Posts Tagged ‘trick’

Color Psychology – Color Mind Programming or how big companies boost their sales and make up your mind

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

Colors Programming Color mind Programming, how big companies boost their sales and make up your mind

As I've pointed earlier there is plenty of "secretly" kept and less known by public research on how colors influence us daily. The biggest companies are heavily taking advantage of what is found and known for colors impact on our minds (psyche). Actually there is a whole branch in psychology which deals with impact of colors perception on us.Besides companies, many modern governments are well aware of the many facts on how citizens percept colors and use this in color 'installment' in government offices and government institutions.

There is no universal knowledge on how colors completely affect us as every human on earth is very unique and saying this or that color has this or that impact on indivirual or group is not 100% accurate. However there are general traits nowdays formed especially with globalization and unification of TV ads and big companies corporate image, a unification started on how different nationality people perceive colors.

Nowdays in developed countries there are more and more people who perceive certain colors in similar fashion. Therefore every serious top marketer should carefully study colors and their relation with ancient time people believes and understanding on what each of the 'rainbow' colors symbolize. Most likely because there is no completely unified understanding of colors between various individuals may companies like Google and Microsoft started using all the rainbow colors in their basic company logos and branding for more on this topic please check my previous blog post Color trick Microsoft and Google use to keep their users loyal

Another large industry area, where color programming is very heavy is Computer and Video Games. You certainly still remember large portions of the games like Sega’s Sonic the HendgeHog or Mario Super Bros. or even the old arcade machines with games like Punisher or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, Street Fighter etc.
All this old arcade games have a big portion of Color programming embedded in and this is one of the main reasons we remember them for a long time and playing them evoked such a strong feelings in youth.

This trend of using colors to make up our minds is being observed for many other physical goods as well as is starting to get more and more heavy adoption by websites branding on the internet.
Actually those with most succesful businesses on the internet have already integrated some kind of color programming scheme. An example for this would be the Internet top domain names seller GoDaddy. The have adopted a green scheme as a primary color combined with some other ones to create in the customer a feeling of ecology, naturality, peace and solitude.

The study of color programming is one major field to be known by anyone truly willing to understand why certain big store chainslike Carrefour, Lidl, Billa, MediaMarkt – in western europe or TechnoMarket, TechnoPolis (MediaMarkt copied tech equipment by shops here in Bulgaria) are decorated inside the way they are. I personally didn't like the concept of color programming since from Spiritual point of view it is a big evil. Trying to manipulate people perception to do something you would like to in general is very evil from spiritual point of view. A mixture of rainbow colors in a natural environment for example flowers in the wood or wild mountain place is one thing, but making it artificial and placing it in certain pre-desired order is totally another. Besides that the colors in the natural environment are natural and therefore the impact on us even if colorful is very much better than if it is done with a certain intention like in the big supermarkets stores, fast just food companies – McDonalds, Burger King etc.

The research on color mind influcence – Color mind programming is a controversial science. Nowdays many big businesses however use this as a granted science, even whole business sects with some mambo-jambo believes universities, children garden and schools in modern countries have employed the use of some type of color programming aiming to influence their pupils, students (organizational members – you call it).
Color mind programming and heavy use on advertisements on the TV, the Internet, Stores and mostly everywhere are however starting to took their tolls. The high increase in mental problems and dumbness in developed and some undeveloped countries as well as the increased number of people who go insane because of too much color programming is reality. The believe that mental programming is one of the ultimate tools to influence somebody and push him to do things you want like consome more of a product or generally consume (buy) more goods creates another severe issue it makes people to constantly over-consume (eat more than the body needs) and this increases the number of over-consumption evoked diseases …

But color programming doesn't stop with just the material (physical) surrounding world it is a concept highly employed in online based marketing. Online business is seen on so many top used websites, social networks like take for instance (facebook). It is so spread that even the software primary vendors like Microsoft, search engines Google Inc. have already heavily employed the color programming as a basis of their products.

There is another reason why most vendors nowdays issue their physical or 'virtual' products so colorful using all the colors of the rainbow. The reason is the fact that as a kids through animation, cartoons, toys and surrounding environment we have been exposed already even from our very youth age to a kind of color programming through kids toys we've been given by our parents). Hence the young years color programming became a basis for a future time color programming. The colorfulness of our kids years are already sub-consciously stored in our minds, so almost naturally there is a feeling of joy to pop-up once we see something childishly colorful.
 

