Tommy

Multitasking Mondays: Prioritize

Apr 272009

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been. I am spending a lot of concentrated time right now on my dissertation, among other things, and as a result have not been able to publish as much as I would like on Nerdlets.org. More posts are coming, and I hope to return to my previous level of productivity soon.

one of my photos. Check out my flickr page for more

In the mean time, you can find me in other areas of the internet. I’m on twitter, friendfeed, and flickr to name a few (friendfeed is my new favorite because it aggregates everything). It’s easier and quicker to interact with those sites than it is to write full-fledged blog posts, so I have been more active there lately. I would love to interact with you there, as well as here!

Next on tap for nerdlets.org (time permitting): new (open-domain) ebook for the Greek New Testament (Tischendorf or Westcott), keeping up your Greek over the summer, managing contacts, backing up your computer, securing your home from internet dangers, update on the OpenScriptures project and related sites (Ressurgence Greek, etc.).

Ferguson: Baptism in the Early Church

What I'm Reading 2 Responses »

Apr 242009

Online Reader’s Bible

Biblical Greek, Christianity, Computing, Webapps and Websites 2 Responses »

Apr 062009

: Image via Wikipedia

Mourning the loss of Zhubert? Me too, and I will have an update on the copyright discussions soon, and a new eBook of the GNT as well.

In the mean time there is an excellent new reader’s Bible available that is based on Tischendorf‘s Greek New Testament. Check that out here. It features handy footnotes and popups. You will need Google Gears for it to work, but that’s an easy install.

HT: Justin Taylor

Update:David Stark points out that the site also displays the OT, with notes for both Hebrew and Aramaic.

More Resources for Online Books

Books, Computing, Research Tools 3 Responses »

Apr 032009

Phil Gons has some excellent information regarding a newly released site: OpenLibrary.org. It is an offshoot of the already mentioned Internet Archive. In addition to providing a whole host of open-domain books in full text (just over 1 million at time of writing), they have the ambitious goal of dedicating a page for every book ever written!

Check out Phil Gons’s post for the details, as well as a list of other sites that provide free books. It is very much worth a bookmark. As is everything Phil graces us with, like this little gem.

Protect Yourself from the Conficker Worm

Computing, How to, Software 2 Responses »

Mar 312009

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 Helps You Educate, or Get an Education

Culture, Webapps and Websites 1 Response »

Mar 242009

Think 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.

New Bible Search Bar for your Blog (from Logos.com)

Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Webapps and Websites 1 Response »

Mar 242009

In 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.

Download Internet Explorer 8 (Please!)

Books, Software No Responses »

Mar 192009

: 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!

Troubles for the Open Scriptures Project

Bible and Hermeneutics, Christianity, Webapps and Websites 3 Responses »

Mar 182009

: 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.

eBook of the Greek New Testament (UBS4) for the Kindle, iPod, or iPhone

Bible and Hermeneutics, Biblical Greek, Books, Research Tools, Software 8 Responses »

Mar 142009

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!

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.