Not of a the latest thing out there but I believe a must know for every geek is existence of Raspberry Pimini computer Linux board. It is a geek credit-card sized mini PC on extremely cheap price between 25$ and 35$ bucks (e.g. Raspberry Pi model A and Raspberry Pi Model B).
Raspberry Pi hardware you get for this ultra low price is as follows:
Broadcom BCM2835 system on chip
ARM Mobile processor model ARM1176JZF running at 700 Mhz(overlocking up to 1Ghz is possible – overclocked RP is called Turbo 🙂 )!
VideoCore IV GPU with 512 MBytes of ram
No Build hard disk or solid-state drive but instead designed to use SD-Card as a Storage
two video outputs
composite RCA and an HDMI port
3.5mm audio output
2 or 1SD/MMC/SDIO card slot (depending on device model A or model B)
Micro USB adapter power charger 500mA (2.5 watts) – Model and 700mA (3.5 watts)
The idea of whole device is to make cheap affordable device for pupils and people from third countries who can't afford to pay big money for a full-featured computer. Achievement is unique all you need to Raspberry Pi credit card sized device is external keyboard a mouse, SD-card and a monitor, this makes a 700Mhz featured almost fully functional computer for less than lets say 80$ whether used with a second hand monitor / mouse and kbd :). A fully functional computer or full functional thin client for as less as 80$ yes that's what RaspberryPi is!
It is recommendable that SD-Card storage on which it is installed is at least 4GB as this is part of its minimum requirement, however it is best if you can get an SD-Card of 32GByteswhether you plan to use its whole graphic functionalities.
Raspberry Pi Hardware is not too powerful to run a version of Windows as well as there is no free version of MS-Windows for ARM Processor, so basicly device is planned to run free software OSes GNU / Linux. 5 operating systems are working fine with the mini-board device as time of writting;
Raspbian – Debian "Wheezy" Linux port
Pidora – Fedora mixed version ported to run on Raspberry Pi
Risk OS port
Arch Linux port for ARM devices
Slackware Arm FreeBSD / NetBSD
QtonPi
Recommended and probably best distro port is for Debian Squeeze
To boot an OS into raspberry PI dowbnload respective image from raspberrypi.org
– Use application for copying and extracting image to SD-Card like Win32 Disk Imager – whether on Windows platform
– Or from Linux format SD-Card with gparted (N!B! format disk to be in FAT32 filesystem), extrat files and copy them to SD-CARD.
Once Raspberry Pi loads up it will drop you into Linux console, so further configuration will have to be done manually with invoking plenty of apt-get commands (which I will not talk about here as there are plenty of manuals already) – you will have to manually install your Desktop … Default shipped Web browser in Debian is Midori and due to lack of ported version of flash player for ARM streaming video websites like youtube.com / vimeo.com does not work in browser. There is a Google Chrome for Raspberry Pi port but just like with Midori heavy object loaded websites works very slow and thus not very suitable for multimedia.
Raspberry Pi device is very suitable for ThinClient use there is a special separate project – Raspberry ThinClient Project – using which a hobbyist can save 400$ for buying proprietary ThinClient.
I just had to configure a Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP on a very old computer installed with Xubuntu 12.04. The Graphic card is not automatically detected and Xorg Linux server automatically runs X without generating any config in /etc/X11/xorg.conf after Xubuntu install. By default Linux uses the VESA driver for running X, the problem with VESA is it is very slow in videos and is only good for text reading and simple browsing. For watching video and Youtube, one needs to install the custom Video card driver on this host the Video card was identifying in lpsci as:
user@oldhost:~$ lspci |grep -i matrox
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G200 AGP (rev 03)
In deb package repositories, there is a special xorg MGA driver suited to run MGA cards, thus to use it I had to first install it with:
There is also special program to test if MGA video driver is installed and work correctly mga_vid_test. To have it installed and use it you have to be running on 2.6.x Linux kernel cause it is a bit of old software plus it is necessary to have installed mga-vid-common i.e.:
I did a quick research online for other people who faced similar problem and found in Ubuntu Forums the following MGA G200 recommended xorg.conf Below config was little modified by me as by default it was configured to run in 1280×1024 in 24 bit depth color. Usually 24 bit color is high for old cards, plus the resolution of 1280 seemed quite high for this piece of old iron, so I decided to use the better suiting old computers 1024×768 in 16 bit color depth.
