Are you using Unicode to type in ancient Greek (if not, follow this guide)? Do your prefer OpenOffice to Microsoft Office? Well today is the day where it all pays off. There is only one Word Processor in the world that spell-checks ancient Greek, and that’s OpenOffice. You can set it up by installing this plugin for OpenOffice 2.4 or higher.
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.
Some good news from Microsoft: Office 14 and the next Service Pack for Office 2007 will natively support the OpenDocument format (ODF) used by such software as OpenOffice.org and Google Docs. This open-source format has been adopted as a standard by recognized computing organizations and governments worldwide, succeededing to gain support in many areas that Microsoft’s OpenXML format has failed, which has put pressure on MS to respond with a similarly “open” format.
Cnet reports:
For a company that is happy to list a million reasons why Office is better than OpenOffice or Google Docs or other rivals, Microsoft sure is putting a tremendous amount of effort into working better with those products.
The next version of Office will natively support the OpenDocument format (as will the next service pack for Office 2007). As it is developing the next Office, Microsoft is also documenting every change it is making as part of its commitment to documenting all of Office’s various formats and protocols.
For those unable or unwilling to wait, you can download a plugin for MS Office that will add ODF support now. There is one from Sun (which I am given to understand is the version to be included in Office 2007 SP2 and later) or from the OpenOffice community.
It’s pretty easy to add all the various modules and resources available in Bibleworks to your Zotero database. Follow this guide.
Paper isn’t going away, of course, but having all your documents on such an antiquated medium is often less than ideal. There is at least one major disadvantage to paper: searching is much more difficult. That’s just one of the reasons PDFs are so popular! Anybody can open a PDF file for free, search it for the information they need, and store it for later browsing without any significant impact on harddrive space.
Not all PDFs are Created Equal
But perhaps you don’t know that there are two kinds of PDFs. The best kind of PDF is the kind generated by computer software from a text file. These PDFs are searchable because the text is preserved.
But many PDFs are generated from images rather than text. If you create a PDF by scanning a document in a photocopier or image scanner then the result is usually an image-based PDF, rather than a text-based PDF. This means that your PDF will not be searchable because you computer does not have access to the underlying text, even though you can read it just fine.
Searching any PDF with OCR
So how can you overcome this difficulty? By using Optical Recognition (OCR) software. OCR tools look at the image and try to convert it to plain text, which can then be searched, copy-and-pasted, and indexed just like any other document (I worked with several such software systems during my undergraduate degree).
There are several good free OCR tools available for converting PDF documents to plain text. The best out there is that used by Google, which powers its Google Books services. The problem here is that you don’t have direct access to their software. You need to go fishing and wait for Google to bite. You can find instructions for doing that here.
If you want more control over your software, and you probably do, check out this list of handy PDF tools, many of which are OCR converters. There is also a lot of great software on this list.
Finally a new service, PDF-to-word, currently in invite-only Beta, accurately converts PDF images to MS Word documents. You might have to just bookmark this one since it’s not yet available to the public, but you might find an invite code online, such as here.
Conclusions
One remaining limitation of all this is that the OCR software listed above is optimized for English. Problems often occur with German and French, and don’t even bother trying it on Greek or Hebrew. Nevertheless the advantages for English scanned images are worth investing some time experimenting with one of these systems, especially if you have a lot of scanned PDF documents.
On Monday I mentioned the usefulness of using a feedreader to collect information and stay up-to-date. What I did not mention was a web service, PostRank, that provides some very handy advanced features for feeds that may be of interest.
In addition to a whole set of wonderful free services for bloggers, PostRank allows blog readers to create customized feeds just for them. Imagine this situation: you’ve been reading my blog for awhile now and have decided that you really only care about the posts that are about Greek. Dropbox? Not interested. You just want the Greek posts. PageRank is there to help you out!
How does it work? Take a look at the “Top Posts” section in the sidebar of this blog. Type in “Greek” in the search box. 
That should result in a filtered list of “Top Posts” about Greek on this site. You can then click on the little RSS-like icon to subscribe to only those posts that match your search query.
