Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.
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Short article over at Science and Religion Today (What Spiritual App Is There a Market for? Paul Lamb Answers) on the use of mobile applications maintain and strengthen spiritual communities.
Echoes of past thoughts from both Steve Taylor (sustain:if:able kiwi » mobile theology) and Pete Ward ("Liquid Church").
I’m not a big Marvel comics fan, though I’ll read them if they’re around (and I quite like Spider-Man), but I do like DC and Vertigo. So reasons to acquire an iPad just increased. See Newsarama.com : DC Does DIGITAL: iPhone, iPad App Premieres on iTunes
And, even with exchange rates, the comics will cost about a third to a half less than their paper equivalents, and as publishers put their back catalogues online we should be able to access issues etc. that never made it to NZ. Not the same as having the paper version, but it’d help some of my research and teaching (really!)
I can’t see myself getting my hands on an iPad in the near future, but I’m interested in what people might use them for in education. Derek has some links through to some thoughts on that over at Derek’s Blog » iPads in Education, including this article (with videos) on how it might be the youngest generation who click with it fastest (see Handheld Learning - Game Changer: Is it iPad?)
Wired Magazine recently published an article with a range of opinions on tablet computing: 13 of the Brightest Tech Minds Sound Off on the Rise of the Tablet | Wired Magazine. I haven’t played around enough with tablet computers and appliances to come to any conclusions about them yet, so I found this interesting.
Also, related to this is Derek’s post Trying out an iPad which refers to the iPAD Learning LAB by The MASIE Center. I think the comments about things like the iPad in relation to trying to see how it fits into a particular context (or redefines that context) are much more helpful that all the ‘gee whiz’ posts about how ‘lickable’ it is.
One of the things we spent a little bit of time in ethics class last year was how the wired/digital world might intersect with ethics, and in particular digital downloads. So I was interested to see this brief comment in the ethics section of the New York Times, where the author argued that some digital downloads while illegal might be ethical. See The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - Question - NYTimes.com. (Will file this away for a class exercise next year)
Quite possibly the most useful little application I’ve come across in a while - Jomic - a viewer for comic book archives
I was talking to someone today about their experiences about buying DRM audio books, and how in the end they gave up. Between grief with paying and downloading, installing a separate piece of extra software to play the books, and then finding on the bus that the software then wanted to authenticate via the net before things would play (and that wasn’t an option), he’d basically lost any faith that it was worth it. Too hard and too painful.
The cartoons in this post sum that experience up quite well. See TidBITS Tech News: A Pair of Cartoons Reveals DRM Frustrations.
I often get annoyed by the various ‘powers that be’ spouting on about faster broadband and how it will improve life and business for all in NZ because I don’t think speed is the issue - it’s data caps. Until broadband in general in NZ stops being charged by the bit (or subsidising that through something like a pay TV subscription) then digitally downloadable movies, music, TV programmes and large software updates in bulk just isn’t a reality for most people.
Nice to see an outsider’s perspective on this, from someone who’s recently moved to NZ. See TidBITS Networking: Paying by the Bit: Internet Access in New Zealand. And interesting to read the comments from folks who live in the US but outside of larger cities.
So it seems that the situation posited in William Gibson’s book "Idoru" back in 1997 comes to pass in some form in 2009. See Man marries virtual girlfriend | Stuff.co.nz.
And this is interesting too - Church fined for blocking cellphones | Stuff.co.nz.
Every now and then I ponder what happens to people’s different online presences when they die, but I hadn’t realized Facebook has a memorialization function for their accounts. See Social networking for the dead | Alan Wilson | guardian.co.uk.
I don’t know if something like this (In-App Sales and iTablet: The Killer Combo to Save Publishing? | Gadget Lab | Wired.com) would work, but I really like something like that to buy and read comics and graphic novels on. If the screen was the same size as a printed comic book page and in colour then I’d be first in line to buy one. (Plus I wouldn’t have to worry about the plastic bags etc. for keeping the comics in).
A week or two back I was talking with a colleague about the difference between between Facebook and blogs, and in particular how my use of those media intersects with different communities. My Facebook posts are restricted to a group of people I’ve selected, whereas my blog posts are more public. I select who’s in my Facebook community (and they get the blog posts too), but I’ve made more friends and contacts from the blog. I think in the conversation I used the term ‘gated community‘ to describe how I saw Facebook.
I mentioned the idea in passing, but this posting picks it up and deals with it in much more detail. Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part Two)
I began reading some of the research on the rise of gated communities in America and found some interesting parallels in the language used by residents living in physical world gated communities and young white collegians who preferred Facebook (a kind of virtual gated community) over MySpace. They both use words like “safe,” “clean,” “private,” and “neat” to describe attachment to their communities. They both practice what cultural anthropologists call “gating,” that is, the tendency to build physical/virtual, social, and cultural walls that are exclusive.
One of the things I see communities like churches doing is creating more Facebook-type communities. Perhaps they like the “safe,” “clean,” “private,” and “neat” aspects of that, of the control over who can participate. Wondering if a modern day parable about the Kingdom of God might be better seen as a blog or MySpace page.
This looks interesting digital nation - life on the virtual frontier | PBS
Digital Nation is a new, open source PBS project that explores what it means to be human in an entirely new world — a digital world. It consists of this Web site as well as a major FRONTLINE documentary to be broadcast in winter 2010. Our production team is posting rough cuts and raw footage on the web, and gathering input, feedback and stories from users as we go.
Related links:
Nice little article on the development of Mac laptops over the past 20 years. See From Mac Portable to MacBook Pro: 20 years of Apple laptops - Ars Technica.
In order of the ones I’ve owned/used…
Macintosh Portable (back in 91-93 for work) - very heavy, but the trackball worked well.
Powerbook 520c - bought one in 1995 (esp. with the ethernet) back when trackpads were new. Worked well, but sold it to get PowerMac 6100.
Powerbook 150 - best machine I’ve every had for plain writing. A keyboard you can hit, no bells and whistles. Great with Word 5.
12″ G3 iBook (White, twin USB) - got me through the PhD, but ran out of steam towards the end. Still working as a ‘netbook’ at home.
15″ MacBook Pro - day to day machine. Works well, though it’s a bit heavy to carry everyday.
In the manner of many examination and essay questions…
Compare and contrast the perspectives of each of these people:
Have fun 
Henry Jenkins’ blog has had a number of interesting recent postings related to transmedia storytelling, computer games and various other things:
A bunch of recent links to things related to faith in the digital world.
Digital Faith
Exploring the contours of faith in our digital world
How do the Christian faith and the Internet impact upon each other? What place might the Bible have in our digital world?
Come and join us as our panel of expert speakers engage with these topics and others relating to issues of faith in the digital world.
Speakers
Mark Brown (Blog)
CEO, Bible Society New Zealand
Founder Anglican Cathedral in Second Life.
Stephen Garner (blog)
Lecturer in Theology and Popular Culture,
School of Theology, University of Auckland.
Heidi Campbell (blog)
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication, Texas A&M University
Author of Exploring Religious Community Online.
Tim Bulkeley (blog)
Lecturer in Old Testament, Carey Baptist College
Developer of the Amos Hypertext Commentary & podBible projects.
Saturday 5 September 2009, 9am-12pm
OGGB4 Lecture Theatre, Level 0, Owen G Glenn Building, 12 Grafton Road, The University of Auckland
(Map of city campus (PDF))
Please REGISTER your attendance by Wednesday 2 September with theologyadmin@auckland.ac.nz
Cost $5 (morning tea provided)
Parking under Owen G Glenn building, $5 flat rate
You can download the flyer here:
Cute article on resurrecting old personal computers for modern tasks - love the Apple II and C-64 web server idea. See Reboot for the retro PC relics | Stuff.co.nz.
Encarta, of which we use CD/DVD and internet versions, is disappearing. Somehow I figured it would last a bit longer. And I preferred my kids starting their homework assignments with it (at least as a first survey point) rather than just Googling-away for stuff. Anyway, the links are here: Encarta’s demise speaks volumes - at ZDNet.co.uk and Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be Discontinued - MSN Encarta
Some recent links from around the net relating to religion online / online religion:
As someone who loves maps this looks cool. The ability to slide through time for different cities by making different layers appear. See HyperCities. (And there’s a write up on it over at Historical Map Mashups Turn Cities Into Glass Onions of Time - Webmonkey)
One of the things I’ve done over the past few years is talk in seminars etc. about how faith and technology might relate - focusing on how technology is as much our environment as ‘things’ we make and use. The conversation often takes the turn that talks about how one might use something like a cellphone to build community or if they have become ‘idols’. There is little or no discussion about whether possessing one might have implicated yourself in an injustice and make the world a somewhat worse place. Is there the blood of others on my cellphone?
This article picks up on some of that concern (and a topic that one person did actually raise at one talk, which surprised me). See The blood diamonds of gadgets - technology | Stuff.co.nz.
Sentient Developments: Moving objects with your mind has a video clip of one of the new range of toys that use a wearable interface that ‘reads’ your brain’s activity to control physical objects.
A guest post over at “Per Crucem ad Lucem” by Bruce Hamill raises some good points about all the noise about Susan Boyle and what that says about our own judgmentalism. See Susan Boyle: Judged by Beauty
I love maps. It’s as simple as that. So I’m enjoying looking at the material Worldmapper has available.
Having my laptop go AWOL is something I’m always worried about. There are some useful thoughts (albeit from a Mac perspective) about minimising the damage of this over at TidBITS Safe Computing: What I Learned from Having My Laptop Stolen.
I love the idea of netbooks, though I’m not ready to get one myself. I don’t think the infrastructure is quite here yet to support them as an everywhere tool (e.g. the cost of data via wireless or 3G), but one would be very useful to throw in my backpack to work in things or do presentations without having the weight of the laptop.
See The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time
C4LPT Learning Network has a useful looking section
A Guide to Social Learning provides a practical guide to getting engaged with social media, and understanding their use for formal and informal learning.
Hat tip to Mary.
Dylan Horrocks posts on why he, as an artist, opposes Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act that comes into affect in February. See Dylan’s Blog: Why I oppose s92 of the Copyright Amendment Act.
See also: Creative Freedom Foundation
See! A ‘holy’ reason to get an iPhone.
High-tech prayer book - Religion and beliefs - NZ Herald News
A couple of interesting video links from Mary over at Tensegrities that have been sitting in my snippets folder for that last little bit.
Related to the second link is the recent report - Parental Engagement in Children’s Learning with Technology | Intuitive Media and EDtalks.org Nicola Yelland - New technologies and young children.
It’s been a month or so since I posted about my experiences with the Parallels and VMWare Fusion demos. Since then I’ve installed Vista on a Bootcamp partition and that seems to run nicely (though logging in takes for ever) and had a chance to use the demos to access Vista off the Bootcamp partition (though it seems to be either Bootcamp + Parallels or Bootcamp + VMWare not Bootcamp + Parallels + VMWare (obviously not running the virtual machine systems at the same time).
Both Fusion and Parallels worked nicely with the Bootcamp partition and installed their helper applications for sharing data etc. just fine. I tested out the Direct X support - useful for games and for other software that uses that graphics support - and found Parallels 3 was not good, and VMWare stuttered sometimes. The upgrade to Parallels 4 demo produced some nicer Direct X behaviour though.
At the end of the day either system - Parallels or VMWare - would do the job for me (like running Camtasia to make training videos showing how to access eLearning resources under Window). Parallels seemed to have the more integrated interface with MacOSX but did seem to suck resources out of the computer. VMWare seemed a little less integrated but felt (subjectively) less resource hungry and more snappy at installing operating systems etc. If push came to shove I’d probably go the VMWare route for my needs. (However I’ll need to run that past the people who control my budget). Bootcamp works, but there’s been a few times recently where I’d want to have Entourage and NetNewsWire running while doing Windows stuff too.
The digital divide and how it impacts upon ministry contexts is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, so I was interested to see this article this week, which highlights some new dimensions to the problem as digital systems develop.