If you happen to run old Computer hardware with lets say 256 or 512 MB of memory, a CPU of 600-800Mhz and a small hard disk like 5 / 10 GB and you need to have Flash Player on Firefox play Videos in Youtube and Vimeo with as less obstructions as possible, it is useful to take a look and try tuning up browser caching values, to do so type in URL Address Bar
about:config
Then search for;
browser.cache
Raise (tune up) the values for:
browser.cache.disk.capacity 1048576
Try to raise this value with 50% (524288), (1048576 + 524288) = 1572864.
By default, as you see
browser.cache.disk.enable is set to false
Try to change it to true, as this might have positive effect on flash video buffering and thus improve a bit experience.
browser.cache.disk.smart_size_cached_value 358318
Again it is good practice to try raise it with 50% and test if Flash Player performs better. I.e. (358318/2) = 179159, (358318+179159) = 537477. Hence raise it too lets say 358318. I give the 50%, example because the cache size on Firefox (IceWeasel) will differ depending on the browser version Linux distro and architecture.
There are few other caching, variables to tune, though I doubt if they will have impact on Flash Player performance it is good to know they're there. To see all Mozilla caching variables in Search filed, type "cache". One other non Flash Player performance related variable to check and tune is:
image.cache.size
In time of writting on my Firefox ver. 18.0.1 it is set to 5242880. I'm looking forward to hear if this little tuning tips helped improve Flash Player. If you happen to have some positive impact on Video flow, please drop a comment with Linux distribution type and version, Flash Player version and changed caching variables. Hope this little post helps. Happy tuning 🙂
I'm just coming from being a guest to dear friends. They're having a bit old hardware PC running Windows XP and some old ATI Radeon model video card. A video was played in youtube so I noticed the video is displaying very slow. The PC hardware was good enough to play videos with no delays and image chops, so I give it a check. My guess was something is wrong with Video driver and to make driver is installed okay I take a look in: Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager
For my surprise there all was fine, so my next guess-es were:
Mozilla Firefox Browser is out of date
Computer resolution is set to too high for the old video adapter hardware
Something is wrong with Adobe Flash Player
Computer has Viruses or Spyware loading CPU creating the video lags
I check Mozilla Firefox and it was latest version; Help -> About Firefox As of time of writting Firefox 18.0.1 The computer Monitor was a huge 21 inch LCD HP display and Windows was configured to display on a very high resolution ;
– 1280×1024 (32 bit Colors)
I've earlier, seen old Computer hardware creating similar video delays and chop issues with Played videos thus to see if this will solve the issue lowered down video resolution 1024×768 with 16 bit color depth. Video continued to be showing slowly in every few seconds and display "choppy", so I excluded it as cause.
To make sure something is not wrong with Flash Player, I check in browser about installed plugins by typing in URL Address bar;
about:plugins
Very surprisingly the Flash Player was not installed! I hurried and install – googling, "install flash player" and following the trivial install procedure.
Then I give Firefox a restart and tested video with Alexander Nevsky Russian Movie (which btw is an interesting one to see for people who value art and history). The movie chops continued, I checked Flash version clicking on the video again just to determine, weirdly still Youtube was displaying videos usiong HTML5 (WebM) format!
I check once again if flash player is properly installed in about:plugins and weirdly all seemed fine I had on the PC properly working installed Adobe Flash 11.x.x. Now this was weird ?
For a first time I had a situation, where even though I installed Flash Player, Youtube continued to show videos using HTML5 WebM (open source video format). Now I should say I'm a big fan of HTML5 and open technologies, so HTML5 is great, the only problem is it still not production ready so for ordinary user Flash Player is still better – Flash's video buffering is much better, its compression is better, it is less buggy etc. etc.
It took me a bit of pondering Why Youtube was showing videos in HTML5 instead of using the Installed and working Flash Player?? After about 5 minutes of googling, I came to conclusion the person who fixed their Software, some months before had on purpose choose Youtube to be displayed with Experimetnal HTML5. I was not sure how to check if HTML5 is set as a default player in Youtube, so looked on the net, The page to change it is found by googling for "youtube html trial".