Color Trick Microsoft and Google use to keep their users loyal and happy unwalfully

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

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 HBDIHerrmann 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 |||

HBDI The whole brain model

Next I show you Microsoft Windows OS worldly "infamous" flag |||

Microsoft Windows OS 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 —

Analytical, Fact Based, Logal, Quantitative

The YELLOW oriented people are claimed to be —

Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesizing

The GREEN ones in model terms are interested in —

Organizing, Sequentiality, Planning, Detailizing facts

Finally the RED Ones are said to be —

Interpersonal, Feeling based, Kinesthetic, Emotional

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:

Google Search Engine Logo and HBDI 4 colors embedded

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

Google Web Chrome Browser Logo 4 colors HBDI microsoft flag

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 HBDI yellow, 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:

Google Icon 4 colors Linux Debian Epiphany Browser tab screenshot

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;;;

Microsoft Windows XP Start Button and HBDI 4 colors scheme

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 :::

Windows 3.11 Operating system logo flag

Microsoft Windows 95 4 colors flag and blue sky

Here is also the 4 colored (a bit like Nazi like looking) flag on M$ Win-doze 7 |||

MS Windows 7 start Menu m$ windows well known flag

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 Left to Right

, 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

Old Apple Computer/s logo colors of rainbow 4 hbdi colors are there

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 ,,,

How to convert html pages to text in console / terminal on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

HTML to Plain Text Convertion on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

I’m realizing the more I’m converting to a fully functional GUI user, the less I’m doing coding or any interesting stuff…
I remembered of the old glorious times, when I was full time console user and got a memory on a nifty trick I was so used to back in the day.
Back then I was quite often writing shell scripts which were fetching (html) webpages and converting the html content into a plain TEXT (TXT) files

In order to fetch a page back in the days I used lynx(a very simple UNIX text browser, which by the way lacks support for any CSS or Javascipt) in combination with html2text – (an advanced HTML-to-text converter).

Let’s say I wanted to fetch a my personal home page https://www.pc-freak.net/, I did that via the command:

$ lynx -source https://www.pc-freak.net/ | html2text > pcfreak_page.txt

The content from www.pc-freak.net got spit by lynx as an html source and passed html2pdf wchich saves it in plain text file pcfreak_page.txt
The bit more advanced elinks – (lynx-like alternative character mode WWW browser) provides better support for HTML and even some CSS and Javascript so to properly save the content of many pages in plain html file its better to use it instead of lynx, the way to produce .txt using elinks files is identical, e.g.:

$ elinks -source https://www.pc-freak.net/blog/ | html2text > pcfreak_blog_page.txt

By the way back in the days I was used more to links , than the superior elinks , nowdays I have both of the text browsers installed and testing to fetch an html like in the upper example and pipe to html2text produced garbaged output.

Here is the time to tell its not even necessery to have a text browser installed in order to fetch a webpage and convert it to a plain text TXT!. wget file downloading tools supports source dump as well, for all those who did not (yet) tried it and want to test it:

$ wget -qO- https://www.pc-freak.net | html2text Anyways of course, some pages convertion of text inside HTML tags would not properly get saved with neither lynx or elinks cause some texts might be embedded in some elinks or lynx unsupported CSS or JavaScript. In those cases the GUI browser is useful. You can use any browser like Firefox, Epiphany or Opera ‘s File -> Save As (Text Files) embedded functionality, below is a screenshot showing an html page which I’m about to save as a plain Text File in Mozilla Firefox:

Firefox iceWeasel Opera etc. save html webpage as plain text on GNU / Linux, FreeBSD

Besides being handy in conjunction with text browsers, html2text is also handy for converting .html pages already existing on the computer’s hard drive to a plain (.TXT) text format.
One might wonder, why would ever one would like to do that?? Well I personally prefer reading plain text documents instead of htmls 😉
Converting an html files already existing on hard drive with html2text is done with cmd:

$ html2text index.html >index.txt

To convert a whole directory full of .html (documentation) or whatever files to plain text .TXT , cd the directory with HTMLs and issue the one liner bash loop command:

$ cd html/
html$ for i in $(echo *.html); do html2text $i > $(echo $i | sed -e 's#.html#.txt#g'); done

Now lay off your back and enjoy reading the dox like in the good old hacker days when .TXT files were fashionable 😉

How to convert AVI, MP4, FLV (flash video) and other non-free video encoded formats to Free Video format encoding OGV (Ogg Vorbis / Theora) on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Ogg Vorbis Free / Open Audio Video Format logo

I was looking for a way to convert some Video and Sound files, downloaded from Youtube (mostly things dedicated to free software) and as far as I looked online unfortunately these pieces of nice music and tutorials are not available for download anywhere else or at least not available for download in some of the Open / Free Format (OGG Vorbis or OGV (OGG / Theora Video).