What if the blog you want to filter isn’t as cool as Nerdlets.org and does not have the PostRank widget on its site? In that case, just go to postrank.com. Let’s say you only want Justin Taylor’s reflections on books. Enter the web-address of the Justin Taylor’s blog (http://theologica.blogspot.com/) in the search box. 
This will bring you to a page with that blog’s top posts, along with the Top Posts widget. Just enter your filter into the search box, click on the subscribe button, and you’re done!
This is a great way to keep your feedreader tidy. If you only like certain topics that a site is given to cover, use PostRank to filter out the chaff!
News travels fast, especially on the net. You probably use a variety of web sites to stay up to date, so let’s make this simple: if you regularly check more than one website, then a feedreader will make your life much much easier. Whenever a site you want to follow—a blog, the New York Times, or jcrew.com—publishes a new article your feedreader will download it and have it ready for your viewing at a moments notice. This is a great way to stay up-to-date, and you don’t have to worry about a bunch of notifications junking up your email-Inbox because feedreaders operate independently (though Outlook and Thunderbird have native feedreader modules). You just open your reader and skim through the headlines, much like you would a newspaper, until you find an article that looks interesting and give it a read.
Most websites offer a “feed” (nerdlets.org is no exception). Just look for this icon and click on it. That icon is the universal-symbol for a feed that you can subscribe to in your reader of choice. You may see a lot of variations on the same theme (for a whole collection, go here; any of these would be great additions to your own website).
There really is no reason for me to go on and on about this because many people already have. Here is a great introduction by TechSoup—a website devoted to technology tools for non-profits.
Reader Recommendations
Perhaps you’re ready to get started (the best introduction to a feedreader is to start using one)!
My personal favorite feedreader is Google Reader. It is a web-based reader, so you use it within a browser like IE or Firefox, but it also has offline support, so you don’t always need a web connection to stay in touch. Google reader has a wealth of viewing options. You can view your feeds as a mail-like list or as mini articles. You can group your feeds into topics, which allows you to check only the most important or interesting sites during the week, leaving the sites-I-follow-because-I’m-bored until later. You can star items you like, share them with friends (but only if you want to!), bookmark and email to your heart’s content, and if you decide to change your mind you can always export your feeds and switch to a different application. Best of all, Google Reader brings Google’s wonderful search functionality to your feeds, so if later down the road you remember an article you read but did not bookmark it, you can search away and soon you’ll be in business.
There are a whole host of other applications that might better fit your needs. I have heard good things about bloglines and newsgator, but have not used those myself. Many folks like things like Netvibes or Feedly. Both services, the former a website start page and the latter a Firefox plugin, allow you to view all your feeds in a magazine-like style, spread out across the page in columns rather than as a list. If you have a lot of feeds then this can be inefficient, but for a selection of important sites it can be helpful. Snackr is a fun little application that turns your feeds into a news ticker, and it can also integrate with Google reader. You can also use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Thunderbird as readers, but personally I like to keep me feeds away from my emails.
Conclusions
A feedreader is a great way to get information. What are your favorite feedreaders? What are you looking for in a feedreader?
There are good reasons for eventually upgrading to Windows 7, but don’t let eye candy be one of them. Avoid the pull of marketing by retrofitting Windows XP. There is a guide for that here.
Or maybe you’re an under-the-hood kinda guy or gal. There are many applications that allow you to get the features provided by Vista and the upcoming Windows 7 up-and-running in XP. A Guide for that can be found here.
Phil Gons has a short little guide on how to import your Logos Libronix Library into Zotero’s database.
Bibleworks 8 now runs in Linux through WINE.
I posted a guide awhile back walking Linux users through the steps required to get Bibleworks 7 up-and-running in Linux (using Wine). It has recently been confirmed that the steps used in that guide also work for Bibleworks 8. If you are interested in running Bibleworks in Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE) you can find the guide here.
Surprisingly, it appears that some problems that plagued Bibleworks 7 in Linux are no longer issues in Bibleworks 8. This is good news!
