[Media] How to Embed Videos

Guide to Embed Videos

Locate the video you would like to include and copy the embed code. For Youtube videos, this code is found within the "share" menu. For the video above, it looks like this:

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AqZA77eABRI" width="560"></iframe>

Youtube also has an option to share without having to type this code. First, click on the Share button which is right below the video. Then, when the box appears, click on the Embed button. A code box should appear to the right side. Select the code, copy and then paste it to whatever webpage you wish to embed the video.

What about non-Youtube sites?

[Story] Bug Priest

Originally written on July 7, 2015, this story was updated on July 24, 2019.

Bug Priest

Bob sat up in the hospital bed. He had just woken up yesterday and didn't plan to sleep his life away. His head still hurt like hell but at least he could feel the pain now. From what the doctor told him, he was in a coma for about a few days after the accident and couldn't feel anything.

Looking around the room, he saw that he was by himself. It looked like an ordinary boring hospital room. There was a pile of fresh flowers and some get-well cards on the table next to his bed. He was too tired to read any of them and frankly he didn't care to since most of them contained the same platitudes. It's funny how people who don’t care to talk to you for years suddenly feel an urge to check up on you when something bad happens to you.

Bob shook his head. Now's no time to get riled up, he thought. He tried to remember what caused him to be in this state but he still couldn't remember. All he remembered was taking a walk near his house late one night and the next thing he knew he was here. He was told that a neighbor of his found him collapsed unconscious by the side of the road. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital where he was in no better state until yesterday.

The police told him it probably wasn't a robbery. There wasn't anything taken from him. His wallet, phone, and money were all there. The hospital did a battery of tests on him but so far uncovered that he was just perfectly healthy. Apparently, he has just mysteriously collapsed and just as mysteriously woken up a day later.

[Story] Farmer Brown and the Cow

via GIPHY

Farmer Brown and the Cow

Farmer Brown woke up feeling mighty fine. It was a bright sunny day outside. The cows were mooing, chickens were crowing, and the birds were chirping. There isn't a day better than hearing nature's calls, he thought as he got up from his simple wooden bed. He didn't brush his teeth or comb his hair since milking the cows gotta be more important than personal hygiene.

The eggs and bacon on the table were still warm when he got to the small table. Guess his wife thought of him this morning before she left for town with her friends to do the kind of shopping that only females like. Might as well eat the food or else they be going back to the chicken and pigs as their feed, he thought. Farmer Brown chewed his food deliberately and slowly. It'll be nice to have a glass of milk but there ain't any milk around until he goes and milks the cows.

That's right. He gotta milk the cows. He gobbled up the rest of his food and walked the twenty steps or so to the outdoor pens where the cows were kept. They seemed awfully quiet today though they knew what was gonna happen. Farmer Brown thought it a bit strange but thought nothing more of it.

After he milked the cows, he fetched his shotgun. There were still a few cows left but those are the old fat ones that's eating up more grass than making milk. They gotta go and maybe their bodies can fetch at least a fair price for their meat. His gun was just itching to do the trick.

The sun was shining and the birds were chirping. The cows weren't going to go anywhere and neither would he. Farmer Brown decided he's just gonna sit down and appreciate the fine scenery for a bit to catch his breath. He found some shade under an oak tree near the biggest fat cow. He put his head down and breathed deep to regain his breathe. He looked up a minute later and saw the big cow. She was the first to go. Her name was Bessie and she used to be a prize milk cow. Now she's just a lazy old bum who doesn't make any milk but instead spends a lot of her time eating grass and fooling around with the younger cows doing things only cows would do.

[Space] Apollo 11 Video

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC. Armstrong became the first person to step onto the lunar surface six hours 39 minutes later on July 21 at 02:56:15 UTC; Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later. They spent about two and a quarter hours together outside the spacecraft, and collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material to bring back to Earth. Command module pilot Michael Collins flew the command module Columbia alone in lunar orbit while they were on the Moon's surface. Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 hours 31 minutes on the lunar surface at a site they named Tranquility Base before lifting off to rejoin Columbia in lunar orbit.

[Story] Romance at the Bagel Shop

First wrote this story back in ~2008 as a joke. This has never been posted before so whatever you see is the original drafted back when I was an undergraduate. Not intended as the rating of R but you decide.

Romance at the Bagel Shop

           

            It was like any other Saturday when Sharon walked into the bagel shop. She had the job for a few weeks now and work as always was quite boring. She got along well enough with her coworkers but she found them almost as dull as the taste of the bagel she ate every Saturday morning. There was little expectation from her that folding fermented edibles for most of the day would be exciting but at least she had thought that she could pass her time by chatting with some of her coworkers. She was wrong. Since she couldn’t strike a decent conversation with them, she stuck with her personality and made witty remarks. But this didn’t help either for every joke she made convinced them more that this girl was weird and should be avoided.

            Most of the day passed like the dreary norm. Customers came and went without a care for the boredom of the employees. Though she has been there only a few weeks, she had realized by the third time that the customers thought the workers at the bakery as dry as the food themselves. Sharon got more attention than most but they were mostly from pubescent teenagers or overweight college kids. A few times she saw scrawny nerdy college kids glancing at her. They were generally too shy to look at her directly. Once she had been stared at for a full ten minutes or so by a fat bald guy that must have been the age of her father sitting by the window slowly chewing his sandwich. That was the most attention she had ever gotten at the bagel shop and it was also the creepiest thing that she had ever experienced in her life. Luckily for her, he was not a regular.

She was only too glad that the day was over. Since the manager was out today, she had to close shop. Suddenly, there was the clinging of bells as she heard the door open.

            “We’re closed for business,” said Sharon without looking up as she wiped the last table.

            “Can’t you take one last customer?” she heard a pleasant sound drift over to her. It sounded like chimes tinkling from an ocean breeze in midsummer. It was melodious and contained a certain feminine quality. Yet, it was definitely not feminine.

[Space] Interview with Adriano Autino (Space Renaissance International)

[Poetry] Addiction

This viscous, self-perpetuating cycle of prescribed self-abuse,

bleeding from perpetual defeat, I hardly stood a chance to reclaim myself,

when tossed about in the spiraled tempest casting fragmented delightful illusions.

Now, my mind overwhelmed while my shaking hands still unskilled,

I find myself grasping unfamiliar tools – those that can be my anchor.

Hard to dispel these cravings, wandering off within a maze of my own making.

This gloomy fog of darkened thoughts suffocates in the mist of stark isolation,

And other triggers quick to draw me back into depression and addiction.

Resolve and the toolmaker, come guide me and lead me away from this unholy affliction!

[IT] Display Chinese in Command Prompt

Recently, I wanted to read some Chinese document in the Command Prompt. Unfortunately, I could not display Chinese characters by default. I learned a handy technique to do it:

chcp 936

In the Windows shell, the "code page" determines how bytes are converted to characters on the screen. Using the CHCP command changes the shell's code page. Please note that before the CHCP command can be used, the nlsfunc must be loaded and country.sys must be loaded into the config.sys.

Automation
To remove the need to do this every time, you can create a simple batch file to change the code to whatever you wish. Here, it's changed to 65001 which is Unicode. This will not be able to display East Asian characters but you will be able to type other characters.

@ECHO OFF
REM change CHCP to UTF-8
CHCP 65001
CLS

You can save this in the folder C:\Windows\System32 as a bat file such as switch.bat.

Then, create a shortcut to cmd.exe on Desktop and change the shortcut's properties to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /k switch

Now whenever you need to type in a different script, you can use this shorcut.