When it comes to convertion between different formats, always the first things that I think of is ffmpeg or mencoder , however I was not sure if some of this tools are doing the trick so I did a quick research online if there is some specialised console or GUI program that can do the convertions between MP4, FLV etc. to OGV.

In less than 10 minutes I found a threat mentioning about ffmpeg2theoraA Simple Convertor to create Ogg Theora files

As I’m running Debian GNU / Linux, I installed ffmpeg2theora straight via apt, according to some reports online ffmpeg2theora cmd convertion tool is also available straight from repositories on Ubuntu as well.
On FreeBSD there is a port /usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg2theora available for install. Of course FFmpeg2Theora can be installed from source on other Linux distributions that might be missing a pre-built binary.

Using ffmpeg2theora to convert some kind of non-free video format is very simple, though the tool provides quite a numerous options for all those who want to have some customization for the video to be converted.
To convert the flash file “The Gnu Song.flv” for example to The Gnu Song.flv , I invoked ffmpeg2theora like this:

debian:~# ffmpeg2theora "The Gnu Song.flv"
...

The conversion took few minutes of time, as my machine is not ultra powerful and apparently the conversion to OGV format is not too quick but the good news is it works.
After the conversion was completed I used ogginfo to check the information about the recent converted file The Gnu Song.flv , below you see the file info ogginfo returns

debian:~# ogginfo The Gnu Song.ogv
Processing file "The Gnu Song.ogv"...

New logical stream (#1, serial: 5d65413f): type skeleton
New logical stream (#2, serial: 0570412d): type theora
New logical stream (#3, serial: 7e679651): type vorbis
Theora headers parsed for stream 2, information follows…
Version: 3.2.1
Vendor: Xiph.Org libtheora 1.1 20090822 (Thusnelda)
Width: 320
Height: 240
Total image: 320 by 240, crop offset (0, 0)
Framerate 25/1 (25.00 fps)
Aspect ratio undefined
Colourspace: Rec. ITU-R BT.470-6 Systems B and G (PAL)
Pixel format 4:2:0
Target bitrate: 0 kbps
Nominal quality setting (0-63): 32
User comments section follows…
ENCODER=ffmpeg2theora-0.24
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 3, information follows…
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20101101 (Schaufenugget)
Channels: 1
Rate: 22050
Nominal bitrate: 30.444000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
User comments section follows…
ENCODER=ffmpeg2theora-0.24
Logical stream 1 ended
Theora stream 2:
Total data length: 1525324 bytes
Playback length: 2m:41.360s
Average bitrate: 75.623401 kb/s
Logical stream 2 ended
Vorbis stream 3:
Total data length: 646729 bytes
Playback length: 2m:41.384s
Average bitrate: 32.059041 kb/s

ogginfo is a part of a package installed under the name vorbis-tools, vorbis tools also contains a few other helpful tools, whether operations with OGV or OGG file formats are at hand, the complete binaries vorbis-tools contains on Debian as of time of writting this post is:

/usr/bin/ogg123
/usr/bin/oggenc
/usr/bin/oggdec
/usr/bin/ogginfo
/usr/bin/vcut
/usr/bin/vorbiscomment
/usr/bin/vorbistagedit

ogg123 is a player for ogg files, however as far as I’ve tested it it doesn’t work too well. And just to compare ogg audio files were played just nice using the play command.
oggenc is used to encode ogg audio file, based on a stream haneded to it from other audio encoded stream (let’s say mp3). Hence oggenc can be used to convert mp3 files to ogg audio files , like so:

debian:~# mpg321 input.mp3 -w - | oggenc -o output.ogg -

oggdec is used to convert to wav files or raw PCM audio, whether;
vcut is used to cut ogg video file on parts.
vorbiscomment and vorbistagedit is used to edit information on already existing ogg audio files

There is also a GUI programmer for people who doesn’t want to bother with writting on the command line called oggconvert . OggConvert is written for GNOME and uses GTK gnome library, here is how the program looks like:

OggConvert GUI Program to convert to OGG og OGV Theora on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD