Father Atanas Arolski A Notable Priest and Spiritual Father Elder of Bulgarian Lands and Bulgarian Orthodox Church passed away to Christ aged 95. fr. Atanas was born in a small Bulgarian mountain village Hvoyna located in Middle Rodopis Mountain. The priest is famous because he was among the few priests of our faithless times that walked by Rodopi Muntain villages all their life to preach the Gospel of Christ. 70 years of his earthly life was dedicated to God's word and priesty service.
Fr. Atanas Arolski is born (by God's providence) on 1st of November on the day of Bulgarian Christian enlightener saints St. St. Kiril and Methodius who preached the Holy Gospel Good news of Salvation on Bulgarian lands in the 9th century. And just like the two Thesaloniki brother saints Cyril and Methodius fr. Atanas was enlightener of the Bulgarian nation during all his life. fr. Atanas completed his church studies succesfully in the Seminary of Cherepish "St. John of Rila"in year 1939. Though a lot of the Seminary students choose to become deacons in the Church to escape the mobilization and army service in Second Wolrd War the fr. decided not to cheat and went for a military service. He was ordained priest in 1943. During the last years of his life even when 90+ years old he walked to Malevo village (3km away) from his village and Orehovo village (7km! away from Hvoyna).
Its interesting that the father walks to the 3 village Churches where he was assigned to be serving Holy Liturgy and do his many Church duties daiy even though he has a driving license since 1961, however he alone says until this very date he failed to find money to buy a car (because of his humbleness) in order to hide the spiritual reason behind that. The most notable father saying is "Man alone Opens or Closes the Door to Heaven" and his life is an example on how one can open the door to heaven and open when the Lord Jesus Christ knocks on the door of our heart.
This priest was torutred severely by the Atheist authorities during the Communist rule in Bulgaria in their attempt to convert him to atheism but fr. Atanas stand firm being a true confessor of Christ as he explains in the short video below, on many times they bring him in police and he was beaten badly with the purpose to show them there is no God and convince them to decline his faith in Christ and the Church but he refused. Many times to make him stop going to Church and serving Holy Liturgy the authorities threatened him that he will be sent as a political Prisoner to Belene and he was imprison for a time and beaten to death but with God's help he survived.
fr. Atanas alone used to say that God left him to survive until the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in order to show those who mocked him and tortured him that their regime prooved false demising (nowdays even hated by most of Bulgarian) but God's Church triumpths victoriously even though the severe trials and persecutions standing according to Christ's word that promised us that the Gates of Hell will not get over his Church.
Below is a nice 15 minutes video made earlier by one of our Bulgarian Televisions (BTV) about this unique confessor priest. The Holy Scriptures says "Great are the miracles of God in his holies" and movie prooves the Bible verse another time.
One True Story of Rodopi Mountains – A movie about fr. Atanas Arolsky
Ft. Atanas Arolsky the Christian Englightener 91 continues to serve to God God forgive and remember fr. Atanas in his Eternal Kingdom and let the father pray the Lord Jesus Christ to have mercy on us the sinners. Amen.
This should be enough to use Ubuntu normally for multimedia Desktop just as MS Windows for most of the daily activities. Am I missing some important program?
If you're on Linux the questions like, how can I convert between video and audio formats, how to do photo editing etc. etc. have always been a taugh question as with it's diversity Linux often allows too many ways to do the same things.
In the spirit of questioning I have been recently curious, how can a subtitles be added to a flash video (.flv) video?
After some research online I've come up with the below suggested solution which uses mplayer to do the flash inclusion of the subtitles file.
While including the subtitles to the .flv file, it's best to close up all the active browsers and if running something else on the desktop close it up. Note that above's mplayer example for (.srt and .sub) subtitle files example is only appropriate for a .flv movie files which already has a third party published subtitle files.
What is interesting is that often if you want to make custom subtitles to let's say a video downloaded from Youtube on Linux the mplayer way pointed above will be useless. Why?
Well the Linux programs that allows a user to add custom subtitles to a movie does not support the flv (flash video) file format.
My idea on how to create custom subtitles and embed them into a flv movie file is very simple and it goes like this:
1. Convert the .flv file format to let's say .avi or .mpeg 2. Use gnome-subitles or subtitleeditor to create the subtitles for the .avi or .mpeg file 3. Convert back the .avi/.mpeg file with included subtitles to .flv (flash video format)
This methodology is really long and time consuming, but pitily as far as my understanding goes it's the only way to do that on your Linux until now.
To make the conversations between .flv and .avi format you will need to use the ffmpeg – (FFMpeg command line tool video converter), here is how:
You will also have to spend some time to get to know gnome-subtitles or subtitleeditor, but it won't be that long until you get the idea on how to use them.
I needed to add to a wordpress based website Google maps location pictures with Google Maps Zoom In / Out controls.
I've seen plenty of plugins available that said to to this but none of them really worked fine for me. Either the plugins I checked in wordperss.org was too complex to set up and required a Google API registration or was marked as Broken (not working).
Finally to add the geographic locations taken from maps.google.com I used the embed code generated directly from maps.google.com.
But that was not the end of my WordPress Google Maps struggles. What followed was rather ridiculous, it seems since some time Google removed the pinning of a location searched for. Moreover the easy old way to simply pin a location on the map is also, gone.
Hence here is what I had to do to pinpoint location on the Google map of my searched country destination:
1. To be able to pinpoint the location, I had to login to my gmail 2. Go to http://maps.google.com in browser 3. Press on My Places button 4. Click on Create map and fill in the Title and Description dialogs 5. The Privacy and Sharing radio button should be selected 6. Click on Done and Save buttons 7. From the left top corner inside the Google map image to select the baloon picture (Add a Placemark) 8. Choose the exact desired placemark type and color from the next appearing dialog 9. Choose the location I want to pin on the map
I've created also a small Video tutorial just for fun for all those who want to see the pin a location with a baloon 😉 on the google map tutorial, here is the video as well:
For all people who can't properly see the .mov video here is link to the video created with recordmydesktop on my Linux showing how the baloon pinning inside a map can be done.
A friend of mine has bought a new Nokia Express Music 5800, yesterday evening He wanted to use skype on his nokia so we played a bit together in installing an app that provides skype on that mobile phone. There are two applications which run on the phone.1. Skype Lite downloaded from Skype�s mobile phone version download page However, the selected version was pretty old it was for Nokia 7370. This solution worked out, unfortunately there was no skype voice calls on it, niether video calls. 2. We tested Fring For convenience reasons I did a mirror of the Nokia�s ExpressMusic 5800, which by the way runs on top of Symbian OS ver. 9.4.Here is a link to the Fring for Nokia ExpressMusic 5800 We tested also the fring�s skype protocol abilities, trying out both video and audio calls which prooved to work okay. Nevertheless, during playing with the fring the program crashed once and required to be rebooted to return to proper operation mode. Credits for this post go to Nomen who did most of the work on testing fring on his phone. In the mean time tonight, a new year is approaching. Let�s all hope this year will prove to be peaceful, fruitful and full of grace for every inhabitant on earth. In regard to the new year approaching I Wish you a Really, Really Happy and Peaceful New Year!
You probably already know of existence of two Linux commands available by default across all Linux distributions script – which makes a text based save of all commands executed on console and scriptreplay – which playbacks saved script command typescripts. Using this two you can save terminal sessions without problem, but in order to play them you need to have a Linux / UNIX computer at hand. However If you want to make a short video record displaying what you have done on Linux console / terminal, you have few other options with which you can share your Linux terminal sessions on the web. In this short article I will go through 3 popular tools to do that – asciinema, showterm and termrecord.
1. Asciinema Current most popular tool to create video from Linux terminal
Here is how ASCIINEMA's website describes it:
"Asciinema is a free and open source solution for recording the terminal sessions and sharing them on the web."
apt-get –yes install python-pip
To install it with pip – python package installer
pip install asciinema
Or if the machine is in DMZ secured zone and have access to the internet over a Proxy:
It will get installed in /usr/local/bin/asciinema to make a terminal screen video capture just launch it (nomatter if it is privileged or non-privileged user):
asciinema
To finalize and upload the recorded terminal session, just type exit (to exit the shell), hopefully it will get you an upload link.
exit
You can claim authorship on video you issue:
asciinema auth
Use can then embed the new Linux terminal session video to your website.