In The New Digital Divide, Sojourners Magazine/January 2009, Andrew Sears notes that:
You can see a similar segregation reflected in profiles of Christians on online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace; most people will have friends with backgrounds similar to their own. If everyone links to people they know, the result is that a disproportionate number of resourced individuals and ministries will link to each other, while ministries serving under-resourced communities are stuck in a virtual ghetto. The rich link to the rich, while the poor link to the poor.
I hate trying to think up passwords and domain names. Guaranteed to make me go blank. So any suggestions for a domain name for a website that refers to science, religion, technology and media would be appreciated.
A couple of useful links that passed across my screen this week.
The first notes several sources of (free) software for plaining Windows media files of various types. It doesn’t link through to VLC, but the links there are useful too. See Play Windows media files on your Mac | Playlist | Macworld
The second is a piece of software that prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Useful for quickly changing settings for presentation mode. See Lighthead - Caffeine.
Apparently this will analyze your blog and assign it a Myers-Briggs personality indication. See Typealyzer.
Derek’s Blog » Ben’s Game points to this interesting project initiated by Ben (a boy with leukemia) to create a computer game to explain/education about cancer treatments. See Ben’s Game - Instructions - Make-A-Wish.
I’m pretty picky about my computer keyboards (and have been since using ‘dumb’ terminals way, way back). So I’m always interested in links to new ones.
So far my preferred keyboard for both Mac and PC has been the Microsoft Internet Pro keyboard (with the built in USB hub). However, it got stepped on the other month (don’t ask) and will need replacing at some point soon. They don’t make it any more so it’s time to look around.
So I’ve been trying our different options for virtual machines on the MacBook Pro with varying degrees of success. So far I’ve played around with the Parallels 3 demo, the VMWare Fusion demo, Crossover and VirtualBox.
Given I don’t have a spare Windows XP or Vista licence lying around at the moment (something I’ll fix in the next few days) I’ve been playing around with Windows 98 and Ubuntu distributions to see how easy it is install and run the different virtual machines.
Firstly, Crossover which effectively attempts to run Windows applications (using a WINE base) without you having to install a Window OS in a virtual machine. A nice idea but it didn’t really do the job with the apps I tried. Plus I want to record what the Windows setup looks like with something like Camtasia and having the familiar Windows Desktop helps there.
Secondly, Parallels. Easy install and worked well mostly. With Windows 98 it wouldn’t find the CD drive properly (disk image or real CD) which meant it couldn’t install the extras nor additional drivers it needed to run smoothly (like for sound and networking). Ubuntu installed too, but again the extras wouldn’t install either, though it ran just fine without them for testing purposes. Perhaps XP and Vista would work better, but it’s had a couple of strikes against it. YMMV.
Thirdly, VMWare Fusion. Again easy to install and the install of the OSs seemed to work well. It did a better job on Win98 (which is useful because I need to test course CD-ROMs etc. on old browsers and OSs. A lot of our students seem to have second-hand/hand-me-down hardware) but I couldn’t for the life of me get the soundcard to work. The appropriate drivers just gave a blue screen of death on install, though the CDROM worked. Latest Ubuntu (8.10) installed like a charm, with the extras. So, if this one plays well with XP/Vista it could be the one to pick.
Lastly, VirtualBox. Installed Win98 fine but only in basic mode - no sound etc and lo-res graphics. Ubuntu fared better and installed smoothly. If all I wanted to do was run the latter for testing then maybe that would be the way to go.
Next step is to set up a Bootcamp partition with Vista and then see how the virtual machines like Fusion play with that. In a less than perfect world I’d go with that by default, but I’d like to be testing and documenting the Windows and Linux experiences for students at the same time as the Mac experience. So far Fusion looks like it might do the job best, but we’ll wait and see.
Darren posts a thoughtful piece on social networking over at Social Networking and Safety | Youth Ministry Blog
Both VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop are a similar price but which to choose? I know VMWare has the edge (perhaps) for performance, but Parallels is (perhaps) better for integration.
Any ideas?
Automatic content generator for your blog. Ugh!
I wonder what happens if you feed in a journal article and whether something like Turnitin would work on it?
See: Datapresser.com
This looks good. NZ On Screen is a new web site that provides access to television, film, music video and new media produced in NZ, along with knowledgeable background information.
Has anyone had a play with the new Mac OS X friendly OpenOffice 3? I’m going to pull it down the wire but would be interested to know what other experiences people have had.
You don’t really need advanced scientific research for this - there’s enough anecdotal evidence around the place that walking, running and driving while txting may not be a good idea - but it’s nice to know it does do weird things to your brain.
Someone has way too much time on their hands.
Anyway, this is pretty much what I want. Smaller and more robust than a MacBook, but bigger and more capable than an iPhone, but still running Mac OS X. Desktop at work for most of the grunty work and then throw something like this in the backpack for word processing, web and email.
Cool.
Full article at Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC - Wired How-To Wiki including a video of it working.
Tag Galaxy - wow!
A couple of related recent web links about online publishing.
The first, Open Source Textbooks Challenge a Paradigm | Epicenter from Wired.com looks at some recent initiatives relating to creating accessible (from a cost point of view) text books.
Similarly, Tensegrities » Blog Archive » Digital media and civic learning, notes that MIT have released some more books in an online, open access forum - relating particularly to digital media and learning.
Also, Mary (also via a Tensegrities post) notes the availability of a guide to using multimedia tools with youth available over at Participation Works How To Guide on Multimedia Participation | Tim’s Blog.
I’ve been interested in the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State University for a while now. Coordinated by Michael Wesch, their videos The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today have done the rounds on the internet in the past year or so. But there’s more coming out of the project. Wesch’s presentation on an anthropological introduction to YouTube is interesting (but definitely longer than your typical 3 minute YouTube clip). Also the mediated cultures web site has the videos often in high resolution formats making reading some of the text in them much easier.
See:
Sigh. The internet connection at home has gone belly-up and ISP is struggling to identify problem. So far it’s been 5 days with no connection. I’m sure it’s good for my soul, though.
Our television isn’t too old, only four years old perhaps, but it’s causing a bit of grief for us. Firstly, the tuner seems to have lost the plot with remembering channels and secondly it isn’t widescreen. The first problem can be gotten around with judicious use of the VCR and Sky digital box tuners (though we lose the option of watching a different channel if videoing off Sky), but the second problem was more of an issue because Sky started broadcasting the rugby only in widescreen, which meant that for most of the games recently we haven’t been able to see the on-screen score. (It appears too to be a problem for lots of people, including some of the radio commentators).
Anyway, the quick answer is to fiddle around in the Sky settop box’s advanced settings and set the TV mode to “4:3 Letterbox”. Widescreen shows will get “letterboxed” (i.e. the black bars on top and bottom, smaller picture, but all viewable), while older 4:3 shows will still fill the screen. Not ideal, but until we replace the TV (not in the near future) it’s a workaround.
Will try it for the All Blacks tonight.
More details at: SkyTV Widescreen tips.
With all the hype over direct neural interfaces this hi-tech (but also lo-tech) approach looks interesting. See ‘Tongue Drive System’ Controls Wheelchair, Computer | Wired Science from Wired.com.
I (foolishly) assumed the home Acer PC was using NTFS for the file system on its hard disk, but have now found after working on some large files that it is FAT32 and I can’t have files larger than 4GB! How bizarre - way, way back before I started theological training etc. we were using NTFS by default on our old Pentium (I) NT 4 boxes at work. Surely if XP works better with NTFS why was this not the default. Apart from being able to boot from floppy to access the hard disk their should be no advantage?
So, I’m looking at converting the drive over to NTFS - as per the Microsoft instructions here.
I have a big batch of blank DVDs for backup, plus the iPod also for backups. So I will get things back if they turn to custard, but I was wondering if anyone had any experiences of the conversion process first-hand? There’s always something to watch out for.
BTW - on the iBook I’m running the journalling file system which I turned on at install. That seems really good, compared to the old file system that 10.1 & 10.2 had.
After a flurry of technology posts it seems appropriate to point to this interesting one by Kevin Kelly about people who are or have been heavily involved with technology and are now attempting to reduce it’s invasiveness in their lives. See Kevin Kelly — The Technium — Neo-Amish Drop Outs.
While I won’t be owning an iPhone in the near future I was interested to stumble across this Flickr app for it created by my ‘cousin-in-law’ : Mobile Flickr, coming to an iPhone near you — Sneak.
Videos of it working over at Mobile Flickr | Apple iPhone School
Being an old UNIX programmer I love the idea of assembling your own set of small, powerful applications doing one task well rather than monolithic applications that try to do too much and fail at doing everything well. I don’t use Flickr but I like the look of this small app.
Via Hacking Christianity - The Social Principles Word-Cloud I’ve found Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds.
Here’s a word cloud for the presentation/paper I did this week.
(Click on it to get slightly bigger picture)
When the combination of WYSIWYG graphical user interfaces, scalable fonts, laser printers and desktop publishing software started to make its presence felt at the end of the 1980s it was a time of serious typeface abuse in newsletters, invitations and home-made greetings cards. It seems everyone wanted to go and put as many jarring and clashing typefaces on a page as they could. Some of my friends even when to far as to use things like Fontographer to create their own typeface variants, but then they tended to be over-zealous about things like that (and actually read up on things like kerning etc.) (Of course, all that came in useful when we had a couple of assignments in computer graphics class writing Postscript by hand to generate graphic objects and in order to understand how a Postscript laser printer or Sun’s NeWS GUI worked.)
(Equivalent things to this typeface abuse still happens today in Powerpoint presentations you encounter every now and then, along with the evil that is the in web pages.)
Anyway, the other day I saw this news article, F is for do-it-yourself fonts - Stuff.co.nz, which pointed over to FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts. This is a web site that allows you to design your own typefaces and share them with the world. Suddenly it’s 1986 all over again.
Related link: At some point I want to see the film, Helvetica, as I’m always intrigued by the effort and history that lurks in the stories about things like typefaces.
The fusion of technology from Weta Digital’s work on animation technologies using human subjects finds an application in helping doctors understand children’s motion with a view to corrective surgery and other therapy. See Wellywood technology helps children to walk - NZ Herald: Technology News
An interesting article over at Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Designing Accessible Games. You see articles about making things like web sites usable or accessible, but not so much about making computer/video games accessible for people.
Something I didn’t know when making MP3 disks in iTunes - Macworld | Playlist | Creating navigable MP3 discs.
Ages ago (way back in 1990-91, I think) one of my flatmates had the game OIDS on his computer. It ran just fine on a Mac Plus and on the new Mac LC’s that had just come out. Good memories of the flat all taking turns to see who could get the highest score.
Any now I find that there’s a version for Mac OS X available from Xavagus Prime Software. I downloaded it and all the game playing memories came back. Unfortunately, the old game playing reflexes haven’t come back with the memories - can’t seem to fly anywhere near as well as I once did.
Related link: Oids - MobyGames
The iBook power adaptor died. After years of faithful service the cable that wrapped around the yo-yo adaptor broke, and I’ve spent a reasonable bit of time trying to find an old style iBook adaptor to plug in. However, I found one this morning and we’re up and charging. Luckily, backups had been made so no worries there mostly. I can’t belief how expensive both Apple and third-party adaptors are, though.
The G3 lives on - and is still fine for word processing, music and podcasts, email, blogging, DVDs, presentations and basic web browsing. Not so good for video play back (Flash or MP4) though - and web pages with lots of Flash items etc. tend to drag.
The screen may die in a little bit though, so it may become limited to a desk with a monitor and keyboard for chidren’s homework in the near future 
Various learning management systems (LMS) like Moodle allow you to create online activities like quizzes and polls as part of the course content and engagement. But what do you do if you need something like that but you don’t have access to an LMS that does it or you need to put that content in an environment outside of the LMS.
