Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

  • RL & VR

    Wired News: Real World Doesn’t Use a Joystick

    Kozy Kitchens’ experience with having a difficult time separating her real-life consciousness from that of her game playing is all too common among hard-core gamers. It’s so common, in fact, that game publishers might want to consider warning their customers that they may soon be unable to tell the difference between the game and reality.

    If you want to read some interesting essays and articles about how people interact online or shape their “real lives” and “virtual lives” see Sherry Turkle. (Her book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet is an accessible, if a little dated now, survey of online life and its psychological and sociological implications)

  • The world is my oyster…

    Well, maybe not. However this article shows how to use a local style sheet to override the one on a web site.

    Skinning Gmail with a Custom Stylesheet

    No longer will I have to suffer bizarre colour combinations when accessing things like library catalogues – now I can override it so I get readable black text on a white/grey background and buttons that I can read. Content first!

    A quick rewrite of the stylesheet and away we go. The link is above in case you want to do it yourself and fix any problems you think my blog has.

  • MuVo Helper

    Found this neat little Mac OS X app the other day that connect iTunes to my Creative MuVo TX FM MP3/WMA player. Plug the USB connection in, iTunes starts up and displays the MuVo as a device and you can drag music onto it without having those annoying hidden OSX files appearing if you did it in the finder. Saves having to dig around in the Music folder to find what I want.

    Check out MuVo Helper here.

    The little app that could.

  • Young Prospective Artist Finds Herself in a ‘No Sketch’ Zone

    Following a link from an article on copyright stuff I came across this incident where a girl was prevented (wrongly) by a gallery guard from sketching art works on display. How nuts is this?

    Eyewitness News 11.com: Young Prospective Artist Finds Herself in a ‘No Sketch’ Zone

  • Eco Coffee for the Office

    Treehugger: Q&A. Eco Coffee for the Office.

  • Home Library Software

    Kim’s reorganised all the fiction books in the house, bought two new bookshelves, and we’re now at the point where we’ve run out of space for books in the interim. (Barring building a new room or putting the kids in a tent.)

    Looking at all the books (plus the non-fiction and my own work-related library) has me thinking about doing an electronic inventory. I know Delicious Monster is available for Mac OS X 10.3 (but I’m still on Jaguar) so any suggestions for Windows or Mac software that can take the ISBN and complete the record would be helpful. EndNote would do at a pinch but some sort of borrower list would be good. (At the moment we use the notebook & pencil system.)

  • Ecological Suicide – Ecocide

    Thought provoking article at Seed Magazine: Science is Culture – Collapse on ecological suicide–ecocide.

    At first, a critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object: “It’s ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all those ancient peoples could have broad relevance today, especially to the modern United States. Those ancients didn’t enjoy the wonders of modern technology, which benefits us and which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly technologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of climate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environments by doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvesting wild-animal sources of protein, watching their topsoil erode away, and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish leaders who didn’t have books and so couldn’t learn from history, and who embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about staying in power, and didn’t pay attention to problems at home. They got overwhelmed by desperate, starving immigrants as one society after another collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the societies that weren’t collapsing. In all those respects, we moderns are fundamentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing that we could learn from them. Especially in the U.S., the richest and most powerful country in the world today, with the most productive environment and wise leaders and strong, loyal allies and only weak, insignificant enemies–none of those bad things could possibly apply.”

    Via: Nouslife: Ecocide.

  • Sci-fi conference removes fiction from fact

    Wish I’d been there. Sounds fascinating.
    Science & Theology News – News: Sci-fi conference removes fiction from fact.

  • Tolkien’s writing has religious ring

    From the latest Science & Theology News : Real Life Religion: Tolkien’s writing has religious ring

  • Pondering justice, kindness, humility and the new year

    I don’t preach very often in a church setting. I do lecture and tutor theology, teach in house groups etc. so maybe some preaching comes out there from time to time. So sermon prep this week is a reasonably unusual activity. In preparation for wondering how Micah might approach New Year’s resolutions I’ve been reading Walter Brueggemann’s “Voices of the Night – Against Justice.” (Pages 5-28 in To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly: An Agenda for Ministers Edited by Brueggemann, Walter, Sharon Parks, and Thomas H Groome. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.) Some good stuff in there.

    I especially like his comment about Micah 6:8 where he says,

    The three elements are well known to us. To do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with God – these may embody all that we need to know in order to be faithful and to be human. They are not three “virtues.” They are not three “things to do.” Rather, they speak of three dimensions of a life of faithfulness, each of which depends on and is reinforced by the other two.

    Reminiscent of Duncan Forrester’s view that justice is not the application of faith – it is its substance – the how and why of living.

    Anyway, time for a break. It’s that warm, hard-to-think, part of the afternoon.