David Stark at New Testament Interpretation reports on the (still beta) roll-out of Biblia.com, an excellent web resource for Biblical Studies. Check out the full report here, or if you’d just like to see the goods, check that out here.

Related posts:

1. Discourse Analysis Software from Logos
2. Göttingen Septuagint in Logos Pre-Pub
3. New Features at Bible.Logos.com

WTS Books currently has a super sale on all NICOT commentaries. The sale is running until August 19th, so be sure to check it out!

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The folks at Crossway have produced a really phenomenal application for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. The iPad version is especially handy, with an interface perfectly fit for its widescreen. The app is currently on a promotional sale ($9.99), so check it out on iTunes.

Via: What’s Best Next

Related posts:

1. Use Ubiquity to Listen to the Bible Online

If you are a blogger (and that includes Bibliobloggers!), and you haven’t already heard the news, be aware that new FCC guidelines may affect you. Here’s an explanation from the fine folks at CNET:

Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” published Monday.

So if you are reviewing a book, and you received that book for free, you now need to note that in your review. Silly, right? Well, I agree, and so does the Internet Advertising Bureau, but we’re stuck with it for now.

On a related note, I receive occasional gift certificates from the always wonderful wtsbooks.com on a click-by-click basis. If that bothers you, then I suggest you don’t click any links for books on this site.

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My dissertation advisor Dr. Dan McCartney has a new commentary out on the Epistle of James that I’m picking up today and looking forward to reading. You can get a copy too from the always wonderful Westminster Bookstore.

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OCR is the technology used to turn an image of text into plain (editable, search-able) text. If you’re like me (i.e., a nerd) you probably have a pile of scanned journal articles and books and such meticulously sorted on your hard drive (PDFs for example). You can read them and print them, but you can’t search them or edit them. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could?

Well, there are a number of free options on the web, but they all have their problems. Google has some of the best OCR technology out there–they recently acquired CAPTCHA to make it even better–and they have apparently been rolling this out into Google Docs. The Google Docs version is not as wonderful as you might like, but it works on high-res documents. Read about how to turn your images into text here.

Update: I was not able to get this to work with PDFs, surprisingly. The web-app only accepts PNG, JPEG, or GIF images right now. That is unfortunate, and I assume will be “corrected” in the future. Has anyone tried this on an image yet?

Related posts:

1. Send Web Documents Straight to Google Docs
2. Search your PDFs with OCR
3. Even More PDF Tools

If you are using the 2.0 Beta version of Zotero then I have good news. Zotero has recently updated their plugins for word processor integration. I have had a couple of problems with the OpenOffice plugin, so I am excited to see that work continues.

It appears that the update is fairly significant. One major change is that the both the Microsoft Word and the OpenOffice plugins are installed as browser components. Previously you had to add them as Word Processor macros, which can be messy and is difficult to upgrade when there are changes. By contrast, the new plugins are always up-to-date because Firefox does the checking for you, and all the messy installation is handled by the plugin itself, rather than the old manual process. In short: if you can install a Firefox plugin, you can install Zotero’s Word Processor integration.

There are a number of back-end changes to the plugins (ie., Java), with the result that everything seems to run a lot more smoothly. Two major problems I had with the previous plugins—errors in footnotes with multiple Zotero fields, and lack of support for adding citations within a table—are now fixed, which makes me an even happier camper than I was before.

How to get it

You will need the latest Beta of Zotero for the new plugins to work. To install the plugins follow the instructions on this page (be sure to install the 2.0 plugins, about half-way down, rather than 1.0 plugins). Once you restart your browser Zotero will do the rest.

If you are not already familiar with Zotero check out my description and guide.

Note for Linux users: if you haven’t already, you will need to install Sun’s version of Java (“sudo apt-get install sun-java6-plugin” in a terminal).

Related posts:

1. Zotero 1.5 and OpenOffice 3.0: Getting it all to Work
2. A Guide to Using Zotero in Biblical Studies: Collecting, Annotating and Citing Bibliographic Data
3. Zotero: An Introduction, now with SBL support

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