I’ve been playing around with Hot Potatoes which gives you some of this functionality. It feels a bit clunky in places, but it will certainly get the job done if you want basic multi-choice quizzes, crosswords and matching exercises.
If course if you want to create a quiz that logs the results against the student (say for assessment purposes) then you’ll need to step up to something more like an LMS.
Useful Problogger article on different ways of getting a design for your blog - from the free through to the expensive. See Problogger: How Do I Get a Professionally Designed Blog?
Turning MS Word files into web pages can be a really painful experience - particularly if you have to go through them by hand looking to change or modify them. I’ve had some days when I’ve given up trying to get Word content into a nice web format and just gone and recoded the content from scratch. However, I might give some of these tools a trying in future - Convert Word Docs to Web Pages - Wired How-To Wiki.
Commenting on a couple of talks he did with groups of librarians, Henry Jenkins notes:
Across both conversations, it was clear that librarians are on the front lines, dealing with those who have been left behind by the participation gap, struggling to deal with those opposed to or frightened by the participatory turn in our culture, helping anxious academics understand the value and limits of wikipedia, and so forth.
It’s something I think is really important to remember. Our librarians (public, private, academic etc.) are often charged to both stay on top of and implement ‘cutting edge’ information technology, while at the same time having to make the library’s resources available to as many people as possible - and especially those for whom access to information and library resources are not technologically or informationally skilled. Raising the technological bar in the library makes new resources available, but also excludes those who don’t know how to or can’t access these new resources for a variety of reasons.
More on Jenkin’s comments at Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Librarians, YouTube, and the New Media Literacies.
Received The Mediated Spirit multimedia CD-ROM by Peter Horsfield in the mail the other day and I’m looking forward to having a moment in the next week or so to have a good look at it. Initial surveys look promising.
Here’s the blurb about “The Mediated Spirit” off the web site:
One of the first major studies to provide in digital format a systematic exploration of the important role played by media in the historical development and present ferment of Christianity. It places the changes brought by digital media in historical context, illustrating how Christianity has always been a mediated spirit, its different forms inextricably linked to the nature of its cultural mediation.With more than 1,000 links and 300 pages providing the chance to follow a topic or follow your own interests, the CDRom is an essential resource for researchers, educators, planners or those just interested in understanding how media have influenced the past and are shaping the present.
To add to my mostly Mac OS X based list of writing tools -
Bean: An OS X Word Processor.
(Oh, and I think I left NeoOffice (based on OpenOffice) off the original list too.)
Adobe make a version of Photoshop - Photoshop Express - available as a free web-based application adding yet another application type to the burgeoning area of free web apps offered to allow companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe carve out their own corner of the internet - and hence a source of consumers to manage and advertise to.
After being initially released (see Adobe’s Photoshop Express and the big picture | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com), the terms of use has quickly been updated in the face of criticism from potential users - Report: Complaints trigger rewrite of Photoshop Express terms | Tech news blog - CNET News.com.
Ernesto comments on using it over at Ernesto Burden | Photoshop Express — Sweet, Free Photo Editing Tool With Social Media Extensions.
I’ll be interested in checking it out - I don’t know how many times I’ve been away from home or the office and needed to edit an image and had an internet connection but no image editing application in the computer I’m using.
Love to share is a downloadable resource from the World Council of Churches that aims to give some direction and guidelines for churches when considering intellectual property rights and copyright and looking at alternatives to the current situation. At some point I’d like to have some students theologically investigate these ideas so I’ll be downloading it to see what it says. [Hat tip to Tensegrities]
On a related note I’ve also been reading the WCC booklet - Globalization of Communications - by Chris Arthur. It’s about 10 years old now, but there’s some interesting starting points for further discussion in it.
But wait, there’s more…
WCC and new and emerging technologies: Able-ism: A prerequisite for transhumanism is a discussion paper on new technologies by Gregor Wolbring, who blogs over at Nano, Bio, Info, Cogno, Synthetic bio, NBICS.
And there’s also the WCC report Science, Faith & New Technologies: Transforming Life, Volume 1 : Convergent Technologies, which has some stuff in it relating to transhumanism.
Not that I’m going to buy a MacBook Air in the near future, but this might make some people think twice - Wide Awake Developers: Steve Jobs Made Me Miss My Flight.
In the next few weeks we’ll be wanting to get a basic Windows notebook computer for home for Kim to use for the various things she does. Looking around the place there seem to be a plethora of low-end models selling from between $800-$1000 depending on the rebate given by the manufacturer.
I was wanting to know if anyone who reads this blog has had any advice to offer on minimum specifications or brands that worked (or didn’t work) for them. We’ve had good experiences with our Acer Aspire desktop (including very responsive servicing) in the past, but I know that different companies load a heap of third-party ‘rubbish’ on PCs which you end up having to cull off when you get the machine.
In a perfect world we’d find one running Windows XP Pro (which we quite like), though most seem to have Vista Home Basic (VHB) on them. Moving to Vista Home Premium (VHP) adds between $200-$300 to the price of the computer, and my understanding is that VHB runs find in 1GB RAM, but VHP really feels better in 2GB of RAM.
The notebook only needs to do this kind of thing: word processing, spreadsheet, Windows media player, web browsing. No real need for DVD authoring (though burning DVD backups would be very useful), nor will it be playing any recent games (so video requirements are low). Hard disk requirements are modest too, as it won’t have games or lots of media loaded on it.
Basically, we’re looking for a reasonably well-made, reliable budget notebook PC that can do the above. And preferably one we can see in person first at a store so we can check out the keyboard feel.
BTW - If you want to make a Vista PC look like XP (and reduce the processor requirements) then this video is useful: Quick Tips: Make Windows Vista look like XP video - CNET TV.
P.S. To all the Mac-heads out there (including myself ), a MacBook isn’t the right choice for this job. Firstly, cost-wise it’s $800-$1000 more expensive, Kim wants to use Windows (so bootcamp would require buying the OS on top of the PC), and we have an unused Office 2003 package so we don’t have to buy Office. Now if I was buying one for me, then I’d be keen on one of the new MacBooks with the extra RAM.
Kevin Kelly ponders the result of including a computer in the ’social space’ that is the kitchen over at Conceptual Trends and Current Topics - The Kitchen Computer. It’s something I’ve thought about as we think about rearranging things in the house as our what we need to do with the internal space changes.
A new documentary about Mac users and their love affair with the Apple brand. See Doco puts Macheads under the microscope - Stuff.co.nz. Trailer available here and movie web site at MacHEADS.
Related link: May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion | Sociology of Religion
PowerUp the Game is a venture into creating an engaging 3D world to allow people (particularly children) to engage with environmental images. Looks interesting, though the specs to run it may be beyond everyone’s PC (and there’s no Mac version either).
Hat tip to: Derek’s Blog: Gaming with an environmental focus
Related links at Greenflame · Serious Games, Digital Storytelling and Public Perceptions
A list (with pictures) of some of the times Apple didn’t get it right. Of course, the definition of not getting something right is often in the eye of the beholder (or user), and items like the Newton, Apple IIc and Lisa (all of which I’ve used) all contained elements that contributed to better designs in the future (for Apple and its competitors). I think the MacBook Air might be in this category of a niche-product that helps stimulate all sorts of developments down the line, independent of how successful a system it is in its own right.
Had a nice (but all to brief) lunch today with Tim (of SansBlogue fame), though I was thwarted in my efforts to find some soup to eat as I recovered from the gentle(?) ministrations of my dentist. Conversation ranged all over the place, but included whether or not the ASUSTek Eee Ultraportable , with Linux, OpenOffice and Zotero (or WinXP etc.), might make a nice small, robust machine for taking on sabbatical-type journeys.
Well, maybe not. But if the Japanese government can move to train experts to help the populace understand their phones, then maybe there’s a secret organization out there that helps people program their VCRs (or similar) as well. See Japanese to train experts to help puzzled mobile users - Stuff.co.nz.
Of course, maybe creating complicated and unusable technology should be a crime instead? Do remote control designers ever actually use their products?
Related link: consumer.org.nz: Home > Appliances > Video cassette recorders > Programming and tuning
Useful article (with AppleScript snippet) for adding some helpful functionality to Word 2008 for Mac for pasting plain text into a document. Pasting plain text is something I do fairly frequently, so I’ve filed this link away for the possible time I have to use Word 2008. See TidBITS Problem Solving: Word 2008 and the Paste Plain Text Dance.
Problogger, Darren Rowse, publishes his list of useful blogging tools for Mac OS X. I use (or have tried many of them) - Ecto (article editor which I have on both Mac and Windows), CyberDuck (FTP client), ImageWell (for quick manipulation and posting of images) and Firefox. I prefer TextWrangler over TextEdit though (I used BBEdit Lite from way back)
The full list is at 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers
There’s no standalone newsreader application in there though because he uses Google Reader to do that. See Greenflame · NetNewsWire (Free now!) for my preference there. I used the Sage plug-in for Firefox for ages, as well as Bloglines, but I really like having one app that does a single job well, but can talk to other apps if need be.
Both MS Word 2007 (Windows) and MS Word 2008 (Mac) claim to have citation and bibliographic features for writers who need that support - though with a limited set of bibliographic styles. Does anyone have any experience working with them or compared them to a third-party add-on like Endnote? If you only used the supplied styles could you do away with EndNote (and the perennial compatibility problems whenever the OS, word processor or EndNote gets updated)?
Links:
A couple of links relating to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.
Firstly, a look at how the new versions of Office for Mac and Windows compare over at How Does MS Office for Mac Compare to Office for Windows?
And secondly, a link through to an article that notes that the recent Service Pack 3 for MS Office (for Windows) will disable Office’s ability to open a number of different legacy file formats. Not good if you have a set of older documents that you open occasionally or are maintaining for archive purposes. You can ‘undo’ the effects of this ‘upgrade’ but it involves Windows Registry hacking (yuck). Or you could install OpenOffice to access some of the older formats. See Microsoft Office Drops Support For Older File Formats | Compiler from Wired.com.
I can see an increasing need to have several different virtual machines on one’s computer that allow the booting into legacy operating systems and running of older versions of software - sort of like RLP here post-switch to Mac OS X.
I use NetNewsWire Lite to keep up with my blog feeds, though I’ve never felt the need to upgrade to the full version. Now, however, the full version of NetNewsWire is being released for free as its developer focuses upon growing their online services. So, if you you’re running Mac OS X 10.4 or later you can grab the latest version and take it for a spin.
More information at: RSS Reader for Mac - NetNewsWire
Hat tip to: TidBITS Networking: NewsGator Turns NetNewsWire Loose for Free
(Of course, I’m still stuck in 10.3.9 for the foreseeable future [anyone want to donate me a MacBook?:-)] and will be plodding along with the old Lite version just fine.)
After some initially using the PHPWebsite content management system way, way back as a proto-blog I shifted to using Blogger, and then over to Movable Type 2 because it afforded me more control over the blog (and added things like categories). And then Movable Type 3 arrived and the licencing became confusing and more restrictive so I just kept on chugging along using the functional, but now relatively obsolete, MT 2. Finally I came to WordPress (via some playing around with Drupal and Mambo/Joomla) and it works pretty well (especially with Ecto).
Now, in part in response to the success of WordPress, there’s an open-source version of Movable Type 4 available, which might just make me go back and have a look at it if I need to set up a new blog on my own server. I quite liked MT - and back when it was more widespread there were all sorts of interesting sites providing helpful tips and themes etc. (Just like for WordPress now).
More details at: Six Apart Reinvigorates Movable Type with New Open-Source Release | Compiler from Wired.com and Movable Type Open Source - MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community.
BTW - I see PHPWebsite continues to evolve. I liked using the early versions, and I might have a look at it again next time I need a CMS.
A couple of times I’ve found it useful to use Marc Prensky’s concepts of the digital native and digital immigrant to make points in things I’ve written. As one reviewer noted of one of these pieces, these are helpful concepts but can’t be realized as absolute categories, which I agree with entirely. The adoption or uptake of digital technologies is far more complicated than seeing people as either ‘natives’ or ‘immigrants’.
