
I know and I have enjoyed BB – Portable Demo for already a decade. I'm sure many newbies to the Free And Open Source (FOSS) realm don't know or heard of bb's existence as nowdays ASCII art is not so well known among youngsters. Hence this short post aims to raise some awareness of the existence of this already OLD but GOLD – awesome! text console / terminal demonstation BB 🙂
Historically bb used to be one of the main stunning things one could show to a fellow GNU / Linux new comer.
For the year 2000, seeing all this awesome ASCII video demo running on free Operating System like GNU / Linux was a big think. The fact that such an advanced ASCII art was distributed freely for an OS which used to exist since only (6 / 7 years) was really outstanding of its time.
I still remember how much I was amazed seeing a plain ascii video stream was possible only Linux. Moreover the minimal requirements of bb were quite low for its time – it worked on mostly all PCs one can find at the time.
BB's minimum requirements to work with no chops is just an old 486/66 DX2 CPU Mhz with few megas of memory (32MB of memory was more than enough to run it)
A very unique feature of bb was it was the first Linux demo that succesfully run simultaneously playing on two monitor screens as one can read on the project website. Unfortunately I didn't owned two monitors back in the day so never ever had the opportunity to see it running on two screens. Anyhow I've seen it runnign somewhere on some of the Linux install fests visited some years ago…
The demo was developed by 4 man group ppl – the AA group the same digital artists are also the guys behind the AA Project.
The main aim of AA-lib was to make possible (Doom, Second Reality, X windows) to run rendered in plain ASCII art text.
The project succeeded in a lot of his goals already as there is already existent such an ascii art ports of large games like QUAKE! Be sure to check this awesome project too AAquake ascii quake page is here , as well as video and pictures could be viewed under a plain console Linux tty or in terminal (via SSH 🙂 )
bb as well as aa-lib has ports for most modern Linux distros in that number one can easily get rpm or deb packages for most of distros. On Slackware Linux you should compile it from source. Though compilation should be a straightfoward process, not that i tried it myself but I remember a close friend of mine (a great Slackware devotee) who was the one to show me the demo for a first time on his Slackware box.
1. Installing bb on Debian Linux
Debian Linux users like me are privileged as for already many years a Debian package of bb is maintaned thanks to Uwe Herman
Hence for anyone willing to enjoy bb install it by running:
If you're running a X server the aa-lib will immediately run with its X server compiled support:
2. Installing BB demo on FreeBSD
On FreeBSD, bb demo has a port to install it run:
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/misc/bb freebsd# make install clean ...
Here is good time to say that even though in most of the machines, I've tested the demo I had on some of the hosts problems with sound due to buggy sound drivers. As of time of writting hopefully on most machines there will be no troubles as most of the Linux sb drivers are better supported by ALSA.
Everyone interested in both Free Software and ASCII art knows well how big in significance is the AA-lib project for the historical development and attraction for new hackers to the Linux dome. In that sense AAlib head developer Jan HubickaBy the way Jan Hubicka is also the author of another Linux tool called xaos. Xaos is a tool to deal with some kind of advanced higher mathematics stuff called fractals.
Unfortunately I don't know a bit for fractal maths and what the purpose of the tool is but as you can see on the shot it looks nice running 🙂
Here are also, lot of the major BB parts in shots:
For those on MS-Windows OS platform, here is the demo 🙂
BB ASCII Demo standard size running in Linux (With sound)
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/
"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 …
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:
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.
I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art.
As time passed and computers went to be used mostly graphics resolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity from the early DOS and BBS (internet primordial days).
However, this kind of art is still higly valued by true computer geeks. In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and ASCII art open source tools available for Linux. Last time I check what is available for 'ASCII job' was before 5 years time. Recently I decided to review once again and see if there are new software for doing ascii manipulations on Linux and this is how this article got born.
My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name), while searching for ASCII keyword description packages with:
Here is the complete description of the Debian package:
hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5
Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name
aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be
edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent
horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces
both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration
into your terminal applications.
I installed it to give it a try:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan
Selecting previously deselected package aewan.
(Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...
