You may have heard about a new threat to your computer: the Conflicker worm. Over 3 million computers are infected, and the scary thing is, you won’t know if you’ve got it until it’s too late. By too late, I mean tomorrow, when the worm “activates” and starts making a real mess of things. What will happen? NPR has the (slightly oversimplified) details about April 1:

That’s when many of the poisoned machines will get more aggressive about “phoning home” to the worm’s creators over the Internet. When that happens, the bad guys behind the worm will be able to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down Web sites.

Technically, this could cause havoc, from massive network outages to the creation of a cyberweapon of mass destruction that attacks government computers. But researchers who have been tracking Conficker say the date will probably come and go quietly.

By “go quietly” NPR means that there will probably not be a massive world-wide shutdown of the internet. That’s all well and good, but your computer may still be infected, and this can and will massively slow down your own internet connection, as well as more significant problems. The best option is to fix the issue by following this excellent guide.

You may also want to consider using OpenDNS in the future, which is a faster and safer way to access the internet, and has been Conflicker-free for awhile now. It’s pretty easy: follow this guide.

As usual, Mac and Linux users are safe and sound.

 

Academic Earth LogoThink Hulu, but for nerds. TechCrunch has the scoop:

Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.”

And here is a description from their web site:

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment that in which that content is remarkably easy to use and in which user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

That’s right, lots of lectures to listen to! Every nerdlings dream! The selection is somewhat limited at this point (merely an aggregate of what is already out-there on the web), and there does not appear to be a way for smaller academic organizations to easily participate, but this shows great promise, and in the future could be a great way to “get the word out” about great teachers.

In the mean time, why not learn more about Ancient Greece, the Pluto Problem, or measuring space and time.

 

bible-search-barIn addition to their excellent reftagger plugin, which provides blog readers with Bible verse popups whenever they hover over a Biblical reference (try it with Heb. 1:1), Bible.Logos.com is now offering a free Bible Search Bar widget to put in your sidebar. Biblical Bloggers should definitely look into this as it makes things easier for your readers. Logos explains:

If you have biblical content on your website or blog, you’ll definitely want to consider adding the new Bible Search Bar to your sidebar. RefTagger allows your readers to have instant access to the Bible passages that you cite in your post, but what if they want to look up a verse that you don’t mention or launch a search for a word or phrase that you discuss? They could manually navigate to Bible.Logos.com, but the Bible Search Bar makes it even easier for your readers to find what they’re looking for.

The sidebar add-in comes in many shapes and sizes, and should be a convenient addition to any biblical blog. You can get it here. And don’t forget reftagger, if you don’t have it installed already, here.

 
Windows Internet Explorer
Image via Wikipedia

Now don’t get me wrong, I still think everyone should be using Firefox as their default web-browser. But I’m a realist, and sometimes you just need Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE). And if you’re going to use Microsoft, then you should really definitely immediately download IE8, released today at noon.

There are a whole host of reasons to do this—security, speed, eye-candy, convenience, lots of new features—but the most important reason is to support Microsoft in their new not-evil policies. For the first time ever Internet Explorer will be standards-compliant by default. This is good news for browsers, programmers, and Microsoft; it will truly change the web be ensuring that every web page is viewable regardless of Operating System or Browser.

So if you’re running Windows, download today. You’ll be glad you did, and you will be doing something good for all of us!

In the interest of full-disclosure, I should mention that viewing this site in IE7 results in a couple of formatting problems (with 3rd-party widgets and things), but IE8 displays everything perfectly. This is because IE8 is now standards-compliant! Thanks Microsoft!

 
Creative Commons Share Alike
Image via Wikipedia

The Open Scriptures Project, which I describe here, has hit a (hopefully temporary) snag. The project is dependent upon James Tauber’s excellent MorphGNT, which is open-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. That license should protect derivative projects, but the German Bible Society has called that into question. You can read that here.

Long story short: I am voluntarily withdrawing my recently published eBook, which is based in turn on the Open Scriptures project, until this issue is resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Update: The links to the ebook in question have been (preemptively) removed because of licensing issues. Such licensing issues are not an issue for the SBLGNT, which now has a kindle version available. So download that instead!

Greek NT on the iPhone

Having Googled long and hard for a free, accented, open-source, Unicode eBook of the Greek New Testament, and to no avail, I decided to make one myself.

Getting the Book

You can download the NA26/UBS4 Greek New Testament eBook in the following formats (right-click and “Save File As”): Kindle, Palm, mobi, and xhtml. Follow the instructions for your device. The Kindle version is the best, so use that if your device supports it. You can convert eBook files using the free application Calibre.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can use the free application Stanza with this guide to get everything set up (it’s easy).

If you need another format for your reader, try Stanza’s Desktop Reader to convert one format to another.