Prensky’s work was originally situated in discussions about education, and in particular, perceived differences between teachers and students in terms of familiarity with and use of digital technology. Now, several years on, Henry Jenkins has an interesting article on the relevance and helpfulness of the terminology. See Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Reconsidering Digital Immigrants….
I was wondering yesterday, with the Wifi and Safari built into the iPod Touch, whether you could blog from it. It appears you can, and there’s a WordPress plugin to format posts for the iPod Touch/iPhone screen size. See Wordpress for Ipod Touch (iWPhone)
If you’re publishing stuff on your blog or web site and you’re concerned about other people misusing your content then ProBlogger has a useful little article on how a terms of service page can help with that. See: Nip Problems in the Bud with a TOS Page.
A couple of useful web development and design articles I came across the other day.
A List Apart: Articles: Understanding Web Design by Jeffrey Zeldman (Nov 20, 2007)
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
Some good points about thinking about how web content is both similar to and different from other forms of content creation.
A List Apart: Articles: How to Size Text in CSS >by Richard Rutter (Nov 20, 2007) contains some useful reminders that all browsers do not render text the same, even if you’re being careful with the CSS.
In what seems now like a lifetime ago, I took a fourth year computer science paper at the University of Canterbury in data encryption as part of the first year of my MSc studies. My memories of the course are a little blurry, though I do remember lots of math (yuck!) and bits of computer science history (yay!). It also included some of the hardest assignments I’ve ever done. I so enjoyed the history bits the best - I think best in terms of themes and events, not bit manipulations.
The history of data encryption (and codes and cyphers etc.) still intrigues me though, and not just that relating to digital computing. So I was interested to see this article - BBC NEWS | Technology | Colossus loses code-cracking race - about rebuilding the WWII Colossus computer, as well as simulating it in software, and recracking a message encoded on a Lorenz S42 machine.
You can find out more about the Colossus project and its history at AlanTuring.net - The Turing Archive for the History of Computing (co-directed by Professor of Philosophy, Jack Copeland, at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch). In particular, look under the section AlanTuring.net - Codebreaking Catalogue.
I like databases, which means that when I see that there’s a new iTunes-style interface database, Bento, coming out for the Mac (by the same developers as FileMaker (Thanks, Matt)) I’ll sit up and pay attention. See Bento: Mac’s New Database App Is iTunes for Control Freaks:
It’s only available for Mac OS X 10.5, but there’s a preview (Alpha? Beta?) available at Meet Bento
I really, really hope it works well, though the reviewer at TidBITS Home Macs: FileMaker’s Bento: Undercooked and Slightly Fishy is less convinced.
Now, if someone could bolt a Leopard interface on top of MySQL and make it as easy to use as iTunes then that’d be cool.
Matt also notes in the comments that SQLite is lurking as part of Mac OS X 10.4 (see here).
A really interesting segment on last weekend’s This Way Up on Radio New Zealand National looked at professional video gaming in South Korea and its public following.
You can listen to the audio here (MP3) or here (WMA).
The best way is probably through the podcast feed here though.
An article (useful mainly for the links) that talks about how to set up a default set of useful applications (Office, email, browser) to carry around on a flash disk should you need to borrow a computer and still have the tools you like to use. Web-based applications are okay, but if you only have dial-up (or no internet) then having tools that allow you to compose email or edit documents offline can be life-savers.
See: Carry Your Desktop Anywhere with Portable Apps / Wired How To’s.
In the past month or so I got rid of the old stereo turntable that broke and thought that it would never need to be replaced. I may have been premature in my assumption.
And what’s the story with USB turntables (like this one)? Do they have both analogue and digital outputs or are they simply an easy way to get old LPs into MP3 format?
I’ve seen the ads, my daughter has mentioned them in passing, and I’ve suffered major “sticker shock” when I saw how much they sold for, but somewhere along the line I hadn’t picked up that they could serve as a mechanism for regulating who a person could chat to online (using the proprietary ‘Secret B Chat’).
Barbie Becomes an Authentication Device for Pre-Teen Friendship | Threat Level from Wired.com
Just wanted to note these links to various things relating to library information technology (including some open-source OPAC systems) for my own reference.
As a Protestant Mac user working part-time at a Catholic theological college where everyone uses Windows PCs I found last Thursday’s technology section on Radio New Zealand National : Nine to Noon (Thu, 25 October) fairly amusing.
You can find the full transcript over at it.gen.nz » The Cult of the Mac, and at the end of it Colin Jackson quotes a chunk of Umberto Eco’s 1994 article The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS in which Eco comments:
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach — if not the kingdom of Heaven — the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
(Windows is, Eco argues, like the Anglican church, at times appearing Catholic but also in places deep down quite Protestant).
This is neat. The combination of the PS3’s parallel-processing capabilities with its ability to run Linux allows supercomputing tasks to be offloaded to clusters of games consoles. Doesn’t it just warm your geeky heart?
Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with a Cluster of Eight PlayStation 3s
Looks interesting a motherboard the comes with embedded Linux/ Firefox / Skype. If you boot to that, instead of the OS on the hard disk (e.g. Windows), then you can be online in about 15 seconds from power on. The review below points out some of the problems with this first model, but for a quick book notebook that could access the net and save user data onto a flash disk or for an internet access kiosk computer then it looks useful.
See Hardware for Webware: A motherboard with embedded Firefox | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
CNET run a series of photos of microcomputers from the 1970s bringing back a flood of memories. I remember I desperately wanted an Atari 400 or 800 (images 19 & 20 respectively), but instead my folks bought a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a (the successor to image 21). The almost complete lack of software and support in NZ for the TI (along with not many programme listings in computer magazines) meant we actually had to learn to programme it! Some nice hardware marred by the world’s slowest ANSI (not Microsoft) BASIC interpreter.
See Photos: Dinosaur Sightings: 1970s computers | CNET News.com
There’s several TI-99/4a emulator floating around the internet. More information on this ‘classic’ at Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - Wikipedia.
Interesting article over at TidBITS Networking: An Electronic Book Giveaway: 2003, a Disaster; 2007, a Pittance which notes the decline in internet traffic costs over the past few year, and some things to be aware of if you’re going to make something available for download that might be (very) popular - in their case, a free eBook.
The Internet has often been touted as the vehicle to promote a more inclusive democratic process, allowing ordinary people to contribute to the wider decision processes of central or local government that are typically hard or costly to access.
While this is often talked about in general terms, the recent NZ Police Act Review might be a specific example of how this might work. Here the team working on reviewing the Police Act put the working draft up on a wiki and allowed anyone in the public to directly suggest/make edits to the wording of the document. The editing process is now complete and a list of suggested changes is available on the wiki. How far these changes are taken account of is yet to be seen, but it might be a step in the right direction.
See Police Act Review Wiki | Main / Home Page
News coverage of the process:
The new daylight savings dates for New Zealand got missed out by Apple in their updates so here’s a link to a page with updates on it for the new DST information. DST starts this weekend in NZ. See New Zealand 2007 daylight savings update for Mac OS X.
Hat tip to: TidBITS Macs & Mac OS X: Daylight Saving Time Rules Fixed for New Zealand:
BTW - I’ve been reading TidBITS since it was available as Hypercard stacks way, way back in 1990. I admire their longevity and commitment in a field that has seen many come and go in that time.
A friend (Hi Rob!) emailed me this links about a (free) Microsoft product - SteadyState - that allows you to manage shared Windows PCs, such as kiosk PCs or ones used by children.
See Parents take control with SteadyState - Security - Technology - theage.com.au
I guess it’s the (great?) grandchild of something like Apple’s old At Ease interface.
Short but helpful article by Darren at ProBlogger on How I Produce Video Blog Posts.
The NZ Privacy Commissioner has a press release out on what she calls “privacy pollution” caused by individuals and wider society being permeated by digital media and transactions.
“Privacy pollution is about the small privacy incursions that are annoying rather than harmful in themselves, but can accumulate and have widespread impact that can ultimately amount to a significant level of intrusion”
See: Private Word Issue 63, August 2007 - The Office of the Privacy Commissioner, New Zealand
Related links:
Last week sometime my name-brand Windows anti-virus software beeped at me and said it wanted to upgrade itself to the new, bright and shiny version. ‘Aha!’ I thought, ‘it knows that the subscription is about to run out and it might be replaced with something else so it’s trying to coerce me into loathing it less.’
Anyway, I duly let it do its thing and, given the painful process of upgrading Windows software, got it running smoothly or so I thought. It turns out though that it seems to become more draconian about CDROMs being inserted into the computer. Before a CDROM would be inserted, be scanned briefly and then autorun. Now a CDROM is inserted and we can all go off and have dinner before the computer recognize it’s there and autoruns it. This *really* *really* annoys the kids running games off CDROM.
Options available
The experience made me think about the church and how sometimes we run our own ‘anti-virus software’ at the door, in the service, in our small groups, in what we read, watch and listen to, and in who we befriend. It seeks to prevent ideas and people who might disrupt the community of faith from even breaching the doorway. In doing so though we may set our ’scanning’ options to be so aggressive that things that are normal and useful become hard to do for people in the community, and others from outside the community will not ever encounter Christ because of being ’scanned’ (and heaven forbid, ‘quarantined’ or ‘deleted’). Perhaps, we need to check what our settings are and take a risk at setting them to something less aggressive.
Seems to be a flurry of news articles in the past week or so about various organizations and institutions altering Wikipedia articles concerning themselves. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone really, should it? Anyone can edit Wikipedia articles and, indeed, is encouraged to, and that includes institutions. What might be more interesting would be some more analysis on what specific things are being modified. I’m with Russell Brown who notes that ‘it would be wise not to go off the deep end about it.’ (Public Address | Hard News | More Wikipedia Scanning | Aug 20, 2007 09:16).
Related links:
As part of some part-time work I’m doing at the moment I’m doing some distance/flexible learning implementation using Moodle (a free, open source course management system for online learning). So here’s a few links I’ve found useful over the past couple of weeks.
In my wanderings around the net a while back I came across this issue of Theological Education which looks at the role/impact of digital technology upon theological education. Looks like a helpful selection of articles.
See Theological Education 41/1 (2005)
Related links:
I’ve thought about putting Skype on the iBook and wondered about Mac-compatible hardware to support it - yelling at the laptop didn’t seem ideal. But really had no idea where to start. I’ve found in the past that quite a few USB devices (speakers, keyboards etc,) do work in Mac OS X but the boxes never say that because it’s unsupported. However TidBITS (which I’ve been reading since it used to be distributed as HyperCard stacks) has a recent, helpful breakdown here of some options.
Blog statistics. Some people admit to looking at them, others won’t (even though we know they do :-)) For some they can become the all-consuming passion - especially if you’re trying to monetarize your blog.
Lorelle on Wordpress has a very useful page that collects together the various different plugins and schemes for WordPress that collect statistic. See Counting WordPress: Statistics WordPress Plugins « Lorelle on WordPress.
I’ve been wondering for a while how many words I’ve written each year, and now I can find out.
Radio New Zealand National : Programmes A-Z : Nine to Noon : Wed, 18 July had an interesting section from their employment lawyer Andrew Scott-Howman on employers and potential employers using information available on employees (and potential employees) on social networking sites. Audio link here.
When I tell people that I work at the intersection of theology and technology I often get these sorts of comments:
There are a lot more comments and questions, but each of these come up fairly regularly. What I find is often missing in the discussion that follows about technological application within the church environment is a sense of context. There is the underlying assumption that the use of these sorts of (digital) technologies in inherently good, or at least something that needs to be done in order to keep up with the world around us. Reflection upon the nature and role of the church and its call to worship intersects with these technologies doesn’t seem to be on the agenda at all.
The Powerpoint comment is a good example. If presentation software and other audio-visual material used in worship, then I think that important questions that need to be asked include: how does its presence in the worship environment change that environment? What are the ongoing positive and negative effects of reshaping how the people of God structure and represent their worship of God using digital technology? And how is a community’s underlying ecclesiology shaped by the changes?
Certainly, the introduction of printed material into the local church, such as hymn books and pew bibles, reshapes people behave in worship. Likewise, changes in the musical environment reshape what things are considered essential to the heart of a worshipping community. How so then digital media? (I’m still searching for the definitive article that reviews how the overhead projector reshaped Christian worship.)
What is missing, I think, in much of the adoption of digital media in church worship context (which conveys messages through both content and style), is the critical application of that technology. Sometimes digital technologies like presentation software are an extremely powerful and helpful tool within the worship context. At other times they aren’t. For example, sometimes a notice, event or sermon example can be illustrated well using a video clip, and at other times the flesh and blood testimony of a person involved might be best. Discerning the appropriate time to use these different media and modes isn’t always present, though.
Following a link off swords to plowshares I came to the following article in The Christian Century (July 25, 2006) about just these sorts of questions.
See The Christian Century - PowerPointless: Video screens in worship by Debra Dean Murphy. She comments,
And so questions beg to be asked. In regard to the increasing use of PowerPoint in churches of all shapes and sizes it is worth pondering: What understanding of the purpose of worship does it assume? What are the personal and communal tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it create? What kind of people does it produce? If Christians believe that the church and the worship it offers to God ought in some ways to counter the norms and practices of the surrounding culture, then what does it mean that after spending so much of our time each week in front of computer monitors, cell phones, and sports bar TVs, we come to church on Sunday and happily position ourselves in front of the biggest screen of all?
Like Murphy in her paper, I’d like to see the technologists and those wise in worship leading to be working together in this. The critical and theological understanding of those who seek to bring the people of God into a place and attitude of worship combined with technological aptitude seeking glorify God.
I’m not against the use of digital technologies in worship and the church, just the assumption they’re inherently good, and their uncritical application.
Related links:
A selection of links that intersect around the role of new media in educational environments. Henry Jenkins has an essay (in two parts) that looks at the tension between participatory media and traditional educational models, and in particular emphasises the critical application of the following skill set:
See:
Connected to this, is Mary Hess’ post about a review of her book on theological education promoting this type of critical engagement with new media by teachers and students. See:
Then AKMA has this post on reflecting on a meeting to discuss related matters - AKMA’s Random Thoughts - Retrospect and Prospect.
And then Tim chimes in with this post (connected to AKMA’s) - SansBlogue: Bible, Babel and Web 2.0. (Some long comments there - including some from Mark which he refers to here: E-BCNZer: Brighouse - “On Education”).
The integration of digital technologies, with existing pedagogues and technologies, will be here for a while yet. I know that I’ve found it frustrating as both a student and teacher that the roles I’m being trained for/are training people for are collaborative - they stand or fall based upon healthy, dynamic relationships (both in IT and religion) - and yet the systems promote individualism (for assessment particularly) and work to stamp out collaborative efforts (it’s called cheating). Intellectual property discussions (esp. academic ones) also connect here. There must be a better way.
Playing around with the news feeds for the site. Should be no hassles, but let me know if there are.
Brief news article on the recent call by some NZ psychologists for addiction to video games to be recognized as a psychiatric disorder. See Video game addiction ‘disorder’ - doctors - Stuff.co.nz.
Update: US Wired News - AP News: Too Much Video Gaming Not Addiction, Yet. The American Medical Association are less concerned, and won’t call it an addiction until more research is done.
In addition to their recent TVNZ On Demand service (which doesn’t allow downloading on Macs - though you can play streamed video), TVNZ are now moving to post content direct on YouTube. See TVNZ to post content to YouTube: Stuff.co.nz
Now, if only my G3 Apple iBook could play embedded/streaming YouTube and TVNZ On Demand videos without stuttering in such a way as to make them an exercise in frustration.
I like the genre of Steampunk - which fuses the historical setting of 19th century Europe with advanced technological visions. Think steam-powered spaceships or Sherlock Holmes stories with mechanical computers thrown in. Elements of it crop up in comic books - the 2000AD series Nemesis was set for a while in a alien society that modelled itself on Victorian Britain and in Star Wars: Dark Empire II there’s a cool steam-powered spaceship - and also in movies like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (based on the comic series), Wild Wild West and Steamboy. Primarily it’s located in books though - Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles is an example of it for young adult/adult readers, while Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age mixes nanotechnology, AI and neo-Victorianism.
Basically, think airships, goggles, steam-powered computers, clockwork robots and difference engines.
Wired has a nice selection of pictures of contemporary steampunk inspired projects with current technologies - I love the steampunk laptop.
See Steam-Driven Dreams: The Wondrously Whimsical World of Steampunk.
Of course, Wikipedia has an extensive section on Steampunk. I tried Britannica Online, but alas, no information there.
Paul Roberts posts like a “true believer”. (It’s all about computer preferences, you see).
Related links:
Felt the need to move to a cleaner, less busy blog theme and so have moved to Tarski · An elegant, flexible WordPress theme.
Had a few hiccoughs with author name of posts etc. needing tinkering but it seems to work now. I like how the stylesheet modification are moved to a separate stylesheet that is overlaid on top of the master stylesheet. Keeps the upgrade easier and the style more manageable.
Open Source Mac - Free, Open-Source software for OS X is exactly what is says it is - “A simple list of free, open-source software for Mac OS X.” Nevertheless, it’s a helpful wee site.
Over the years I’ve used lots of different text and word processors to support writing I’ve needed to do:
Of all of these, MS Word 5 on the PB150 and PB520c offered the best system for just blatting out text without getting distracted by the bells and whistles of the software. The black-and-white display and keyboard of the PB150 seemed to work for me, plus with no internet connection etc. I only turned it on to write. Word v.X was okay (and it supported EndNote) but it didn’t really inspire me to write.
Now with the thesis all written up I’m wondering whether it’s time to look at trying some different things to aid the writing process in the next few months. Some tools that help organize the writing process as much as just allowing text entry and formatting. I’d like them to run on the iBook (which won’t be replaced in the near future) and to have some support if possible for bibliographic data. MS Word compatibility is less of an issue as I still have Word v.X and Word 2003.
From looking around the net these links look helpful.
Applications that help with note-taking and organising writing material
Bibliographic support
Some articles about Mac word processing
I wouldn’t be adverse to a Windows XP/Vista word processor and material organizer though, if they did the job. Just don’t have a Windows laptop to run it on.
Anyway, now feels like a good time to try something new, before I get caught up in not being able to change while projects are ongoing.
Updates
Microsoft has released a beta verison of a converter for the new format of Office 2007 documents, to allow them to be opened in Mac versions of Office (most recent patched versions of MS Office 10 and 11 for OS X). It’s not perfect, and it needs 10.4.8 Mac OS X, but it might be helpful to some. See Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac (Beta).
MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab release a new programming language, Scratch, aimed at teaching computer programming concepts through play. See With simplified code, programming becomes child’s play - The Boston Globe.
Of course, you don’t need to have a computer to teach computer science and computer programming concepts. See Computer Science Unplugged at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.
The best of both worlds - vinyl and MP3 files. Article here about a UK music label that releases music in vinyl format (for the DJ market) coupled with access to non-DRM high-quality MP3s of the music purchased. See U.K. Music Label Creates a Vinyl-MP3 Hybrid.
I’ve been skimming through John Waters’ book The Real Business of Web Design over the past couple of weeks. It’s been a refreshing change to read a book that talks about web design from a perspective that isn’t bogged down in the ‘how’ of what technologies will be used, but rather concentrates much more on the human dimensions of good design. You can find an excerpt from the book here at DMI eBulletin - The Information Age is History.
On design, Water’s writes:
It is not the singular quality of line, or form, or color in the Apple products or the Turkish tiles, or in any product or message for that matter, which we respond to. It is the totality of those elements—the way line, form, color, texture, pattern, purpose and meaning all fit together—that creates a whole far superior to the sum of its parts. Design is a holistic language that speaks not just to emotion or just to reason, but to both sides of the human brain.
Like Web services, the new metalanguage—a transformative language about language—which allows computers to speak to one another, design may be thought of as a metalanguage for humans, one which speaks more clearly, more universally, more comprehensively than any other language we have. A language that may be used effectively on the Web to help us cross borders, not create them. A language that may help us preserve cultural characteristics while sharing universal concerns. By thinking of design as the metalanguage of humans, the circle of language on the Web can be expanded to include everyone. (p.222)
Reminds me of the Mutton Birds song, ‘A thing well made’, which includes the lyrics:
Can you see the man who made that?
Can you see him putting it down and standing back?
Can you see the moment when he said “That’s it. That’s perfect.”?
At a time like that you wouldn’t care about your job,
Or your mortgage, or the fight you had with your wife.
‘Cause when a man holds a thing well made,
There’s connection,
There’s completeness when a man holds a thing well made.
Now in the song, the items in question are rifles, which reminds us of the ambiguity of human creativity— the human capacity to be creative and innovative in design, and yet to use that capacity for both good and evil. And also of almost transcendent power found in things that are well-designed, and how that addresses something deep within us.
The Politics of Map Making; Katrina and Google Earth looks at how digital geography intersects with politics and the other representations of the world we construct. Interesting reading.
The Wordpress Theme Generator is a helpful tool for quickly putting together a WordPress theme by selecting template options. Seems like it might be useful.
Related link: Movable Type Style Generator
If you’re interested in the history of digital computing, especially the early days around the 1940s and 50s, then check out AlanTuring.net: The Turing Archive for the History of Computing based out of the University of Canterbury in NZ.
I’m a big fan of software applications that concentrate on doing one task in an exemplary fashion. Probably a throwback to my UNIX script programming day when I’d connect lots of small single purpose applications together to work on my data. Which is why this interview caught my eye (Mozilla: Why Desktop E-Mail Crucifies the Browser). I loathe web email - I use it, but it’s never a pleasant experience no matter what system the provider is using. Maybe if I was getting mail only on one address, and maybe if I was getting only a few emails a day, but with lots of mail accounts for different purposes it really doesn’t work well.
I tried an early version of Thunderbird years ago and it didn’t quite satisfy me. Maybe it’s time to try it again - especially with better web email support.
Picked up a copy of Marc Prensky’s “Digital Game-Based Learning” today from the public library to have a skim though. I’m interested in the historical development of the digital games.
Recent related links:
Paul’s posted a copy of his Refresh article BLOGGING – A CREATIVE WAY OF EXPLORING SPIRITUALITY & SPIRITUAL FORMATION? over on Prodigal Kiwi(s). Well worth having a look at.
Connects also with the following article published a couple of years back in Stimulus (NZ journal/magazine):
Bednar, Tim. “Blogging: Report from a Grassroots Revival.” Stimulus 12, no. 3 (2004): 24-30.
Similar to Rob Moll’s article in Christianity Today if you have access to their web portal - see Blogger Predicts Revival via Web - Leadership journal - ChristianityTodayLibrary.com
Saw this today, which points to a download from Apple that comes with a variety of free typefaces.
With the arrival (finally) of Microsoft Vista Wired has produced A History of Microsoft Windows, a series of screen shots that track through the history of the Windows operating system. Apart from Windows ME, which I’ve only used once or twice, I’ve used all of these. (I’m pretty sure I’ve used Windows 1 and 2, I think they came as part of Excel when that was ported from the Mac). Of all of them, I still have soft-spots for Windows 98 and NT. The former because it’s still running just fine on an old PC here (and Virtual PC on the iBook), and NT because it wasn’t too bad a development environment for building Delphi and C++ applications on (though I missed the UNIX scripting capabilities). Having to reboot every time you changed a setting was a pain though - especially when the NT box was a server.
I seem to remember the old Byte magazine also doing something similar back when they ran an article comparing different user interfaces back in the early 90s(?) - Mac OS 7, OS/2 Presentation Manager, Windows 3.11, Motif and Open Look were some of them. Seem to remember at that time I had been using Sun’s NeWs as my primary development graphical user interface on Sun Workstations, but had just shifted to X11.