2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files)3. aemakeflic – tool to produce an animation from an aewan document
Next I ran it in plain console tty to check how it is like:
hipo@noah:~$ aewan
Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan ASCII art editor is:
Aewan immediate entry screen after start up
Aewan ASCII art editor – all of the supported tool functions
As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!). It even has a Layers Manager (like GIMP) 🙂
To create my first ASCII art I used the:
New
menu.
This however didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can type the ascii characters to draw my picture. In order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessary to open at least one layer, through using the menu:
Add Layer (defaults)
then the interactive ASCII art editor appeared.
While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.
I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are the editor chars drawing is awesome.
All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:
aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art so far. Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii text. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves; Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as they're displayed in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead display just the stored meta data; the meta data is interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat command.
I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro / hardware architecture rpm package and running:
# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm
On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a package build should compile manually with the usual:
$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz
$ cd aewan-1.0.01
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures. The idea of creating ASCII art video is pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" and movie it. Once all different scene layers of the ASCII art animation are prepared one could use aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as common video.
aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a runnable shell script to display the animation. The other way aemakeflic can be used is to produce a picture in kind of text format showing the video whether seen with less cmd. Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I haven't tested this functionality. Anyways I've seen some ascii videos on telnet to remote hosts (some past time); therefore I guess they were made using aewan and later animated with aemakeflic.
I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (picture is taken from the project page):
1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic
As I don't have a Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded it and run it on my Debian notebook with WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.
For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.
As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty intutive to use. You select an Input file, an Output file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT. One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.
The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I tried converting few pictures originally in size 1024×768 but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't automatically set height / width dimensions to 60×80 and therefore, when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that …
I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be possible from the app options so I played around with the Zoom, Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal JPEGs..
ASCII Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools, like WinKill and RemoteShut, however most of the tools are already too obslete and useless just like ASCII Pic
If I have to compare ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece of crap.
2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator
As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for Windows is jp2a jp2a is a free GPL-ed software available for all major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows. jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but if compared to ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is awesome.
3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) – Windows GUI Images to ASCII generator
ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting. Just like img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text images.
ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with wine version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host via teamviewer.
Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options ASCII2GEN provides:
asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text background)
ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII
Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors
ascii2gen dithering level option shot
asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot
asc2gen save as options shot
Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as input including (BMP and GIF) images. I've also made a mirror of asc2gen v. 2.0.0 here
While researching online, I found plenty of other Image to ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say if they are better ones. Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII generator alternative progs for Winblows?
Probably, many don't know that it is possible to view normal graphical pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP) etc. in plain console tty.
Being able to view pictures in ASCII is something really nice especially for console geeks like me. The images produced sometimes are a bit unreadable, if compared to the original graphics, but anyways most of the pictures looks pretty decent 🙂
Viewing in console / terminal images on GNU / Linux is possible thanks to a library called libcaca, caca labs libcaca project official website here. Below is a shot description of libcaca: hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show libcaca0|grep 'Description' -A 4
Description: colour ASCII art library
libcaca is the Colour AsCii Art library. It provides high level functions
for colour text drawing, simple primitives for line, polygon and ellipse
drawing, as well as powerful image to text conversion routines.
In Debian, Ubuntu and other deb Linux distros viewing GUI images with no need for Xserver or any kind of window manager in plain ASCII is possible with cacaview.
cacaview is part of a package called caca-utils. caca-utils is providing few other great utilities for ASCII freaks 🙂 along with cacaview console ascii viewer prog. The package> is available for Debian distributins since many years, so even on a very old Debians like Debian – (Potato, Woody, Sarge) the package is available in default free package repositories ready to install via apt
To install apt-get it as usual:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install caca-utils
Here is a list of the binaries the package provides:
1. cacaserver a tiny program allowing network streaming of applications written in caca
Belkow is a chop, from man cacaserver
cacaserver reads libcaca animation files in its standard input and serves them as ANSI art on network port 51914. These animations can be created by any libcaca program by setting the CACA_DRIVER environment variable to raw and piping the program's standard output to cacaserver.
Clients can then connect to port 51914 using telnet or netcat to see the output.