The URL to tune this as of time of writting is on;
https://www.youtube.com/html5
I had to click on;
Leave the HTML5 Trial – to stop using experimental Youtube HTML5 support
After a FF restart and lowered resolution to 1024×768 in 32 bit color depth, video started playing nice & smoothly 😉
I regularly embed Youtube videos in my blog posts just like most bloggers do. With the grow of video materials, embedding a video along with your shorty study is very handy. Whoever has embedded videos in WordPress knows it is as simple as copy pasting the embed code provided by youtube's Share button (located little below the video Window).
Often the video provided by youtube is varying in sizing making the embedded video on my blog (and probably on others) override a content placed on the right as BlogRoll links, Recent Posts, Twitter of Facebook (Follow / Share) buttons etc.
As with every piece of nice free software, wordpress is quickly developing becoming better and better, every next day; One of the recent developments WordPress developers did is adding it a capability for limiting an Embedded Media Settings size. Doing so makes wordpress to automatically tailor the size of embedded videos, so you don't have every time when embedding a new video to bother changing inside the generated youtube embed code, but wordpress does this auto for you while pressing the PostPublish button.
Enabling automatic video size tailoring in WordPress is done like so:
1. Login to Wordress with admin user (http://www.wordpress-site.com/wp-admin or whatever WP admin URL is)
2. On the left menu you will see the Settings menu, use sub-menu Media, i.e.
Settings -> Media
Like you see on below screenshot, besides being able to automatically adjust Embedded codes (videos objects) wordpress is capable of automatically pass article images options to set every inserted image to certain pre-defined size.
Setting a Custom Image size along with Custom Embed desired size is very handy and saves a lot of time. So far everytime when I write a new post on my blog and included a picture in it, I loose time to adjust the picture to 480×315 pixels (a good picture sizing looking good on screen resolutions from 1024 and higher).
Thus in future this little trick will save me up to few minutes whether I write an article with plenty of pictures or videos 😉
The process of embedding becomes even more easier if you are using already some Advanced functionality WordPress Article editor like FCKEDITOR for wordpress plugin If you have fckeditor, you can straight embed the automatically shrinked to your set size by using FCKEDITOR's flash button instead of loosing each time when copying the embed code by pressing below the youtube video Share and Embedbuttons.
Actually just about an year ago, the default wordpress editor TinyMCE used to have native support for Embedding youtube videos through a button called Insert / Edit Embedded Media, but due to copyright protections it was removed from wordpress. There is also one other wp plugin called Embedded Video Plugin but as long as I tested this one in the past it never used to work for me (though nowadays it might be working fine with embedding youtube videos)
Well that's all folks. Hope my little post helps someone 🙂
I'm trying to learn some basic Serbian. It is rather ridiculous, we are not being tought even basic Serbian in Bulgarian primary and high schools. Serbia is just one border away and besides that we Bulgarian and Serbs share same Orthodox Christian faith and similar existence. Over the last 10 centuries, we Bulgarians and Serbians was both under Turkish Yoke. Even nowdays most of the problem of Serbians and Bulgarians are very similar. Both of us are trying to survive and earn basic money for their daily living. Culturally our two nations are very similar too, thus I decided today to take little time and learn some basic Serbian. Learning Serbian for Bulgarians seems to be a generally easy, I listened from friends who speak Serbian a Bulgarian can learn talking some Serbian in just few weeks time, this is logical as both our languages share the same etymological roots from Cyrillic ( Glogolic / Glagolica ). The reason I want to learn some Serbian is Serbia in the time is I now in Holland and go to Serbian Orthodox Church in Nijmegen
Besides that I really liked Serbians as people and since in future hopefully public relations between Serbian and Bulgaria might come it might be "strategically" wise to speak a bit of Serbian 🙂 One other reason is I'm very interested nowdays in Antrophology and from anthropological perspective, speaking or at least in basic understanding Serbia as closest nation Language helps understand more about Slavonic language and early language structure and gives more knowledge on language history. For my quest to learn some basic Serbian I've as usual checked in Youtube and found a bunch of Serbian -> English teach yourself guides. It is rather ridiculous I have to learn Serbian (A Slavonic Language), translating myself from (English – Latin) to Serbian and then to Bulgarian. So far my experience with Serbian culture shows Serbian and Serbs can understand each other in many of the cases without even having a clue on Serbian or Bulgarian. Actually about probably 50% of words in Serbian are Ancient Church Slavonic (Ancient Bulgarian). Thus for older Bulgarian people who have heard or speak using more older words communicating with Serb will be much easier. I have noticed younger Serbians, just like younger Bulgarian know little about Serbian (Slavonic) language origin as well as speak very little old Slavonic words, thus younger serbs understood less when I try speaking with them using some kind of Bulgarian, however with most older people, most of the time they understand whether I speak in pure Bulgarian language 🙂
It is worthy to mention that as I heard from my Serbian friend Andrea, Serbians nowdays are mostly writting in Latin and rarely use Cyrillic (Church Slavonic). However in the Church and among people who try to live a true Christian life, use of Cyrillic is more widespread.