Can’t see the need to upgrade to Vista in the near future, even if the eye-candy looks nice. The Acer desktop is running WinXP and Office 2003 just fine (and passes all the Vista specs for a reasonable system), the borrowed PIII runs a very stable Windows 2000, and the old Celeron 333 plays Age of Empires 1 & 2 on the LAN just fine under Windows 98. If it’s not broken, then don’t upgrade.
Of course, an Intel MacBook or Mini running Vista and Tiger would be very nice (and would allow some PC culling, and more desk space). Maybe sometime later this year.
Related link: Windows Vista Gallery
Just erased and reinstalled everything on the iBook to get over the wobbles it was developing at the end of the thesis writing. In the process found these links I’d saved earlier.
Ashley X links:
Other links
Needed to print out some Finder windows today on the iBook and remembered that it was a feature that used to be in Classic and earlier but got removed. *Sigh*. Luckily the following came to my rescue:
Macworld: Mac 911: Printing Finder windows
SearchWare Solutions : Products : Print Window
One of the local PC magazines came with the full version (both Vol. 1 & 2) of Atari Arcade Anniversary Edition for free, which I duly installed on the PC today. My children, upon discovering it, are rapt with the likes of Centipede, Asteroids and Missile Command. However, the game of the collection for them is Pong. Go figure. I guess, game play will always trump eye candy.
Recent BBC World “Click” programme had a slot on strange USB devices for your PC. See BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | USB talk. Just right for Darren over at planet telex » One of my new toys….
As I’ve edited my thesis, and used a variety of Mac OS X the bizarreness of the Home / End keys in OS X has driven me mad. In some apps they go to the top and bottom of the document, in others to the beginning and end of paragraphs, and in other apps (e.g. Ecto) they didn’t work at all!
Today I tracked this down, made the changes, re-logged in and, wow, they work how I want (beginning and end of line respectively). That man deserves a DB.
This article talks about how intelligent software agents might transfer between various “bodies” in order to achieve certain tasks. So you own “personal assistant” software might follow you around the house, making itself available as it incarnates itself in different technological artifacts. Spooky, possums.
See Wired News: The Seoul of a New Machine.
Resonates with the idea of a “familiar” or personal spirit that accompanies you through the day, assisting you when needed. Though, I guess, “guardian angel” might also be another analogous term.
Vernor Vinge’s presentation of the technological singularity back in 1993 (PDF here) talked about the scenario where human intellect is augmented through better communications networks and human-computer interfaces. Here’s a recent article in the Boston Globe that picks up on the “intelligence augmentation” (IA) within contemporary settings. See Souls of a new machine - The Boston Globe.
Interesting article on how the new Zune’s media sharing facilities add DRM to creative commons media. See Wired News: Zune, Creative Commons Don’t Mix.
Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, on the initiative to create a discipline (or inter-discipline) to examine the the social aspect of the Web and the Web’s impact on society. A kind of new “Web (Social) Science”. See Berners-Lee, universities launch ‘Web science’ initiative - Internet - News - ZDNet Asia.
As an aside, Tim Berners-Lee provides an interesting example of the integration of religious stories and cyberspace. In his book describing the origin of the web and its possible future, Berners-Lee connects Unitarian Universalism with how he thinks the web should function. Unitarian Universalism’s pragmatic appropriation of features from various religions and philosophies serves, he argues, as a useful metaphor for the World Wide Web. Provided one maintains mutual respect for each other’s traditions and beliefs, be they religious or technological, then the web will function harmoniously.
(See: Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 207-09.)
Hat tip to Jonny Baker for this link to the Guardian’s focus on Web 2.0. See Weekend Magazine web 2.0 special | Weekend | Guardian Unlimited.
This is so, so cool. What an amazing way to interact with digital technology. I kept watching and thinking that would be great for this and this and this. That photo lightbox app is just like parts of iPhoto or similar should be like.
A reasonably long, and sometimes bitty, article on social media’s use by teenagers and tweens over at MediaShift . Media Usage::Finding Balance in Teen Use of Social Media | PBS. One comment that stuck out as I scanned it,
Kids and teenagers have very little freedom in the real world. It’s not like back in the day. They used to bike places on their own — now it’s all controlled and sanitized.
The online world is the only place where they have freedom of expression, and can really be on their own and be themselves.
Hat tip to Fernando’s Desk » Blog Archive » A Few Good Reads…
These wee beasties look interesting if you’re looking for easy ways to get video/audio into a video iPod. Being able to shoot video or have a video source, convert it and upload it to the iPod or PSP with little or no need for a computer looks helpful.
A whole bunch of related links that I don’t have time to flesh out.
From Paul there’s fishers, surfers and casters » Web Ministry 101 and fishers, surfers and casters » Sydney Anglicans’ new site.
Related to this is an older article by Stephen Downes - Stephen’s Web ~ Turning God and Learning into Commodities.
And let’s cap it of with the cartoon on this page about God and brands.
Related other links:
Greenflame: Marketing Jesus - Aussie style.
Article on Ars Technica that points to recent surveys that show teen email use is down, and technologies like IM are more in vogue at the moment (see Teens: E-mail is for old people).
User Friendly responds to this here and raises a good point about the nature of interactivity. If you want responsive and real-time communication, why not incarnate?
BTW - I started using email in 1987. That must make me really old.
Over at The Digital Sanctuary: Internet Evolution Cynthia points to the new Pew/Internet report Imagining the Internet which surveyed the opinions of various stakeholders in the Internet. Related to my previous posting is their assertion that a substantial number of them are concerned about the role of autonomous technology in shaping future societies.
Of course, one of the best known examples of this technological unease is Bill Joy’s article Wired 8.04: Why the future doesn’t need us, which sparked off a range of responses.
Another well-known but optimistic view is that of Ray Kurzweil. See, for example, Reinventing Humanity: The Future of Machine-Human Intelligence. (PDF)
Joel Garreau’s book gives a good introduction to three of the various scenarios posed by the development of nano, biological, information and cognitive technologies (NBIC). He describes these as “Hell”, “Heaven”, and “Prevail”. Your local library should have a copy of the book. See “Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human” (Joel Garreau).
Before & After magazine has a few PDF articles that you can download - teasers to get you to subscribe to the magazine. One of these free articles is a nice one on choosing a readable typeface for a publication/presentation.
Via ProBlogger: Which Font is Best for Blogging?. Darren has a few extra comments there too.
If you use iPhoto and post images from it to a Gallery2 website then Karl’s post here might be of interest. See XK72 Spacelab - blog of Karl von Randow » Blog Archive » Gallery iPhoto Exporter
Gallery iPhoto Exporter
Gallery2Export is a plugin for iPhoto that enables you to export photos directly from iPhoto into your Gallery2 website. It was originally developed by Dustin Brewer, based on the Flickr and Coppermine iPhoto Exporters.
BTW - Gallery is an open-source web-based photo album organiser. (You don’t have to run iPhoto to use it).
An interesting article from a while back (2000) by Jeffrey Rosen on the loss of privacy in cyberspace. See The Eroded Self
In cyberspace, there is no real wall between public and private. And the version of you being constructed out there - from bits and pieces of stray data - is probably not who you think you are.
Something to think about.
Full reference: Jeffrey Rosen, “The Eroded Self”, New York Times Magazine (Apr 30, 2000).
Does anyone know if Sente from Third Street Software is any good for managing bibliographic data and handling citations in word processing documents. I’m currently locked into the MS Word/Endnote system, but I wouldn’t mind having the option to try out Mellel for academic writing (which Sente supports as well as Word).
Forbes Magazine has an article online about robots cropping up in real life - from vacuum cleaners to Lego. Associated with it are a couple of slideshows. See The Robots Are Coming! - Forbes.com
For an example of how mainstream they are becoming, the NZ Listener is offering the prize of the robotic vacuum cleaner to a lucky subscriber. We just renewed our subscription and it’d be nice to get a robot to play with.
Joff alerts me (via email) to the news that JMS will be coming to the Auckland Armageddon in October. See pulpexpo.com - Joe Straczynski - Film and Comic Writer. (Curses! The link disappeared over the weekend)
Related links:
Joff’s experiences of the Wellington expo.
Greenflame: Post-Armageddon.
2002 article - Wired News: Of PowerPoint and Pointlessness on Powerpoint in schools. Via slacktivist: PowerPoint sucks.
Undeniable Facts: Undeniable Friday- a fact a day - Levitating screw.
Oh, yes! A movement calls for the removal of the Caps Lock key on keyboards. I loved some of the keyboards on old CRT terminals that I used to use because the Control key was in the right place. I can swap the two but it’d be nicer to have two Ctrl keys.
Wired News: Death to Caps Lock
Inspired by jonnybaker: if you want me to read your blog posts… I have hacked the RSS feeds (both RSS1 & RSS2) to include the full content of blog posts. Been meaning to do it for a while now, but needed a push from somewhere to do it.
The resulting changes looked okay in NewNewsWire Lite but if any problems let me know. Of course, if there’s a significant problem you won’t be able to read this if you use a news aggregator/reader.
Did not touch the Atom feed. (Does anyone use it?)
As an aside, Blogger’s atom feeds seem to be painful in the newsreader all the time. Lack of titles, constantly refreshing the feed so I get large numbers of past feeds marked as new, etc. Almost makes me think twice before subscribing to someone’s Atom feed.
This looks interesting. An open-source IDE for creating Web 2.0 type applications. When I have time I’ll download the Mac version and have a look. See Aptana. From the web site blurb:
Aptana is a robust, JavaScript-focused IDE for building dynamic web applications. Highlights include the following features:
- Code Assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, including your own JavaScript functions
- Outliner that gives a snapshot view of your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code structure
- Error and warning notification for your code
- Support for Aptana UI customization and extensions
- Cross-platform support
- Free and open source. (Source available soon)
I’m now not sure what’s left to make iPod-compatible. Can’t see the appeal personally, but I guess there must be a market somewhere. See iCarta iPod Toilet Roll.
Related link: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2006/03/inshower_mp3pla.html
Another interesting article on the use of computer and video games as agents for sociopolitical change.
Morph: Serious Games, Digital Storytelling and Public Perceptions
Serious games, Thompson writes, “immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.”
The serious games movement comprises advocates and nonprofit groups searching for new ways to reach young people, as well as tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’ educational potential.
Related links:
Report on the American Association for Artificial Intelligence celebrating 50 years of AI research. See Wired News: The Wisdom of Robots.
consequently.org/news • Well, that was easy… on using an RSS feed and iTunes to distribute PDF files through syndication.
Not exactly Douglas Adam’s electric monk but some Cistercian monks who run a successful office supplies e-business supporting themselves and various charities. See Wired 14.07: Monk Ebusiness. (LaserMonks - slogan “Real Savings. Real Monks.”)
This looks like getting the old grey cells buzzing. Always interested in seeing where people across the spectrum think digital culture will go. See Aula Network.
This is funky. Playing virtual tennis in real space with your cell phone. I love augmented reality technologies (see Greenflame: Augmented Reality, Children’s Books and Ritual), and the video clips at the HITL (NZ) web site have some interesting demos. (Just wish they were in Quicktime or MPEG formats - never know how WMV is going to perform on the old iBook)
See: Wired News: Next Game Controller: Your Phone and Human Interface Technology New Zealand (Videos).
Helpful little article on getting a WordPress installation going under WindowsXP. See [Geeks are Sexy] technology news: Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP.
The story of having to create a new font for the second edition of the New Living Translation with study notes. They needed to increase the amount of text in the book by 10% but keep the page count the same. And removing bits of the biblical text was out of the question - so a new font was created to do the job. See A new font for an old book.
Looks interesting.
International Portable Film Festival 2006
The festival works very simply - our films are delivered to you as a video podcast that you can subscribe to through this website. When films are ready they are sent automatically to you, ready for you to watch on your iPod, PlayStation Portable, 3G or media player.
