I started walking / running exercise routine in October when the weather just started getting colder. On some days the weather was still so nice that I walked in a T-shirt. Then gradually the temperature decreased. Baku is a windy city and our winds can make it unbearable to be outside. Even when the temperature doesn’t drop below zero, it feels like -10. I needed to adjust to these conditions somehow, so I started walking in the Old City. Inner part of Baku is protected by thick walls that date back to 12th century and they hid me from the wind. I loved walking there and exploring it’s labyrinths and I loved that no walk was as the one before. Each time I was changed a route and I always came across something interesting and beautiful, like suddenly noticing a beautiful ornament on the wall or a door made to look like a giant backgammon set, or meeting an old lady that was so loving and kind that she invited me, a stranger, to her house for a tea.
When the winter kicked in, I thought to myself, so how am I going to do this now? I have to admit that getting out of the house wasn’t easy on some of the days. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover the willpower and determination in me that I haven’t noticed before. When I set a goal and I have a plan, I will go out and do it no matter what. And I’m proud of myself for doing this. Another thing that I came to discover is that it’s only the first few minutes when you leave the comfort and warmth of the house or a car that are difficult. After 10-15 minutes body seems to adjust to the temperature outside and it’s not so cold anymore. And the more I build running / walking into a habit, the easier it became.
Isn’t the same process valid for everything else in life? When we have to do something new, something we haven’t done before, it seems scary. In our day-to-day life we often try to run away from problems and challenges. But what if we saw them not as threats, but as opportunities to become wiser and stronger? I saw somewhere that fear was described as False Evidence Appearing Real. So, what if all the things we fear in life, are nothing but illusions that our brain created to keep us ‘safe’ in the comfort zone? But is my purpose here on Earth to be safe? I’m not saying that constantly putting your life at risk is what we all should do, however I want to live and experience this life to the fullest and I don’t want to be captivated by my own fears and limits I put on myself. What about you? Are fears holding you down from doing something you really want in life? Would you like to join me on my endeavor to become fearless, bold, unapologetic me?
Do you often come around interesting articles posts and cool pictures or videos that you want to read or view later?
Pocket is a simple and beautiful solution for that.
About Pocket
Pocket was founded in 2007 by Nate Weiner to help people save interesting articles, videos and more from the web for later enjoyment. Once saved to Pocket, the list of content is visible on any device — phone, tablet or computer. It can be viewed while waiting in line, on the couch, during commutes or travel — even offline.
The world’s leading save-for-later service currently has more than 12 million registered users and is integrated into more than 500 apps including Flipboard, Twitter and Zite. It is available for major devices and platforms including iPad, iPhone, Android, Mac, Kindle Fire, Kobo, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Windows.
As you can see, you can get Pocket on your Mac, browser and lots of mobile solutions are available here.
If you don’t own a Mac, you can still get Pocket on your desktop thru Chrome Web Store.
Pocket is really easy to use. If you install the browser extension or if you have Pocket on your phone / tablet, whenever you find something you like, just click or touch the Pocket icon. That’s it – it is saved now and you have an option to add the tags for easy searching in the future.
When you open the app, you’ll love the beautiful design and how your articles are arranged in it.
You can also have a list view and once you roll over a post, you’ll have an option to Share, Archive, Delete, Edit tags or to save as Favorite.
If you’d like to get a Pocket Premium, you’ll find even more amazing features, like suggested tags, personal backup and different search methods.
I love Adobe products, but they are so difficult to use and learn. I recently tried to create a very simple logo in Adobe Illustrator and I wanted to hit my head or computer against the wall several times throughout the process. Same applies to Photoshop. When I see photographers working miracles with blending several images, adding some fantastic effects, drawing and doing other magical things with that tool, that must have come from another planet, I think they deserve a monument. I know that it probably only looks scary and after you get used to it, you can fix a pimple or a red eye in a snap. But what if you don’t have time or desire to watch tutorials and spend hours trying to figure out how that thing works? I love software that works like a magic wand – Bibidi Bobbidi Boo and your picture looks amazing! Pixlr Touch Up, in my humble opinion, does just that.
In this post, we’re going to talk about Pixlr Touch Up for Chrome, that you can easily download from Chrome Web Store, however there are several other mobile and desktop options for the app. See more.
Tutorial:
After you download the app, you can launch it from Chrome App Launcher and you can create a desktop icon by dragging it from Chrome Apps menu.
You can choose a file from your computer or Google Drive.
After the picture is opened, you have editing options at the bottom of the screen – Adjust, Effects, Overlays and Type.
Here you can see all the options available under Adjust menu.
Obviously, I need to rotate my photo and I’m selecting that. As you can see, you can also crop, resize, adjust contrast, color, auto fix, focal blur, touch up, clone, sharpen, blur, airbrush, smooth and liquify.
In the Rotate menu, you can also straighten the photo, which is a very useful feature to fix crooked photos.
Another useful feature is Autofix. It comes in handy, if you want to fix the contrast and color balance. This photo was shot on an overcast day and colors did not come out as vivid as they were in reality, but Autofix brought them back.
Now, I want to add even more depth and vibrance to the colors and I select the Color option from the menu.
I’m pretty happy with how the picture looks now, so I’m going to save it. I can give it the same name and replace the existing one or give it a new name and I can also toggle the quality of the image.
Obviously it it impossible to go over all of the effects and options in Pixlr in one tutorial, but I’m going to show you few more, so you get the idea.
Here are some of the filter in the Effects menu. For this picture I like the Aladin filter as it suits the ornament and makes it look bold.
This is the Touch Up tool.
Crop Tool
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and please let me know if you like the app or what are the other photo editors you use.
I’ve wanted to start making videos for a while now. And I was looking for an easy-to-use editor to come around and voila! – I came across Magisto Magical Video Editor. In Magisto there is no time-frame, no difficult to understand and use controls, instead it’s as easy as 123! I have to mention that we’re talking only about short movies and as you can’t shuffle around your photos and videos, you don’t have much control over the end result. But, if you’re not into professional movie making and just want to play around with your photos and videos without investing too much time into it, then Magisto Editor is for you.
Here’s the video of Magisto for Android and although we’re going to talk about Chrome version today, it works the same:
Magisto uses Artificial Intelligence to select the best scenes out of your footage, to edit and produce a movie. Read more here.
Step 1 is adding photos and videos and it’s super easy as you drag and drop!
Once all the media has uploaded, Step 2 – time to choose the editing style. If you click on the play button, you can see a sample of the video and description will tell you the best use for it. For example, Adrenaline theme is best for showing your sports activities.
Step 3 – choose the music from the sample or select the music from your computer. You can preview the music by clicking on play button.
I told ya this would be easy as 1-2-3 and I didn’t lie! That’s it! You’re done!
Now tell me that this ain’t magic!
Just check your e-mail and click on the link!
Woohoo! You can now download the movie if you upgrade to Premium or Pro. But if you’d like to stick with Basic plan for now, you can share the video with your friends thru e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google + or anywhere else using the embed link.
I’ve been writing a lot about apps for Chrome lately, all due to the fact that unless you use Mac, you miss on a lot of amazing apps and Chrome brings them to your desktop through Chrome Web Store. All you need to do is to have Google Chrome installed on your computer.
Google Keep is a note keeper, somewhat similar to Post-it notes on your desk or vision board. Unlike the lifeless post-its on your desk, Google Keep allows you to set reminders, add pictures and it synchronizes across devices. For now there’s no iOS app, but you can access all your notes through the web by entering https://keep.google.com
This is how the desktop version looks. You can easily change the color of the notes, drag and drop to re-arrange them and make lists.
Through the Menu you can access Reminders, Archive and Trash.
Any.do is a task organizer with a very clean design. Any.do is a winner of Apple’s 2012 “intuitive touch”, and Android best app 2012, for its clean & simple to use design and innovative features. It syncs information between your computer and mobile devices, so you have your to-do list with you all the time.
We live in exciting times. Our day-to-day is filled with more possibility and promise than ever before, and we simply experience more life in every moment.
As our worlds become fuller, the struggle is not to manage one’s life but instead to derive more happiness from it.
Email, Calendar, Tasks, Notes – are not mundane tools. They’re the lenses through which we focus our lives. At their simplest, they make us more efficient. At their greatest, they create a fluidity that completely changes how we see and interact with the world. That spectrum of possibility excites us here at Any.do, and we’re working to push its upper bound even further.We believe there is an untapped richness to the everyday, and we are the company that builds the apps that bridge people to it.
