How to | Nerdlets

How I use drop.io for Sermons, Papers, and GTD

How to, Research Tools, Webapps and Websites 4 Responses »

Feb 022009

A sample drop, here organized like a simple blog.

The web service drop.io is an excellent site that allows you to store just about anything you might want—text, pictures, audio, video, phone calls, etc.—in a secure, easily accessible “drop.” This may sound pretty basic, and it is, but what makes drop.io worth your time and attention are all the fancy features surrounding it. Let me give you an example that I frequently use.

Don’t Forget Sermon Illustrations

Imagine this situation. You’re preaching on Sunday. In the course of driving to work you frequently listen to the radio, to a book-on-top, or to music or NPR, and suddenly you realize that whatever you’re listening to would be the perfect intro analogy to Sunday’s sermon. What do you do? Trust you’ll remember? You won’t. Pull over and write it down? That’s neither safe nor time-efficient. Call your voice mail? Most voice-mail boxes give you 20 seconds or so, and it’s easy to forget about them.

Each drop has its own phone number

Well, with drop.io you can just call your drop and leave yourself a message, which will be sitting in your email inbox (or feed reader, or medium of choice) when you get to work. This is simple, convenient, and fast. You can’t loose your note or forget about it (since it’s in your inbox), and you can download all your voice messages at any time. And this is just the beginning!

Imagine the possibilities

The possibilities are legion. With drop.io you never have to forget a task or appointment. If you make a promise to someone, but aren’t at your computer to add your new task to Outlook or Remember the Milk, just call your drop. What’s really cool here is that your voice messages each have dedicated web links, so you can just copy the link into your Getting Things Done tool of choice and add a due-date. Easy.

Or perhaps you are prone to dissertation-related brainstorms in the middle of exercising or long walks. No need to pause to get pen and paper! Just call your drop and keep running. Your idea will be ready and waiting for you when you get home. You can even add the link or the file itself directly into Zotero (my Bibliographic/Annotating software of choice).

As mentioned before, you can store any number of items on your drop. You can easily add web links, documents, pictures, and music. You can call your drop or send it a fax. And all of this is then available immediately in your drop to view, download, share with friends or coworkers, or simply store in a safe place until you need it.

Setting Up Your Drop

Start here

It’s easy to get started. Just go to drop.io and follow the instructions. Drops are free (you get 100 mb of space per drop) and you can have as many drops as you want (I have one for GTD, one for sermons, one for my dissertation, one for each class I teach, etc). By default your drop will be named by a random set of characters. You can change this, however. Give it a name that means something to you. I created a drop called “nerdletstest” for this guide. You can access your drop by going to http://drop.io/[Your Drop's Name]; in this case, drop.io/nerdletstest.

Be sure to check out the “Additional Settings” on the start page. If you want your drop to be private, set a password. You can than share the drop password with anyone you want, or with no one. Guests can view, add, or delete files, or you can forbid all these actions. It all depends on how you want to use your drop. All of these settings can be changed at any time.

Bookmark your drop so you don’t have to remember where it is. Now you can view it anywhere!

Notifications

Several options for notifying yourself of new drop content.

You can use drop.io for a number of different things, but if you want to use it in the manner outlined above you will need a way to notify yourself when something has been added to your drop. There are several ways to do this, and they are all located under the “Share” tab.

The simplest notification option is to tell your drop your email address. Anytime you add something to your drop (like a phone message), you will receive an email in your inbox. (If you’re using drop.io for GTD, this is an ideal solution since your email is connected to the rest of GTD methods).

Personally, I’m a big fan of RSS Readers like Google Reader. Drop.io lets you subscribe to drops, and so my preferred notification method is by RSS (the link under Email Alerts). You can also subscribe by Podcast or send your cell phone a text message. Look around—there really is no shortage of options!

Sending Things to Your Drop

We have already mentioned that each drop has its own phone number. You can call your drop and the message you leave will be saved as a downloadable audio file. You can also use drop.io’s web interface to add files, links, text, and other items to your drop.

There are a wealth of other options, however. You can email files to your drop. You can set up conference calss through your drop. There is also a Firefox Plugin that allows you to bookmark your drops and drag-and-drop files into them.