Some Radio NZ programmes at now available as podcasts. Check out Radio New Zealand - Podcasts.
Apple - Nike+iPod combines shoes, exercise and the iPod.
I look forward to the integration of my iPod with my toothbrush. The iBrush (has a WhiteTooth interface) that sends music via your jawbone while you brush etc.
Why stop there? - For those who need them why not the iDentures - suck to advance a track, spit to go back, volume control by the opening and closing your mouth.
Materious’ forecast umbrella uses a wifi connection to download weather information. The more likely the chance of rain, the bluer the handle glows.
Around here at the moment the handle would be a deep indigo with all the rain we’re having.
Interesting little article on whether the sustained use of internet connections due to downloading of video and like will screw up internet service providers’ models for provisioning of services. See Wired News: Could High-Def Choke Internet?
SEOmoz Blog | Interviewing Web Developers - 20 Good Questions to Ask has a good list of questions to ask someone selling web development expertise - especially if you’re interested in hiring one.
Today in a workshop I attended the facilitator recommended formating all documents in the Arial typeface. I winced. There’s something about Arial that just rubs me the wrong way - but I can’t guarantee that Helvetica will be available on every computer that prints out my documents. Later today I stumble across The Scourge of Arial which contains some history about how Arial came to be ubiquitous.
A brief article on some new web site monitoring software that allows salespeople to monitor pretty much everything you do on a web site to tailor return sales calls to you. See The case of the spying salesman - Alpha Blog - alpha.cnet.com. I agree with the author that it breaks some sort of social contract because the monitoring is undisclosed.
Problogger notes that the new version of Drupal (4.7.0) is out now. It has some nice videos on installation and features. A while back Drupal made my short list when I was looking around for a CMS. Now the new version is out I’ll have a look and compare it with Mambo (another on the shortlist).
The title says it all. Go have a look at TechToolBlog » 195 Free Online Programming Books.
Karl, Kim’s cousin and web developer, makes it onto one of Wired.com’s tech blogs at Monkey Bites : Charles the Debugger with his incredibly useful web proxy debugger and testing tool : Charles : Web Debugging Proxy | HTTP Monitor | HTTP Proxy | HTTPS/SSL Proxy | Reverse Proxy.
One of its features is to allow you to set the web proxy to simulate different network speeds, e.g. 56K modem or 256K DSL, so see how your web site works at those speeds. That’s pretty neat and I would have thought essential for testing the usability of web sites (along with things like testing cross-browser and operating system performance).
I’d imagine it would be extremely useful for testing e-learning system where distance students don’t always have the latest and greatest internet connections.
Karl blogs here at XK72 Spacelab - blog of Karl von Randow and you can find out more about the other stuff they do at Cactuslab > Standards-Compliant Web Site Design > Content Management > Auckland NZ.
Back last September I posted about the Nature comparative survey of Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (see Greenflame: Who’re you going to call (or rather, look up)?). Now it looks as if things are getting a bit nastier with Britannica taking out newspaper ads against Nature and its survey. See,
Britannica’s defense is here (PDF). And the responses from Nature are here - Britannica attacks : Nature and Nature’s responses to Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Related link: Guardian : Reboot : Is Wikipedia a reliable source of information?
Today’s posting inspired by the UserFriendly cartoon here.
After various third-party claims of installing and running Windows XP on the new Apple Intel-based systems Apple come out with an official dual-boot solution. It’s not particularly graceful - Windows will need a separate disk partition and it won’t run Windows simultaneously with OS X (a la Virtual PC or similar) - but it’s officially supported and will tick the appropriate boxes for corporate buyers. And it will open the door to access to more PC games hopefully.
See Apple: Windows on a Mac is here | Tech News on ZDNet.
Also see Wired News: Intel Macs: Doublethink Different for why Intel are now the “good guys” after years of vilification.
The journal Nature has a special issue on the future of computing at looking at the next 15 years. Future of Computing: Web focus : Nature. Currently the articles are available as free content.
Article on computer gaming promoting creativity and stimulating the imagination at Wired 14.04: Dream Machines.
A gadget that allows authors to sign books and meet readers while in another location. See Guardian Unlimited Books | News | Atwood sign of the times draws blank.
Had a play around with Pandora this afternoon. Enter in the names of artists and songs you like and it’ll find similar genre music and stream it to you. It works quite well, picking up songs that I’d never heard off but quite liked when they were played.
An article by Guy Kawasaki on generating community - Let the Good Times Roll–by Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Creating a Community. Aimed primarily at generating communities to support business it has some points that would translate into building communities - particularly online ones - for other purposes. The article is being updated and revised every so often too. Here’s a list of points raised that are expanded in the article.
(BTW - a “thunderlizard” is like an “evangelist”)
A year ago I posted a link to the New Zealand Short Films web site where, strangely enough, you could watch NZ short films online. Now you can download some of them as MPEG-4 files for your iPod. The MPEG-4 files should play in Quicktime on PC and Mac too.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - some lawyers and intellectual property “suits” have way too much time on their hands. See Cingular applies to patent smileys :@ | The Register and Cingular emoticon grab not so serious say experts | The Register.
Interesting article over at Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom : Caring About the Content about children, blogs and community.
I’ve taught at various times on the different genres present within the biblical texts and there are some students who find the whole concept of genre really hard to grasp. So several times I’ve set up a game show in class with student participants called “Name that Genre!” I’ve taken a variety of different pieces of music representing different genres, loaded them into iTunes, given each participant a squeaky toy as a buzzer and run a game show - with the appropriate prizes of chocolate, of course. It works as a fun, general introduction to the concept of genre. Which like the concept of metaphor is alien to some people’s reading of the text. (See Douglas Coupland’s neologism “Metaphasia - the inability to recognise metaphor”)
In the process of the game though it becomes clear that the concept of genre is often a pretty fluid one. One person’s jazz is another person’s blues or another person’s gospel. And this gets hotly debated at some points. It’s the same too with the biblical texts. A gospel passage might be “gospel” genre to one person and “historical narrative” to another, or there’s debate of what kind of “lament” a psalm is, or why a “prophetic” text suddenly switches into “wisdom” genre.
I was thinking about this the other day when trying to sort out some music in iTunes. It only allows one genre to be assigned to each song. But what if I want to assign more than one genre to a song. In the end I’ve set up smart playlists that filters the comments field attached to a song. In the comments field I list the genres I want: for example, **jazz**, **blues** and then select using those “tags”. It’s clumsy but it works.
Another example of human beings being colonized by technology - an MP3 player/swimming goggles combination. See SwiMP3.
Looks good - when I have time I’ll download these lectures on web technologies and education. See Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes: Grande Yellowhead Seminar. (Hat tip to Tensegrities: Stephen Downes seminar)
Area51 (A NZ site/blog focused on “up to date medical technology news with a New Zealand focus where possible.”) has a link to and a brief summary of an article in Nature about scientists using blogs and Wiki’s to share information and collaborate with others. See Wikis and Blogs by Scientists - a new way to communicate science | Area51.
A nice short introduction to virtual reality technologies at the Virtual Reality Laboratory at the University of Michigan. See: UM-VRL: Virtual Reality: A Short Introduction. All you ever wanted to know (in summary) about CAVEs, BOOMs, HMDs and data gloves.
Fitting right into today’s writing efforts is this older (Jan 2005!) article about Markus Giesler who works in the area of high-tech consumer research. The article picks up on some of the themes from my own research, albeit from a business perspective.
“IPod and user form a cybernetic unit,” said Giesler. “We’re always talking about cyborgs in the context of cultural theory and sci-fi literature, but this is an excellent example that they’re out there in the marketplace…. I have seen the future, and it is called the cyborg consumer.”
From Wired News: My IPod, My Self by Leander Kahney (Wired News, 2005-01-28).
Was skimming through Playlist.com: The best iPod-related products of 2005 and saw a link to Senuti. This is a really excellent little (free) Mac OS X application that allows you to look at and retrieve the content from your iPod through an iTunes-like interface. So if you iTunes hard disk goes belly-up you should be able to recreate it from your iPod.
See Senuti (where there are some other nice little apps too). In the Playlist article there’s a link to a Windows app that does the same thing and is also free.
Check out SoftwareFor.org: Free Software for You. From their web site,
The Software for Starving Students CD enhances the Windows and Mac desktop computing experiences by providing an easy way to install free, high-quality software titles via a user-friendly interface. It includes popular open source programs like Firefox and OpenOffice, intended to help students learn about and benefit from open source and free software programs. The SSS team put all the most commonly used free programs onto one CD to make it easier for students to install useful software (including fully-featured office suites, 3D graphic editors and much more) for free.
Possibly a new Apple iLife app for blogging and stuff? See Monkey Bites: iWeb: A New Apple App?
I read this interview with DJ and music producer Peter Tong because I was following an iPod/Apple thread (see Wired News: Pete Tong: Apple’s Gone Wrong?) and the following quote about DJ-ing stood out
The thing about technology — the same as I learned with the advent of CD — if you stop using old technology and move immediately to the new, your DJing dips. Maybe that’s a good thing, but my thing is to try and blend the two. Everyone I’ve seen who has just begun doing it ends up doing things they would never normally do, just because they can.
Seems to me to be true of many things - business, church and faith, even cooking. Being able to create something new within of the transition area. So rather than abrupt paradigm shifts where you throw away everything you previously did and embrace only the new ideas, you take all the experience, knowledge and technique from the old ways and remix them with the new to make something novel and unforeseen. And if you’re doing that you can connect people from different paradigms and together create a new community.
AJAX seems to be flavour of the month while everyone makes up their lists of what was significant in 2005 or will be in 2006. Rachel mentions it here and here and TallSkinnyKiwi here and here.
So for all of you out there looking for how to distinguish an ordinary household cleaner from Asynchronous JavaScript and XML here are some helpful links:
Updated - See also Cre8d-design blog: What is AJAX?
From some reading I was doing today.
Technology never escapes politics. The fiction of cyberspace is useful precisely to the extent that it allows it allows its proponents to imagine an androcentric reality in which a threatening, messy, or recalcitrant (and invariably feminized) nature never intrudes. In this respect, cyberspace is consensual primarily in its insistence that technologically mediated experience can transcend the ecological and economic constraints that have shaped and continue to shape human culture. It offers the fantasy that the more technologically sophisticated our society becomes the less it has to worry about the distribution of wealth and resources.
From: Robert Moss Markley “Introduction: History, Theory, and Virtual Reality.” In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Moss Markley, 1-10. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. (p.4)
This book is a collection of essays from writers who are more critical (even cynical) about the benefits offered by virtual reality and cyberspace, and the myths spun by the proponents of the technology.
See SansBlogue : Amos: Hypertext Bible Commentary all go! for Tim’s news on the Amos hypertext commentary.
Go to www.bible.gen.nz to have a play online.
The following blogs that I read have moved to new locations (mostly to WordPress or WordPress 2.0). Update your links for Musings of a Postmodern Negro and Rachel’s cre8d design blog.
Rachel’s back blogging more regularly and has some good material and links up for blogging, web design and general internet thoughts.
iPodNN | Podcasting raises church attendance. I guess that it depends on the quality of the content delivered. If some of the services and sermons I’ve heard were podcast I’m sure it’d have the opposite effect.
Wired News: Beyond Porno: Free IPod Content has a list of various podcasts (audio and video) as well as other material for your video iPod/iTunes.
Interesting posting on storytelling and digital creativity at Craig’s blog - mountain masala: the hyperrhetoric of the quilt of the quilt.
Brief article on some NZ software that can be used to help make collaborative ethical decisions - primarily in the health sector. See Stuff.co.nz: Software matter of life or death.
Following up from Paul’s comment a day or two ago, here’s the information on pigeons as internet media.