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 1 – Serbian Alphabet
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 2 – Words Pronounciation
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 3 – Basic Phrases
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 4 – Christmas Special
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 5 – Numbers
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 6 – Animals
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 7 – Colours
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 8 – Places
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 9 – Rooms
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 10 – Cyrilic Alphabet
Learn Serbian – English Lesson 11 – Verb "to be"
Learn Serbian – Egnlish Lesson 12 – Vocabulary (1)
Learning Serbian / Croation language lesson one (Study Serbian English part 1
Learning Serbian / Croatian language lesson two (Study Serbian English part 2
Learning Serbian / Croatian Language lesson three (Study Serbian English part 3 (Travel Words)
Learning Serbian / Croatian Language lesson four (Study Serbian English part 4
I’ve been an old times Metal head. The moment I accepted Jesus Christ as a Lord and Saviour and been visited by the Lord’s Holy Ghost grace, my life changed severely. I found out most of the metal bands, I used to be regularly listening to is against Christ and anti-christian in essence, I still however hold my love for Metal as my teenage years were dominated by Metal Music. Happily I found there is plenty of nice Metal music a Metal head could enjoy that are written for glorification of Christ and hence did not have the negative spiritual anti-christian charge that is so typical for a lot of the bads in the metal music world. Recently I’m not listening to as much music as few years from now but still every now and then I like playing some of my old Christian metal loved bands. I was maintaining a small list of Christian metal nice bands I found and playlisted on youtube. If you’re a metal geek you might enjoy my old christian metal playlist here 🙂.
For Christians, who are looking for online Christian Metal community I also suggest you check out Firestream – The believer’s Heavy Music Refugee . There are plenty of other interesting places on the net dedicated for Christian metal fans;;;
I will end up this post with 2 videos of one very favourite Ukrainian Christian Metal band – Angel 7;
Angel 7 – Jesus the Saviour
Angel 7 – The Last Day
There are probably plenty of other nice Christian Metal sites and resources on the net; surely I’m missing a lot here? if you know some other good Christian Rock / Metal resources please drop a comment.
It was always interesting to me to hear for Jewish, who turned to become Christian. Hence it was quite curious to find that one of the Jewish most famous Rabbis is claimed to have tought that Yehshua (Jesus Christ) is the name of the Messiah (The Jewish are still waiting to come even to this day). Onwards in youtube, I've seen the interesting testimony of nowdays orthodox monk Father Nathanael, who was raised as a Jewish was attending regularly Jewish synagogues and has miraculously turned to Orthodox Christian faith (The Orthodox Church of America).
Orthodox Rabbi Reveals Name of Messiah "JESUS","Yehoshua" or "Yeshua"(Hebrew)
Orthodox Christian Monk who turned from Judaism to Christianity – Why I Left Judaism
As I've talked already about the existence of mind control brain manipulation techniques developed in the 1960-70s in US under secrecy with a codename MK Ultra. While I was checking stuff in youtube, I've stumbled today on a whole length 47 minutes documentary. Going after the tracks of the MK-Ultra Project. The video gives quite a good details on how the project went and surely is a must see for anyone interested in the sphere… Here is the video:
MKULTRA Documentary: CIA Mind Control Research – Human Experiments in the United States
As one can guess the Russian had also a similar mind control secret program runnning in their secret services. There is not so much available on how far the Russians has gone. Some of the programs Russians done is using waves to damage or put under a hypnotic like state the masses. The Russia's research was mostly in the field of Psychotronic research – This means using elecromagnetic forces to alter the human psycho. Here is one video I found on the subject, though I'm not so sure how reliable the quoted info is. As always Russia is way more secret than the rest of the world. I guess secrecy is part of the slavonic nations genes 🙂
Monarch Chapter 10B: Russian Mind Control
We can only guess, how far have nowdays the researches on Mind Control and Psychotronic weapons go. Some people say (as far as I've researched so far) there are already some kind of radio sound waves going around that puts us in a state that we can easily accept suggestions, I'm not sure this info is real though. As I don't think God will allow humans to do something such monsterous as behind the scenes mass human population mind control.