2. ShowTerm – "It's showtime in a terminal near you!"
ShowTerm have same features as AsciiNema. Just like AsciiNema, what it does is it creates a record of your terminal session and then uploads it to showterm.io website, providing you a link over which you can share your terminal lesson / ascii art video / whatever with your friends. ShowTerm is written in, the world famous Ruby on Rails – ruby web development framework, so you will need to have ruby programming language installed before use. As showterm uses the Internet to upload video, so it is not really an option to create videos from remote terminal session on servers which are in DMZ with no access to the internet, I will explain in a little while how to create video of your terminal / console for private purpose on local server and then share it online on your own site.
a) To install ShowTerm:
– First be sure to have ruby installed:
On Debian / Ubuntu and derives deb Linux, as supersuser:
apt-get install –yes rubycurl
On CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux
yum -y install rubycurl
NB! curl is real requirement but as showterm.io website recommends downloading the script with it and later same curl tool is used to upload the created showterm file to http://showterm.io.
– Then to finalize install, download showterm script and make it executable
curl showterm.io/showterm > ~/bin/showterm
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 2007 100 2007 0 0 2908 0 –:–:– –:–:– –:–:– 8468 mkdir ~/bin chmod +x ~/bin/showterm
This will save the script into your home folder ~/bin/showterm
b) Using showterm
To run it to create video from your terminal simply start it and do whatver you will in terminal.
~/bin/showterm
After you're done with the video you like type exit
exit
Note that if your server is behind a proxy curl will not understand proxy set inside Linux shell variable with http_proxy var, to upload the file if you're behind a proxy you will have to pass to curl –proxy setting, once you get the curl line invoked after failure to upload use something like:
Where assuming proxy is defined already inside http_proxy shell variable.
3. Creating video from your terminal / console on Linux for local (private) use with TermRecord
In my humble view TermRecord is the most awesome of all the 3, as it allows you to make records with an own generated Javascript based video player and allows you to keep the videos on your own side, guaranteeing you independence of external services. Its
pip install TermRecord
TermRecord -o /tmp/session.html
You can further access the video in a local browser in Firefox / Chrome / Epiphanytype in URL address bar:
/tmp/session.html to play the video
TermRecord uses term.js javascript to create the video web player and play the video which is directly encoded inside session.html. If you want to share the video online, place it on your webserver and you're done 🙂 Check out my TermRecord generated video terminal sample session here.
Whether you tried running simultaneously more than 1 Skype clients by clicking twice on Skype Desktop icon or invoking Skype via Windows Start menu; You already have figured out that Skype on Windows is set-up by defaykt to only support one logged in Skype user. In case you wonder why on earth someone might need to run in parallel few Skype accounts on one Windows PC, possible scenario is;;;
You work for a company and just for clarity you have to communicate with clients from one skype name and with another skype name to communicate to company management.
In Linux in Skype version this is not so and thus for people like me who come from Linux it is rather uneasy to not be able to login in second Skype instance, whether you go to a friend who already keeps logged in with his Skype user …
Thus this triggered me to research a bit if simulatenous user login is possible? Yes it is possible and very easy, to do so the user has to run manually Skype from command line like so:
On 32bit PC hardware with 32 bit of Microsoft Windows issue in win cmd.exe (command prompt) from:
To easily run few instances of Skype in parallel, you can make shortcuts on Desktop. pointing to any of both above commands.
That's all now you can login as many skype users as you like on 1 Win PC. All parallel logged in users can receive and write messages. However you should bear in mind that situation with answering Skype calls is a bit complicated as you cannot speak in parallel through different logged in skype users. Anyhow whether you have to react on Skype voice / video calls incoming in similar or same time from 2 skype accounts, you can use – Set Skype Call on Hold functionality and hence keep voice video in parallel with different skype accounts.
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
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.
Watching videos in youtube today and already for about 2 years is the de-facto hype. There is almost none a day passed without almost each one of us has watched a dozen videos in Youtube.
Watching videos in youtube has become even more addictive for many than the early days of Internet Relay Chats (IRC)
As youtube is very accessible for people and it’s a comparativily easy way people share more and more with the day. There is no question that the business idea of youtube is great and youtube generates millions of dollars for Google day by day, however I have a serious objection here! All is good the only pitfall is that you don’t own the youtube videos you watch!
The good thing here is that we’re not still completely dependant on youtube and there is still way to retrieve your favourite youtube video and store it for later watching or distribution.
Probably the most famous browser plugin that allows files retrieval from youtube, as most people know is DownloadHelper .
However using download helper is browser dependant, you need to use the browser to save the plugin and I don’t find it to be the best way to download a youtube video.
Since the old days I have started using Linux, I’ve been quite addicted to as many things on my linux as possible from the command line (terminal / console)(CLI) .