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight | CNET News.com
BBC News | SCI/TECH | The net takes to the air
Tim finally publishes his thoughts on the interaction of RSS and commenting on blogs. Namely that the more RSS and its analogues (e.g. Atom) are used to “consume” blogs the less one is inclined to comment directly on the blog being read. A quick skim and if it’s interesing a link from your own blog to it. Thus Tim asserts a “death of comments” theology, so to speak. See SansBlogue : Web 2.0 and the Evils of RSS. (I’m sure I’ve talked to him about this before but it’s nice to see him put it down in some concrete form.)
One of the things that initially attracted me to blogging, both as an author and reader, was the interaction based around comments and trackbacks. Now spam dealt to the trackbacks on this blog but the comments are still there because I think it’s important for the opportunity to add another voice to be there. But with the advent of RSS aggregation I think that’s a thing of the past - so many blogs, so little time. Software such as Carnglas Software’s iFeedPod only increased the point of aggregation being getting the information/data down to me not creating a two-way or multi-way network.
Personally, I think things like RSS are brilliant at getting subscriptions to content like news and podcasts, but I’m still not convinced that it’s the best way to read blogs. There’s something about going to the front page of a blog and seeing what else has changed (comments, polls etc) apart from just the next post.
Anyway, over to Tim’s blog to post a comment…
Related to that last post some more commentary on religion and gaming - hopefully the author will draw out his assertion of “a strong relationship between consumption and faith.” See both Water Cooler Games - iBelieve - social commentary goes meta and the related Serious Games for Religion and Religious Institutions.
IST Results - Robo-rodent gets ‘touchy-feely’ with artificial whiskers.
Robots that ‘feel’ objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project.
See also IST Results - Embodying artificial intelligence for some general discussion on A.I.
I like the Apple web browser Safari but I often had problems with it under Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.3 (Panther) around its inability to send a “deep refresh”. In Firefox I’d click Ctrl-Refresh to get the most recent page (and in IE I could do similar) but the web toolkit that Safari (and NetNewsWire) use doesn’t allow that. It’s been a real source of frustration because my ISP has an upstream cache and Safari will only get pages from there until they expire. Which meant things like editing blog entries, refreshing web site changes and getting the latest RSS feeds wasn’t reliable. (I’d post stuff on here and it would appear in the news aggregator half a day later.)
However, last night I installed Privoxy which is a caching layer that you can set up between web applications and the net. Configure it to always ask for the most recent page, point the default OS X proxy settings at it and Safari/NewNewsWire works just fine! Excellent.
BTW - Privoxy isn’t the easiest to configure if you’re not comfortable with modifying configuration files and setting up proxy settings.
So now I can get my RSS/Atom feeds reliably outside of the Sage plug-in in Firefox. I’ll keep using Firefox as my browser because it can by-pass Privoxy but now my “Apple” apps will work just fine.
Maybe this is all fixed in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with Safari 2.0 but I’m not there yet.
Also, if you’re getting fed up with Flash slowing up web sites (can we all say “TVNZ“?) try out the Firefox plug-in FlashBlock. It marks the Flash on the page but doesn’t load them until you click on them or set up that site to always load Flash animations/apps.
I was looking up some things on the Waikato University web site today and saw this. A brief news article on the front page on the downloadable Greenstone digital library software developed there being used by various organizations around the world for things like aid and development work.
For a list of various projects and organizations using it go to the New Zealand Digital Library Project as well as Ian Witten’s paper “Examples of Practical Digital Libraries: Collections Built Internationally Using Greenstone.”
Greenstone can be downloaded from: www.greenstone.org
See also:
A new computer game teaches the strategies of non-violent resistance/conflict. Intriguing. From the web site “A Force More Powerful : The Game of Nonviolent Strategy“,
Can a computer game teach players how to defeat real-world adversaries – dictators, military occupiers, and corrupt rulers – by bypassing laser rays and AK47s and choosing instead a non-military strategy and nonviolent weapons?
See Wired News: Sir, the Gamers Are Revolting! for an article on it.
In a similar vein newsgaming.com has a couple of flash-based games.
Great article on one man’s quest to hear music again through his cochlear implant. I’d definitely agree that going beyond mere utility into extra research to improve the overall quality of life is worth it. I can’t imagine a world without music myself. See Wired 13.11: My Bionic Quest for Boléro.
Well the Apple iTMS is up and going in Australia. I wonder if the Apple Australia Store login I already have works with it? New Zealanders who want to buy Apple software and licences for things like Quicktime have to create an Apple Australian account with the NZ city as part of New South Wales. (Which I did when I bought the QT MPEG-2 component a while back). For the purposes of both Apple and music companies I think NZ is just treated as part of Australia. Hmmm.
Even though I’ve been a Mac person since 1986, as well as a UNIX programmer and sysadmin, there’s always something new to learn. Like this tip from the Apple web site. I was wondering how to click on a file on the desktop in OS X and then print it (printing used to be on the Finder’s File menu). Now I know. See Apple - Pro - Tip of the Week - Printing from the Desktop (Without a Desktop Printer).
Also has the tip on setting up a drag-and-drop desktop printer if you need one of those (they can go in the dock too.)
Tony Long (The Luddite) in his column at Wired writes on reducing the hype around technology. See Wired News: Dark Underbelly of Technology.
And that’s the reason for this column: to lend a contrarian perspective to a world besotted with technology and all its bright, glittery appeal. This is not, as some of my colleagues have characterized it, an “anti-technology” column. I’m not, strictly speaking, anti-technology. I just don’t treat it like a freaking religion. So this is a “perspective” column.
Just got round to listening to the podcast Open Source » Blog Archive » Google Sociology. Downloaded it a while back but never got around to listening to it. So I left it playing while working on some AI stuff and tuned in when things caught my interest.
Google is changing the way we understand knowledge and the world. And this show we’re asking what we can learn about ourselves by understanding what we’re looking for.
A discussion with John Battelle and David Weinberger.
In this week’s NZ Listener Russell Brown’s column “Wide Area News” is mostly dedicated to the ongoing tensions, or should that be conflict, between established providers of information (i.e. encyclopaedia publishers) and projects like Wikipedia. Some interesting points about Wikipedia and its like being open to the placement of “viral marketing.”
See: NZ Listener - Wide Area News - 10 Sept. 2005 (You’ll have to scroll down past the David Kirk bit and it flows over onto the next page).
Here are some relevant links. The first two were cited in the paper edition of the article but ironically left out of the online version. I’ve added the latter two because, while mentioned in the article, they weren’t linked to at all in any version.
Update - some more links that go with the above ones.
Also check out these posts by Tim (especially the comments sections). See “Wikipedia vs Britannica” and “What matters about an encyclopedia?“
Okay, so I’ve installed WordPress 1.5 and it works well. No problems with the install on my web host, it connects to Ecto fine and from the comments in the blogosphere is handles spam well. Plus it has a polling module which I want to add.
But getting it to look like I want could be a problem and looks to be one place that Movable Type 3.2 (but not necessarily 3.1 or 2.6) has over it. A nice simple 3-column layout would be nice, with easy to configure parameters. MT3.2 support for alpha, beta, gamma and delta models is a big plus here. Instead it looks like I’ll have to find someone else’s WordPress theme they’ve made available for download and then hack that to get it how I want. And what’s with all the themes that put the two sidebar-type columns both on the right?
Looks promising - Greasemonkey - a user-centric model for controlling the content you see in your web browser. See Wired 13.09: START : Monkeying With the Web.
Arvind at Movalog notes that the new MT 3.2 styles and layout lend itself to Greasemonkey style hacking.
I’ve been playing around with this over the past few days. Looks like it will be a toss-up between WordPress and the new, improved Movable Type for this blog. Only have one author for this personal blog so licensing isn’t the issue it might be for multi-author type blogs. The style management in MT3.2 looks really good - providing you forget a lot of the 2.6 and 3.1 stuff and start again. Now standardised across Movable Type, TypePad and LiveJournal.
Movable Type 3.2 (Check out the style library)
WordPress
Mike, a friend of mine, forwarded me this link about the new family world envisaged by Intel its recent developer forum. The author comments that a colleague of his saw it like this,
Wolfgang’s issue with what was presented is that our future family life would have little in common with a typical scenario of today. Availability of various digital devices, ubiquitous broadband and wireless connections will enable every family member to be engaged in their own digital worlds. Just like in Total Recall, we would become trapped inside our own heads.
More at: Tom’s Hardware Guide Columns: Intel Does a Total Recall at IDF.
Seems similar to the observations a while back by Michael Lewis in the very watchable BBC documentary series “The Future Just Happened”. You can watch episodes at the main web site BBC : The Future Just Happened - the key episode for this topic is “Promise vs. Threat” (Real Player). (Book available here.)
For those of you running Movable Type 3.2 here’s an online web-based tool to generate a new stylesheet for your blog. Ingenious. See - Movalog : Movable Type Style Generator.
Via Elise at Learning Movable Type: Movable Type Style Generator.
I’ll be tinkering with stylesheets and the blog layout over the next week or so - primarily to reorganize a few things, but also to fix some problems with Internet Explorer. If you arrive and things look different/broken don’t panic - try again later. I’ll try and make changes in increments (and offline) but sometimes it’s better to simply return to a clean slate and start again.
IBM helps Firefox reach disabled | Tech News on ZDNet
IBM will donate 50,000 lines of code to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser to make it friendly for people with visual and motor disabilities, Big Blue said Monday.
Sounds like a useful addition to Firefox. Now if I could only get it to reduce the sensitivity to popping up the context menu when I press the left-mouse button too long on my iBook.
A couple of interesting links off Wired News.
Firstly Wired News: Google’s Book Scanning Hits Snag comments on the problems Google is having convincing the existing publishing community its digital library attempt is a good thing. Really, what did they expect would happen?
And secondly Wired News: Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs talks about the version of Mac OSX that runs on the new Intel Mac is able to be hacked to run on non-Apple Intel hardware. Can’t see it happening soon but if Apple released a version of Tiger for generic Intel systems I’d buy and install it on our Acer P4 system in a flash.
One of the significant issues facing people trying to make sense of data is getting the data in a format that can be analysed - particularly if you’re trying to use data from disparate sources. This following article notes an open source attempt to overcome this problem. See Wired News: Analyze This: Combining Data
In hopes of broadening the potential of this kind of software, several companies plan to announce an agreement Monday on a technological standard that will let multiple computing engines for sorting unstructured data work together.The programming codes that govern the framework, spearheaded by International Business Machines in conjunction with academic researchers and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will be open source and freely available.
Back when I was doing data mining related work this was a huge issue, so I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with.
STUFF : TECHNOLOGY - STORY : Apple buys NZ domain as download wars begin - Apple acquires www.itunes.co.nz
Guess we’ll have to wait and see though.
Grabbed these two books off the shelf in the public library because the covers and titles looked interesting. They’re definitely “coffee table” books - glossy, well laid out, striking design. Contentwise they’re light and fluffy (and being books about the web a little dated). What is really, really good about them is the showcase of web sites that each has in the back. Great books for looking at 30-50 web sites to see what things you like or don’t like, different colour schemes and navigation layouts.
Worthwhile getting out from the library and skimming. Probably not worthwhile buying them. There’s also a web site related to the series over at - www.designdirectories.com.
This week I’m trying to sort out the broadband dilemma that we’ve been landed with.
We have our (primitive) broadband connection with our ISP (owned by Telco #1) and have our phone account (local and toll) with Telco #2. This has worked well in the past because ISP #1 has been good to us and we’ve got our phone plan with Telco #2 just how we want it.
So when we get an email from our ISP telling us we have to move to Telco #1 for our phone to keep using their broadband we get stuck (and very grumpy). Telco #1 claim that Telco #2 won’t carry our current ADSL connection any more so we either have to:
Feel like we’re stuck between two very large Borg motherships - one way or another we’ll be assimilated into the collective whether we want to be or not.
BTW - It doesn’t help too when you phone around other ISPs and their help desk people just end up confusing you. They’re all set to sign up new customers but don’t seem to cope too well with transferring customers.