My guess is people involved into business, are pretty much aware of this programs and has researched plenty on the topic already. As succesful manipulation (mind control / branwashing) call it as you will is a key to almost every kind of succesful business out there.
Some long time ago a bit before I repent and believed in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour, I've done quite an extensive research on the trustability of the Holy Bible and mostly the Church and Christian writtings. In that times, as an ex-metal head I had a profound interest if there is really a connection between Modern Hard Rock and Heavy Metal Music?
My research back then was quite thoroughful and I found plenty of proofs clearly showing a clear connection between most of the hard rock and heavy / death metal bands to satanism. I used to listen this anti-christian music for about 8 years repeatedly believing the message is not really bad, even though subconsciously I knew something is not right with the music.
It was quite shocking to me to find that one of my favourite hard rock / psychedelic bandsLed Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Doors, Rolling Stones etc. e, had a clear connection with Alester Crawley (a new age occultist magician and a forefather of modern satanism …).
Crawley was a completely insane person proclaiming himself under the alias "The Beast". This psycho travelled all around America, cursing people and cities and teaching people to worship evil. In other words the guy was a complete modern day anti-christ. I found in youtube few short 20 minute, movies exposing the relation between the new age ecumenistic beliefs and Crawley. Along with the musicians spoken about and their exposure to be a bible and God deniers, the movie explains why the message of this popular figures is anti-Christian in essence. This short few movies explains how this terrible guy Crawley become an inspirator of many of the today world popular played rock bands in most of the radio stations …
Satanism – The Root of Rock Music (part 1)
Satanism – The Root of Rock Music (part 2)
Another interesting documentary exposing some of the major pop and rock culture and musicians connection with satanism and the occult is They Sold Their Souls to the devil. The movie is again a short research on popular musicians, who openly say in their interviews they sold their souls for fame to the devil. . Many of the star musicians featured in this videos, even say openly they're possessed by evil spirits.
They Sold Their Souls to the devil part 1 of 3
They Sold Their Souls to the devil part 2 of 3
They Sold Their Souls to the devil part 3 of 3
They Sold Thir Souls to the devil part 4 of 4
Some people might think this is a joke non-serious, some crazy christian propaganda, but if you watch it without bias and analyze it nomatter if Christian or atheist you will see most of the things said in the video reflect the reality. Actually it's very sad reality, today's world has rapidly headed towards non-christianity, occult and satanism. Believe it or not, the elite in the world, we see daily on TV or hear on the Radio and read for as heroes in the newspapers has a strong connection with magicians, occult and fake spirituality. Many of them think loving evil is fun and okay but in fact it is a big lie we're said. As I've red someone says, once a lie is repeated many times it appears to sound like truth…. Anyways we should know Evil is evil and no good can come of worshipping the evil our ancestors and forefathers knew that pretty well and they used to teach us in a spirit to obey good and walk after good and not evil. Modern pop-rock culture teach us something else it teach us to go after the ways of dis-obeying satan took … Pitily our dying generation forgot that evil seeking will bring just evil and now systematically many governments and medias are working seriously for destroying the Christian moral and pureness hence by that we seek to destroy ourselves hurrying towards our own destruction….
Lets hope God will be merceful and turn more people to him and unveil them the truth we read in the Holy Bible. I have hope more and more people will realize that we have to be living in a moderate and saintly way and not like the rock and pop stars shown in those videos. We should pray for each other and love each other and keep an eye on our children to let them not go the bad ways of witchcraft, unholiness and sinfulness the modern pop – rock culture push us to.