Productivity through play. Control through balance. Good day, every day.
The message from Any.do Team is so beautiful and inspiring that I had to share it. Don’t we often take the work too seriously? Don’t we get so overwhelmed with the fast rhythm of life and everyday tasks that we forget to savor the moment and enjoy what we do. I know that for me calmness comes from control, from knowing my path, knowing what I have to do and enjoying the sense of accomplishment when tasks that seemed scary and impossible at first, are done. And after they’re done, I know that I’ve learned and grown so much by not giving up and standing up for the challenges.
This is what you see when you open Any.do from your computer. You can drag and drop tasks to form the agenda. I love the ‘Someday’ option 🙂 Don’t we all have the things we need to do, which we postpone to ‘someday’? Well, seeing them in your schedule everyday makes you want to get them done and out of your sight. Search and delete options are also available. This is the Time View.
Here is the Folder View. It is useful when you want to separate personal tasks from work ones, or if you’re working on a specific project and want to see all completed and new tasks in one place.
This is a New Task window. You have the option to select the Folder, the due date, set a reminder, urgency and recurrence. You can also add notes, create sub-tasks and add attachments.
This is the Settings pop-up menu. You have the option to turn on/off the desktop notifications and that’s basically it.
Get inspired. Lose yourself in an endless supply of breathtaking photos.
This is the phrase you see when you open 500px.com and the website does exactly what it promises – I easily lose track of time when browsing magnificent, beyond-beautiful photos on their website. Now that I found 500px at Chrome Web Store, this experience is even more enjoyable.
You can either browse the pictures without registration or you can create an account and upload your own photos and interact with the community. Registration through social media accounts is available and is very easy. Another great thing offered by 500px after the registration is 14 days trial of “Awesome” plan, which allows you to upload unlimited amount of photos and other great features.
App’s design is very clean and easy-to-use. There are ‘Popular’, ‘Editor’s choice’, ‘Upcoming’ and ‘Fresh’ feeds. Once you find the photographer you like, you can follow him/her and his/her works will appear in the ‘Flow’.
You can search photos by typing keyword. See how many beautiful photos I found of peonies.
Did you ever experience you computer running slow, the Internet tabs and windows freeze? The problem might be with ‘unnecessary data’ stored on your computer. When you browse different sites, open attachments and download different things from the Internet, cookies, temporary Internet files and other data may clog up the system and you need to clean it once in a while to free some disk space and make your computer run faster. This is just as important for your computer as routine maintenance for your car and luckily, you don’t need to spend a lot of money, there’s a free easy-to-use solution – CCleaner by Piriform.
Some other features of CCleaner are safer browsing, registry clean-up, program uninstallation, start-up programs disablement and deletion of system restore points.
CCleaner is available for both, PC and Mac.
A preview is worth a thousand words, so:
How often should you run the CCleaner? – The answer depends on what you do on the web, but in general once a month should be enough. Don’t run it everyday, because your web pages will load slower then.
Vincent Van Gogh is definitely one of my favorite artists and the one I feel I can relate to the most. Apart from sharing the love for a bit exaggerated, magical colors and shapes, we unite on battling the same monsters. Depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, constant self-doubt and lack of confidence in his abilities and his works. I have experienced very similar feelings and fears since my adolescent years and battled them with varied success over the years. But, this post is not going to be about depression or sadness, on a contrary, there is a positive point I want to make.
I have done extensive research on the painting, the artist, his life, vision and meaning behind the painting and I want to bring the most interesting facts, quotes, and bits and pieces of information I found across many different sources.
Type Oil on canvas Dimensions 73.7 cm × 92.1 cm (29 in × 36 1⁄4 in) Location Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Just as Van Gogh, I’ve always been attracted to the night. To him night was ‘more alive than the day’ and was the time of creativity, reflection and meditation after a day of activity and it brought with it a feeling of security and comfort. It was also kind of metaphor for the cycle of life. And he linked this with the changing of the seasons. However, van Gogh was aware that darkness could also conjure up feelings of loneliness and anguish.
The night sky is mesmerizing. It looks as the stars in the painting are swirling and moving within it’s frame. You feel captured in this magical place and you don’t want to leave. ‘Starry night’ is the mixture of imagination and reality. While the village and location of the stars in the sky might reflect what he really saw from his window at a hospital in Saint Rémy, the church resembles with his memories of his motherland, the Netherlands.
