MPJ

I am not absolutely sure that 'Retro Games' is correct title here, after all in the realm of video games, what is today ultra modern and state of the art within current level of GPU and gaming consoles, literally tomorrow we can start considering retro. On the other side, imagination of people in gaming industry is never old and some games from the past, despite obsolete graphics will always be on the top shelf of mine. Not to mention that familiar nostalgia moments when I stumble to some vintage and familiar screen, that always remind me of some happy moments from the past. To cut the story short, one of those vintage moments triggered the idea for Viktor's and mine new blog-vlog collab to explore couple of old games for his channel and this small cover story. We made an easy deal and divided tasks for me to choose the games and for him to play them in front of the camera. It was interesting enough to see how 12 years old reacts to the old graphics and different nature...

The micro:bit is an open source hardware ( ARM -based embedded system) designed by the BBC for use in computer education of software developing and hardware learning for kids and adults of all ages. The concept was so perfect that it quickly outgrew UK and to date over two million BBC micro:bits distributed globally in over 50 countries. Not to mention that within previous year it was proud addition to my and Viktor's shelf of educational toys and of course cause and effect for several of our YouTube contributions and several more in production. In the latest video we used micro:bit powered by Elecfreaks' IoT kit with IoT:bit wifi board and assembled a weather station to measure temperature, pressure, humidity and pollution with BME280 and dust particles sensors. Micro:bit was successfully acquiring the weather data every 60 seconds and sent all of them from our test to ThingSpeak website for analysis and chart presentation. YouTube video link: Internet of Things with Mic...

It was different when I was 5th grader in many ways. Learning how to code was not in the realm of elementary schools back then. Computers were simply too large and expensive for kids to play with and having a good teacher who knew programming languages was rarity. So I was in a bit of a blur when I pressed "P" key on, my first, just unboxed, brand new and state of the art, Sinclair ZX Spectrum  keyboard with amazing 16KB of RAM memory. It reacted immediately and at the bottom of the large home TV, it said "PRINT" followed with blinking black square cursor. "2+2" I added and hit "ENTER". It was like magic seeing "4" printed on the screen next instant. The magic of course was not in the correct number. It was rather in the unworldly feeling I got that exact moment of what would come next. What I could command it to do. It was like I found the door of the amazing new world and the door started to open wide! Soon later I learned more, esp...

I read about a man once, and I honestly couldn't remember who he was, but in the nutshell he returned from the tourist trip with tons of photos and when his friends asked him why he didn't upload them online yet, he said that he needed to enrich them with words first, otherwise they would be just a pile of nice colored moments taken in time and saying very little or nothing at all about the trip and all the sites he visited. The same is with me and the same truth goes with videos as well. Let me be honest about watching other people videos online and browsing private photos uploaded to social media - I am simply not impressed with many of them, because they lack the story. With me, there is no point of uploading a nicely taken photo of you and your friends in front of some historic place or monument and explain nothing about where were you, why were you taking that photo or without saying little something about the place itself. With videos it goes even further - filming a Yo...

Languages always change when we change. Evolutionary speaking and over long period of time. Especially when we mix with others or change environment and move to different places. English is perfect example - perhaps it is the only language spoken with that many variations created from country to country, all over the world, from New Zealand throughout India toward Canada and even in those places on Earth where it is not language number one. Believe it or not, there are thousands of spoken languages throughout our planet today and with people migration over eons, mixing multiple languages into new ones are well recorded in our history. New languages created in that fashion are well known as creoles, most of them connected to the recent colonialism when two cultures or more collided for a longer period in time. Perhaps the most known of them all (and spoken by most of their population) are Haitian, Jamaican and Hawaiian creoles - mixture of French (Haiti) and English (Jamaica and Hawai...

"Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around, facing her back into the house. - Let's go have dinner. Vincent said he made us that Serbian cevapcici." - Eureka, TV Show. Finally and after almost five years from my first glimpse into the most famous Serbian dish, our cooking thread matured enough to step into the adventure of making the royalty. The well known, the most popular and the most amazing of all BBQs in these parts of the world. And by that I mean many of Balkan countries, If you are resident here you probably know what I am talking about. If not and you are just a traveler visiting Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and/or other neighboring countries and stumble to some restaurant with a grill and hesitated what to order just say "ćevapćići' (pronounced 'chevapchichi') and you will experience one of a kind and one extraordinary dish. The quote from the beginning was from the Sci-Fi TV Shows "Eureka" that aired 2006-2012 a...