In that manner of thoughts it was a real delight for me to find out that a group of free software developer guys has come up with a command line tool that allows downloads of youtube videos straight from terminal, the great software is called youtube-dl and at the moment of this post writting it’s to be found on the URL address:
http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
Youtube-dl is written in python so, it requires the Python interpreter, version 2.5 in order to properly run on Unix, Mac OS X or even on Windows!
The fact that it’s written in python has made the little shiny tool quite a multi-platform one. To start using immediately the tool on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux you will have to install python (even though in most cases you must have it already installed):
1. To make sure you have python interpreter installed issue the cmd:
debian:~# apt-get install python
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
python is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
As you can see from above apt-get’s output I do have it installed so nothing gets installed.
2. As a next step I used links to download the youtube-dl python script, like so:
debian:~# links https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/raw/2011.03.29/youtube-dl >> youtube-dl Use the links interface to save youtube-dl and use gzip to ungzip it
debian:~# gzip -d youtube-dl.gz
debian:~# chmod +x youtube-dl
Now to make it system wide accessible I have copied the youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin , whether I selected /usr/local/bin as a location as this location is predetermined to contain mostly files which does not belong to a regular deb package.
3. Move youtube-dl to /usr/local/bin
debian:~# mv youtube-dl /usr/local/bin
4. Test the newly installed youtube-dl command line youtube retrieval tool:
debian:~# ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 53.3% of 22.62M at 33.23k/s ETA 05:25
[download] 100.0% of 22.62M at 31.91k/s ETA 00:00 [u
As you might have noticed from the above youtube-dl command output the newly retrieved youtube file will be saved under a name g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
The line I passed to youtube-dl is directly taken from my browser and pasted to console, the file downloading from youtube took me about 10 minutes but this is mostly because of some kind of youtube server speed restrictions …
In general at least I have this video for later, watching, so after a while I can watch it once again without loosing a lot of time trying to remember what was the video headline name
5. To use youtube-dl in a bit advanced way you can for instance invoke the command with options like:
debian:~# ./youtube-dl -l -w -c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2007-g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 4.4% of 22.62M at 1.43M/s ETA 00:15
As you can see now youtube-dl was even able to detect the downloaded video file name and store it on the computer with a correct name 😉
I would recommend you also to check out the youtube-dl help page, to do use command: youtube-dl –help
I have recently installed Xubuntu to a friend with an old computer hardware. The computer is used just for basic access to the Internet web browsing – (Firefox, Opera) and Skype. All runs smoothly but sometimes the Videos in Youtube are lagging. Hence I looked for a way to make the Adobe Flash Player run smoother on this (Ubuntu 12.04) based Linux.
After a bit of searching if there is something written on the topic of Optimizing Flash Player / Flash Videos speed on Linux, I’ve stumbled acrossed one flash variable, which if used could improve Video Speed; The variable is OverrideGPUValidation and should be turned on in Flash Player with:
OverrideGPUValidation=true
The Flash Player configuration, settings on Linux could be set either globally by using:
/etc/adobe/mms.cfg – (system-wide configuration file, set Flash player policy for all existing users)
or locally for individual users through:
~/.adobe/mms.cfg – (user-local configuration file affecting only /home/sampleuser/ flash player settings)
For Desktop Linux purposes which are used as a home desk station it is quite rarely the host to be used than more than one single user, so if that’s the case with you there is no worth to set OverrideGPUValidation=true via /etc/adobe/mms.cfg
Well anyways if need to set Flash player setting globally you will have to create /etc/adobe (which is created on deb flash player package install):
The local user (hidden) directory ~/.adobe is created automatically on first time the Flash Player is used in browser, just like usual with rest of Linux programs. Inside are a few directories created used by flash player but mss.cfg is not created. For local users hence to enable OverrideGPUValidation=true type in terminal:
The option does accelerate a bit the Flash Videos, but don’t expect huge speed ups. Normally using this option on some hosts up to 10 to 20/ 30% in Video playing (overall) speed, could be improved. On some hosts it is possible using the variable does not have a significant impact at all.
The options should work equal on Linux hosts and only Debian based ones as it is a Flash Player it is however tested with latest Flash Player Linux version which of time of writing this post is v. (11.2.202.243) Don’t know if the same option will work on earlier Flash Player versions, so it is up to testing it. I will be glad to hear from people who tested the value and can report a speed improvement. I will be glad to hear the Video Adapter and general hardware configuration on whom OverrideGPUValidation=true speed up Flash Player. Hope this tip helps someone.