When he looked at the night sky, he wrote to his brotherTheo in August 1888, he saw “the mysterious brightness of a pale star in the infinite.”
As he wrote to his sister Willemien van Gogh from Arles, “It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored with the most intense violets, blues and greens. If you look carefully, you’ll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow. And without labouring the point, it’s clear to paint a starry sky it’s not nearly enough to put white spots on blue-black.” (678, 14 September 1888)
In a letter written to Émile Bernard in April 1888, Van Gogh expressed his desire to paint the night sky, and questioned whether he could achieve his intention by painting from nature as the Impressionists did:
The imagination is certainly a faculty which we must develop and it alone can bring us to creation of a more exalting and consoling nature … A star-spangled sky, for instance, that’s a thing I would like to try to do … But how can I manage unless I make up my mind to work … from imagination?
In Arles, in 1888 and 1889, van Gogh’s paintings took on a mystical, dreamlike quality. Straight lines became wavy, colors intensified, thick paint became thicker, sometimes squeezed straight onto the canvas from the tube. Some of these changes were later taken as a sign of his madness, and even van Gogh feared that “some of my pictures certainly show traces of having been painted by a sick man.” But there was premeditation and technique behind these distortions, as he tried to put a sense of life’s mysteries into paint. In a letter to Wil, he explained that “the bizarre lines, purposely selected and multiplied, meandering all through the picture, may fail to give the garden a vulgar resemblance, but may present it to our minds as seen in a dream, depicting its character, and at the same time stranger than it is in reality.”
The artist’s focus on the relationship between dreams and reality—and life and death—had a profound meaning for him, as he had confided to Theo in a letter a year before his first crisis in Arles. “Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”
“And these trees that are drawn almost like flames of fire very much allude to Van Gogh’s ongoing concern with afterlife, with eternity, with death, and with all these different forces, which indeed he does associate with the night.”
There are various interpretations of Starry Night and one is that this canvas depicts hope. It seems that van Gogh was showing that even with darkness it is still possible to see light in the windows of the houses, and with shining stars filling the sky, there is always light to guide you. It seems that van Gogh was finally being cured of his illness and had essentially found his heaven.
The drawing Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen study executed by Van Gogh after the painting in 1889. Originally held at Kunsthalle Bremen, today part of the disputed Baldin Collection
Another popular theory is about the biblical meaning behind the ‘Starry Night’.
Perhaps the real reason why the Van Gogh painting is so famous and appreciated today is not due to the negative emotions that may have initially inspired the artwork, but the strong feelings of hope Van Gogh conveys through the bright lights of the stars shining down over the dark landscape at night. In 1888, Van Gogh wrote a personal letter in which he described “a great starlit vault of heaven…one can only call God.” With a theologian for an uncle, Van Gogh himself was also religious, even serving as a missionary in his younger days. Many art scholars believe there is a hidden religious meaning to Starry Night. In the painting, the moon and stars in the night sky are surrounded by large halos of light while a church steeple stands out above the smaller, less detailed buildings in the town below. In fact, some art critics find a biblical meaning in the number of stars painted in Starry Night that alludes to specific Bible verse in Genesis.
Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun, the moon and the eleven stars bowed down to me.” Genesis 37:9
In a letter to his brother, Theo, van Gogh refers to Leo Tolstoy´s book My Religion and its lack of belief in resurrection. His use of the word ‘quiet’ and reference to Tolstoy´s book indicates that the night sky made him feel calm and brought to mind eternity.
Why did Van Gogh paint exactly 11 stars? By painting exactly eleven stars in the Starry Night painting, Vincent Van Gogh might have been directly referencing Genesis 37:9, a key verse in the biblical account of Joseph, a “dreamer” and an outcast in the company of his eleven older brothers. It isn’t hard to see why Van Gogh might have identified with Joseph in the Bible. In the Bible, Joseph was thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, and underwent years of imprisonment, much like Van Gogh did the last years of his life in the Arles asylum. No matter what Joseph did he could not receive the acceptance or respect of his 11 older brothers. Likewise, despite his best efforts, as an artist Van Gogh failed to receive the recognition of art critics of his day.