More to Come

Drop.io is a fairly new service (though I mentioned it here last year when it was still in Beta), so expect more features soon. They have a rich programming interface, which means that there will be more and more ways to interact with our drops in the future. In short, drop.io is a great service (and an excellent replacement for the no-longer-free Jott). Give it a try, and please share your thoughts!

File Your Taxes Online for Free

Culture, How to, Webapps and Websites 1 Response »

Jan 262009

Sorry for two-in-a-row from Lifehacker, but this is important stuff.

By the way, Lifehacker is a really wonderful blog. Whether you’re a tech-guru or not, they always have wonderful advice, most of which will save you money. Visit their site, or just subscribe.

Catch the Inauguration Online

Culture, How to, Webapps and Websites No Responses »

Jan 202009

Aren’t going to make it to the inauguration? No worries. This is a Web World. Follow this guide to catch all the action online.

Getting More Use out of Firefox’s Search Bar

How to, Software 43 Responses »

Jan 162009

So you’ve installed a bunch of new searches for Firefox, like this one for the Westminster Bookstore, but don’t want to always be switching back and forth between Google and your other favorite searches. Well there is an easy way to automatically switch between searches: Firefox Keywords.

Setting things up is easy. First drop down your search bar dialog (just like you do to install new searches). Click on “Manage Search Engines.” A new dialog pops up. Select the search that you would like to be able to access more quickly, then click “Edit Keyword.” Type in something short and memorable. I typed “wts” for the Westminster Bookstore search and “g” for Google. You can add keywords to as many search engines as you want, they just have to be unique.

Now you’re all set. To activate your desired search, based on these keywords, go to your address bar (that big long bar you type web addresses into). Alt+D is the default shortcut for easily accessing your address bar. Now type in your keyword, space, and your query. Hit return, and watch Firefox do the rest! Neat!

How to Keep your Greek

Biblical Greek, Books, How to 4 Responses »

Jan 132009

There is nothing worse than learning Greek again. Learn it once! Constantine Campbell has some sage advice on how to keep up with your Greek so you can spend time improving your Greek, rather than learning it over again each time you need it. Here is an excerpt:

From my background in music, I’m absolutely convinced that a little time practicing every day is much more beneficial than large chunks of practice interspersed by large chunks of inactivity. A little bit every day keeps it all ticking along. And it really only has to be a little. Half an hour a day reading Greek would be terrific, but even 10 minutes would be good. I know some guys who just aim to read one sentence of Greek a day. It doesn’t have to involve a big time commitment, just do a little every day.

So how can you do just a little per day? I have found the UBS Reader’s Greek NT to be very helpful in this regard. It defines uncommon words for you, and even parses difficult verbs, which keeps you reading Greek and not flipping through a lexicon.

For those counting, yes, this is my 10th (or so) plug for this book.

Run Bibleworks 7 or 8 with Wine in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10)

Biblical Greek, How to, Linux 54 Responses »

Aug 182008

My Windows readers will be perplexed by this post, so as a brief preface, let me just say feel more than free to skip this one (and any other “Linux how to” posts that might pop-up in the future). I spend most of my computer time in Linux, but there are a couple of Windows applications that I use regularly. Bibleworks is one of them. This post explains how I got Bibleworks to run in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10) using Wine. This guide is confirmed to work with Bibleworks 7 and Bibleworks 8 using any Wine version 1.0 and up (Bibleworks 6 has worked fine for years).

Here are the steps I used to run Bibleworks in Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 (though the instructions should also work in any Linux distro, like Fedora or OpenSUSE, that includes Wine 1.0 and later).

Step 1: Install Wine

You will need to most recent version (1.0 or higher). Use your distribution’s package-manager or follow the instructions for your distribution here (for Ubuntu, use this guide.

Step 2: Tell Wine to Play Nice

There are a few modifications that you will want to make to ensure that Wine plays well with Bibleworks. First, and most important, make certain that you are emulating XP. To do this, type “winecfg” in the command line, and make sure XP is the selected version.

Second, the default settings for Internet Explorer will not work with Bibleworks. We will need to change it. Do the following in a terminal to backup the default setup:

mv ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Internet\ Explorer ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/IE6BACKUP

Now we need to use the winetricks script to set up a fake Internet Explorer. In the command line:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

chmod +x winetricks

./winetricks

This will bring up the following window. There are a lot of great options here. The only one that you need to worry about at the moment is fakeie6. Select it and let winetricks do its work.