People are asking me these days what is "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself into entire story of our pioneer film making project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play - it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series' so in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into real short movie and after little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious. In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor a...

YouTube is really one great service. Probably one of the best online tools there is. But it is not without issues and glitches. Recently, after our vacation I uploaded a video I took on the Lichadonisia beach with our guide and our Greek hosts teaching our (mostly female) group to dance with syrtaki (Greek: συρτάκι) music and even though the music clearly came from the beach-bar loudspeakers, YouTube 'found' that I was using protected and copyrighted content and the video clip was blocked in one country and you will never guess which - Germany. I am still laughing and endlessly trying to find logic behind this silly automation. Nevertheless and ever since then I am not embedding music background by myself anymore and rather using YouTube's selection instead. With today's video I played with two combination and got extraordinary result. First video is accelerated and embedded with horror-typed tune. For the other I used the most cheerful music I could find and with sa...

Cooking can be hard. Sometimes it's more than art and pure joy but if you add all the effort and 'sweat' into it, the very result never disappoints. It was just like that in our today's kitchen play. Making tacos only looks easy and cheerful, but if you are doing it for the first time.. Well I will just say there was three hours of preparing, shopping, cooking and filming that was all intense and on the edge of disaster, but we managed to go all the way through it, and at the end, our Saturday's lunch included these six 'extremely' edible tacos that vanished into tin air in a fraction of just couple of minutes. Making tacos includes several parallel tasks and one of them was watching the tortillas in the oven during their seven minutes burn and they should be monitored closely to avoid over-burning. The color of our lunch today might went little more brownish I was hoping for, but trust me, they were extra crunchy and delicious nevertheless. Frying b...

Well, I am still not hundred percent convinced that this weblog matured enough for it's own cooking thread, but anyway, here we are again, after couple of months from original ' Little Chef ' post, we now have two more videos in our channel - our ways of making Sushi and Pizza. It all started couple of days ago, with me passing by one of those 'healthy food' stores in the neighborhood where I usually buy Serbian, sort of, non-carbonated ginger ale juice that is very popular in this part of the world - especially mixed with lemonade and ice cream. Anyhow, I stepped in to buy a bottle and noticed a pack of nori sheets on the shelf. I didn't think twice, so I bought one and today we made sushi for the first time in our culinary history. This is how it looks. Well, looked. It is always fun when you start preparing a dish for the first time. To be honest, in the past, on many occasions, our first endeavors ended in complete failure. However, today, sushi surp...

I am not sure that this weblog matured enough for it's own cooking thread, but one thing is for sure - spending time in kitchen from time to time and making delicious meals is one of those creative activities that can make your day. Truly. When it is successful, that is. Couple of months ago, Viktor wanted to start filming our kitchen games and to be honest some of them weren't too bad. Actually, what we did on several occasions could be regarded as pretty delicious and worth repeating, especially for those we made for the first time. Anyway, I am really hopeful that we will continue with this thread and maybe in the future if we pile up videos it could be one more chapter on the blog. For the record, I will be the director of the short video clips and Viktor will be dish chooser and main presenter. That means I will be behind the camera while he will be in front. I will also do hard work when camera is off simply because long cooking video clips are not what we really ...

In the past couple of years, every now and again I was uploading video clips to the YouTube that I made either for the blog intentionally or for some other "publishing" reasons and I've just realized that they piled up to the number big enough I can safely pronounce almost two dozens of them today to their public status and officially publish them. It's not really that big "contribution" to the video community but still here they are. Hopefully some of you would find them inspirational and interesting. If you do, following is the home page of the official channel where you can subscribe for the future or contribute with new YouTube community social features. Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel Similar to the blog's threads and for better classification of all videos within the channel I created several playlists and filled them with videos of mutual theme or place or event. One of latest video files, the short movie Viktor and I made this su...

Original post date: May 2013, Update: September 2017 "When I think about everything we've been through together, maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey." This one-liner belongs to Harry Kim, a character from the Star Trek Voyager show - probably the episode when they all realized the ultimate truth about how far Earth is from their location and that even the lifetime might be too short to reach it back. It was one great show I swallowed in just couple of weeks back then in the beginning of 21st century. I remember I was watching up to 6 episodes every night and now looking to it from today's perspective perhaps the most memorable line I still remember is this one about famous journey-destination quote. So, what is your ultimate answer? Is it Journey or Destination? For me there is no doubt, it is always the journey. Even for travels as small as 50km we do to escape city on weekends and go to the mountain village I mention...