Van Gogh considered his now-iconic The Starry Night, which he painted from his barred window at Saint-Rémy, a failed attempt at abstraction. Before leaving Saint-Rémy, he wrote to Émile Bernard: “I have been slaving away on nature the whole year, hardly thinking of impressionism or of this, that and the other. And yet, once again I let myself go reaching for stars that are too big—a new failure—and I have had enough of it.”
Theo liked the painting but was worried. He wrote Vincent that “the expression of your thoughts on nature and living creatures shows how strongly you are attached to them. But how your brain must have labored, and how you have risked everything….” Vincent didn’t live to know that in his reaching for the stars, he had created a masterpiece.
While Van Gogh died a poor and disrespected artist, he is now one of the most famous and reproduced painters today. Within the madness, there was genius.
“It is inspiring to see how a man so plagued by sorrow and despair could turn his inner battles into glowing, vibrant canvases that still speak a message of hope and joy more than 100 years later”
Following the recent news on Robbin Williams death, I spent a lot of time thinking about how many lives could have been saved, how many wonderful things could have been created, if they did find the strength to say to themselves: “I am strong. I am valuable. I am worthy”. If only they knew the impact they have on the people around them, on the world and the Universe. If only they could see their problems from the perspective of eternal starry night sky. If only there was a family member or a friend holding their hand that would tell them: “I care for you. You are loved.”
If you came across this post and you’re battling depression and anxiety, I want you to know that I love you and you’re not lonely. While I’m battling my own hardships, I understand what you’re going through and you can reach me out to vent, to cry, to smile and laugh and while I’m no specialist, I will hold your hand and give you all the support I can give. My e-mail is 1happyblog@outlook.com.
If you have a family member, a friend or anybody else suffering from mental disorders, please don’t just ignore them. A lot of times we are seen as people with ‘personal weaknesses’ or ‘drowned in self-pity’ and our condition is not taken seriously. There are times when we cannot help ourselves and if we could, do you really think that we would stay depressed and miserable? Sometimes, a small gesture, a nice word or just being by our side, can mean the world. Spread some love and I’m sure it will come back to you multiplied.
For more inspiration, I urge you to watch Doctor Who: ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ (Season 5, Episode 10). It literally brought tears to my eyes.
I’m going to leave you with a tribute to Vincent, a song called ‘Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)’ by Don McLean.
“Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)”
Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent’s eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night
You took your life, as lovers often do
But I could’ve told you Vincent
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame-less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
Beautiful soul, Vincent, I know I’ll meet you one day somewhere across the Universe and we’ll paint the sky purple and yellow.
Here is one app that might interest cinema lovers in Baku – Kinotap. It gathers information from all the movie theaters around Baku, thus instead of checking separate apps like Park Cinema or 28 Cinema and comparing the viewing times, you can check this information in one app. One thing that is lacking in Kinotap is online purchase, so after you found out the time and movie theater it’s playing in, you then still have to go to separate app, if you’d like to buy tickets online.
Here’s a quick walk-through the app:
Here is the main view of the app with information on all movies going in the theaters right now.
When you select one of the movies, you will be able to view information on plot, actors and view the trailers (you will be automatically transferred to YouTube app if you have it on your phone).
Below the description, you will find out the next available showtimes and you can scroll to the right to see the next days’ timings too.
You can also filter the movies as you may wish.
The app also allows you to review the upcoming movies.
Cinemas screen shows all the movie theaters in Baku and their addresses.
And the Settings screen allows you to select from 3 languages.
I started walking / running exercise routine in October when the weather just started getting colder. On some days the weather was still so nice that I walked in a T-shirt. Then gradually the temperature decreased. Baku is a windy city and our winds can make it unbearable to be outside. Even when the temperature doesn’t drop below zero, it feels like -10. I needed to adjust to these conditions somehow, so I started walking in the Old City. Inner part of Baku is protected by thick walls that date back to 12th century and they hid me from the wind. I loved walking there and exploring it’s labyrinths and I loved that no walk was as the one before. Each time I was changed a route and I always came across something interesting and beautiful, like suddenly noticing a beautiful ornament on the wall or a door made to look like a giant backgammon set, or meeting an old lady that was so loving and kind that she invited me, a stranger, to her house for a tea.
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