I will post about new releases and improvements on this site, so if you like what you see you may want to subscribe. There are a couple of improvements I would like to make–like sub-chapters and a better Table of Contents–but that will have to wait for another time. Stay tuned!

Licensing

The source text is for this eBook came from the MorphGNT with UBS4 (ver. 5.08) by CCAT and James Tauber, as produced by the Work Viewer web-app created by the Open Scriptures project. It is the same Greek text you will find on the much more robust Resurgence Greek Project and was originally derived from NA26.

This eBook is distributed and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as allowed and required by the use of MorphGNT.

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Tightening doneIf you’re looking for a good open-source media player alternative to iTunes or WMP, consider Songbird. Songbird 1.1 was released today and shows significant improvement over previous versions.

 
Image representing drop.io as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

The excellent web service drop.io has recently received the most significant added feature upgrade since its launch. From their announcement:

drop.io is now fully realtime enabled. this means realtime rich-media streaming collaboration and chat like never before. in one click set up a drop, invite participants, and seamlessly exchange any media on the fly. With full mobile and third party client support, drop.io is the simplest way to collaborate with exactly whom you want how you want.

Check out the launch site, or get more details. There is also a screencast.

Last week drop.io launched playlist.io, which allows you to stream music (or sermons, or lectures) to whoever you want.

Just a quick note that we just launched a new applet at drop.io called ‘playlist.io’ (http://playlist.io) – it is a dead simple way to post your music to the cloud in 3 clicks, and then stream it basically anywhere you want to play it (home, work, etc) — there is a demo video explaining how to use it at http://drop.io/file/playlistio

using the newly release API base iPhone application ‘droppler’ (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) you can even stream your playlist right to your iphone… there is a bit more at http://drop.io/blog if you are interested.

All in all, drop.io is shaping up to be a very handy way of distributing information. It’s a great place to put sermons, for example, or distribute class or lecture materials (which is one way that I use it). There is also a new app for the iPhone or iPod Touch (http://bit.ly/EmZVc) that integrates with drop.io, which makes all this even more portable!

 
{{en}} Flatwound strings for fretless bass. {{...
Image via Wikipedia

NPR‘s All Things Considered reported yesterday on an interesting web-app that allows churches to write or rearrange hymns and easily distribute new music. It’s called SongMap and is available through LifeWay Worship. NPR explains:

The Southern Baptist Convention has introduced a new Web-based application called SongMap, which allows music ministers to rearrange hymns and contemporary praise songs with a few clicks of the mouse. For example, the traditional hymn “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross” has four verses and four choruses, but the Web site allows a verse to be cut, a chorus to be added or the song to be put in a new key.

When the song is mapped, a window pops up with a dozen alternative segments. Once those are arranged, the score can be printed out for bass guitar, piano and even a trombone. For a fee, you can download the audio of the custom arrangement.

It also takes care of all the licensing and legal stuff for you, and charges you on that basis. Being only moderately musical, I have not tested any of this, but those who lead worship might want to check it out. And feel free to report back in the comments!

 

It’s been a long time coming, but SBL has finally released their promised Greek Font. The download page is here, or you can download it directly here. There is also a Hebrew font.

The fonts work in all Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, Mac). They are not open-source (so a couple of other fonts are still my top recommendations), but they are free to use:

SBL fonts are made available without cost to individual scholars for non-profit use. Commercial use by publishers is reserved for members of the SBL Font Foundation.

If you haven’t already set up your keyboard to support Unicode Greek, follow my guide (for Macs go here, or for Linux here).

SBL’s Biblical Font FAQ is also worth a read. If you’re not already familiar with the advantages of Unicode (as described, for example, in my guide), you may find their explanation of interest:

Why should I bother with a Unicode font? Isn’t it easier to keep using the fonts I have used for years?

With older, non-Unicode fonts, character glyphs were simply mapped over Roman characters. So, with SPEzra for example, pushing “b” displays a bet, and “[” displays an ayin. However, the computer understands these characters as “b” and “[.” Thus, when the document is transferred to a computer that does not have that specific font installed, the computer displays those characters.

Unicode seeks to allow for transfer of encoded documents between platforms and independent of fonts. So, if a document is typed using one Unicode font, it will also be viewable using another Unicode font. Likewise if the font is not installed, the computer simply defaults to its normal Unicode font. If one wants to use a different font for aesthetic (or other) reasons, one can change the font just like one would do with English. Additionally, the computer understands the characters to be the ones that the screen displays. So, an ayin both displays as an ayin and is encoded that way. This makes cross-platform text transfers and searches possible, because texts can be encoded with the characters in which they are written. Even though learning to switch to and use keyboard layouts for other languages takes a little bit of time to learn, the benefits of Unicode more than make up for this small initial investment of time and effort.

HT: Rod Decker

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