The example section of the manual points 1 example use of cacaserver to stream the console output from cacademo. cacademo binary is a short presentation ASCII DEMO in the spirit of the old school assembly demos (demoscene) . To run it to bind on port 51914 one has to type in bash shell: hipo@noah:~$ CACA_DRIVER=raw cacademo | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914
Then to check out how the demo looks, open telnet connection to the cacaserver host; In my case the cacaserver is binded and streamed over IP 192.168.0.2:
hipo@debian:~$ telnet 192.168.0.2 51914
Immediately you got the demo shining; Below are two screenshots of the demo played after succesful telnet connection:
cacademo running over telnet network connection – Matrix
Blur spots cacademo shot of cacademo streamed via network
You see the demo looks quite awesome 🙂
2. Running cacafire to stream over network
Another possible example use of cacaserver is in conjunction with cacafire libcaca test application:
noah:~# CACA_DRIVER=raw cacafire | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914 cacafire is a short application written to render ASCII via libcaca and is just displaying a screen with ASCII (moving) burning fire. It is quite spectacular if you, ask an unexpecting friend to connect to your host to 51914 🙂
Besides that bored sys admins, could run cacafire in console to hypnotize themselves watching dumb the burning fire screen for few hoursor just use it as a screensaver 😉
3. cacaview a program to display a graphic images in console using ASCII art
cacaview takes just one argument – the picture to be displayed.
Below is a screenshot of cacaview ran from my gnome-terminaldisplaying a ASCII text version of the MySQL server logo
hipo@noah:~$ cd /disk/pictures
hipo@noah:/disk/pictures$ cacaview mysql_logo.png
Whether cacaview is invoked in GUI, the libcaca X support is used, so the text image is visualized in new window with graphics, if however it is invoked in plain let's say tty1 libcaca displays the graphics pictures drawing it with only text characters.
Here is also a screenshot, I've made while viewing a GIF website logo in ASCII in plain tty console:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/logo.gif
The logo is in cyrillic, so for latin speaking people some of the characters in the two words seen will be unreadable 🙂
cacaview even supports viewing, the next and previous picture in line, like in any modern graphics image viewer program. To view a bunch of graphic pictures in ASCII with cacaview pass it *.*:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*.*
For simplicity the common unix * is also supported, so I find it quicker to do:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*
Showing pictures forward and backward (Previous / Next) picture is done with n and p kbd keys, whether; n - next;
p - previous
cacaview doesn't crash or stop but skip unknown file formats – if for instance encounters filenames which are not images; lets say you have *.rar archive files along with other pictures.
The complete list of keys cacaview supports are: br />
KEYS ? show the help screen
n, p switch to next image, previous image
Left, Right, Up, Down or h, l, k, j scroll the image around
+, – zoom in and out
z reset the zoom level to normal
f switch fullscreen mode (hide/show menu and status bars)
d toggle the dithering mode (no dithering, 4×4 ordered dithering, 8×8 ordered dithering and random dithering)
q exit the program
4. Converting graphics images to ASCII art like (plain text pictures)
The tool that does "the trick" is img2txt. img2txt has a bit more options while compared to the rest of the aforementioned tools.The following list of arguments are recognized:
the size (font, height)
brightness
contrast
gamma and dither
format type of out the output pic
Anyways I found that the basic just in / out arguments passed are enough to produce pretty good results:
After above img2txt command is run and hipo_avatar_pic.txt to see the colorful output ASCII art img2txt produces, cat it:
hipo@noah:~$ cat hipo_avatar_pic.txt
The image result if screenshot looks quite beautiful and even, can be considered or used as an ART effect image (filter) 🙂
The picture colors are plain ANSI color, so in order to display properly the picture with colors on another computers or Operating System you will need at least basic support for ANSI colors.
Plenty of output file formats are supported by img2txt
Here is the complete list of supported output formats:
ansi : coloured ANSI caca : internal libcaca format utf8 : UTF8 with CR utf8 : UTF8 with CRLF (MS Windows) html : HTML with CSS and DIV support html3 : Pure HTML3 with tables irc : IRC with ctrl-k codes bbfr : BBCode (French) ps : Postscript svg : Scalable Vector Graphics tga : Targa Image
libcaca is available for FreeBSD too, but the caca-utils is not available as a port yet, though probably the deb or rpm packages can easily be ported to BSD.
