Category: Tech

Bible Tech

This week’s Boston Sunday Globe had an article about The Massachusetts Bible Society’s struggle to survive in the Internet Age:

The Massachusetts Bible Society, a 197-year-old organization that distributed Bibles to seamen during the war of 1812 and welcomed 19th-century immigrants to Boston’s docks with free Scriptures, has sold its downtown building, is about to close its wood-paneled bookstore, and is trying to reinvent itself for a world in which the latest theological treatises are just a mouse-click away.

If the link above to the full article doesn’t work (registration may be required) click here. Hey, look at that. Comic-books are mentioned…

… and a now-missing set of 1940s Bible stories published by the editors of DC Comics, has for years been housed at the Boston University School of Theology.

As I explained previously in this blog, during college I was an Evangelical Christian. Or at least I tried to be. Although I am no longer a church-goer, that doesn’t mean I don’t read the Bible. But these days I read it online.

Bible Link

Another previous post was about my new SanDisk flash drive with U3 software. Recently, a U3 version of a free program called Bible Link Basic became available. There are add-ons that cost money, but I’m a relatively casual Bible reader.

    Click here

Here’s a screen grab of the small toolbar that comes up when Bible Link is started. From the toolbar you can search the Internet or view local copies of two different versions of The Bible. Click the toolbar image to see a full-size copy of the Bible viewer. Additional translations are available for download at reasonable cost.

The reduced images of the viewer above show how you can navigate by dragging the numbers on the right; (1) for books, (2) for chapters, and (3) for verses. Another neat feature is you can either read just the New American Standard or King James version, or you can view both, one above the other.

So here already is another nifty U3 application for flash drives. I never quite saw the need for a PDA, but this approach to portable applications and data is making a convert of me.

Embed Back From the Dead

How’s this? My first Flash-style embedded video, with a preview frame, without the jumpiness seen with the Media Player box when scrolling. And without resorting to YouTube™.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Movies/Wordpress/Oct06/PeepingTom4.flv 400 240]

The results have their own technical drawbacks and advantages. This wasn’t easy to do!

This clip shows, as promised previously, Moira Shearer about 10 years after she was in The Tales of Hoffmann.  Here she is in 1960’s Peeping Tom, also directed by Michael Powell.

Embed is Dead

I’ve decided to stop using embedded video and audio.  Everybody moans. Awwwww….

Sorry, but the problem with it is the setup phase, which can be seen in the status bar message, “Connecting to media.”  When there are several of these on the same page, the load time takes too long, especially if the hosting service is busy.  The server is in Phoenix, by the way.

From now on what I’ll do for video is take a screen shot and make it a link to the file.  The videos will appear in their original size, 320×240 pixels, and you’ll have to use your media player to make them bigger.  For audio I’ll try to find a picture to use for the link, but failing that there will instead be a text link.

I Shot the Screen

Here’s another boring screen shot of a technical-related thing.  Sorry!  Will get back to fun stuff in the next post.

If you don’t know what the “Feeds” on the right do, this is how they appear in my Yahoo! home page.  I’m extremely sensitive to how daunting all of this new technology is to the vast majority of people, but to me it is neat, although frequently as frustrating as it is to anybody else.