Step 3: Install Bibleworks 7

Now the fun part. Pop in your first Bibleworks disc. Open you favorite file manager and explore the CD. The application you want is “autorun.exe,” and it is best not to run it from the command line (since you will have to switch discs several times). Select the modules you want and start installing.

The only difficulty I ran into here is being a little trigger happy on the disc switching. When the window for exchanging disc opens, go ahead an put in the requested disc. Do not click OK until the disc is fully loaded. Once the disc icon shows up on your desktop (or “Computer” folder), it’s ready to go, and only then should you click OK. Jumping the gun here could result in Bibleworks never recognizing the disc, and you will have to start over. (If this does not work, you can copy the contents of each disc into a folder in your home directory, then use the command line and run wine /path/to/folder/setup.exe).

Once it’s installed, you will have a Bibleworks icon on your desktop. Drag and drop this to whatever launcher or menu you want, or just doubleclick to launch Bibleworks.

Step 4: Updates.

Shutdown Bibleworks and then start it up again. This saves your settings, which is necessary if you have a crash. You should do this anytime you make changes to Bibleworks, such as setting options or default versions.

Before tailoring Bibleworks to your personal needs, it’s a good idea to download all the updates. Sometimes an update can reset your settings, so update before your tweek.

You should be able to check for automatic online updates (this is why we ran the winetricks script). Do not use the dialog for this in the Options menu. Instead, go to Help – Bibleworks on the Internet – Check for updates. This should bring up the window to the left. Check all that you want (I recommend everything), and then click “Apply.”

It should work, and will eventually restart Bibleworks on its own.

Step 5: Getting Pretty

Check out this screenshot. Not pretty, right? That’s because the standard fonts are not really good in Wine. Go to Tools – Options. Select the Font Tab. Adjust as necessary. I used the default font for my Ubuntu theme, which looks very nice. You may also want to change your Greek and Hebrew fonts. For recommendations, check out this post.

Also, while you are in this dialog, set up the “Export” fonts for Unicode support. Use the screenshot to the left as a guide.

You can “pretty up” the rest of the interface by using the aforementioned winetricks script to install the “Core Fonts” package and “Tahoma.”

Step 6: Fixing Smaller Bugs

One minor annoyance occurs when Bibleworks starts and the Welcome Screen appears. In the bottom right hand corner of this dialog box you can uncheck the “Appear at Startup” button, but it won’t do any good. To keep this screen from appearing you need to manually change a line in the bw700.ini file. Located this file in your Wine/BibleWorks 7/ directory and change the following line:

ishowgetstart=1

Change the value to 0.

Step 7: Enduring Problems

There are several issues, but only one of them is major. The most obvious is the lack of any icons on the toolbar. This is really not a problem, however, since Bibleworks gives you many ways to get to the dialogs you need.

Update: Some of what follows is not an issue in Bibleworks 8, but help files do still crash Bibleworks.

The biggest issue is that modules that require Windows Help files (.chm) will crash Bibleworks when you close them. This includes many of the various “books” that Bibleworks provides, such a Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar. There is a work around, however: don’t close the window after you open it. As long as you do not close the window, you can browse, read, copy/paste to your heart’s content. Bibleworks lets you have as many of these windows open as you want, so when you are done with them, just minimize them.

Work Around: You can always view the resource in a native Linux CHM viewer, such as gnochm. I have linked all the .chm files in the Bibleworks “databases” directory into a separate folder to make accessing these resources easier.

Finally, if you do have a crash, you will see the screen to your right. Make sure you select the last option. Bibleworks is a little over-protective. Do not allow it to delete your .ini file, as you will have to reset all your settings. Instead, select “Let the operating system handle the error” and just restart.

I very much recommend backing up your settings file, particularly if you make heavy modifications to the default options (such as specialized search versions, font choices, etc). Despite Bibleworks’s claim to the contrary, the bw700.ini file in the Bibleworks directory is not the file to backup. Bibleworks creates an .ini file in the Windows directory, and that is the one you need (this has been fixed in a recent update). To backup, simply browse to that directory and copy the bw700.ini file, or use the terminal:

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/bw700.ini ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/bw700.ini_BAK

Do the same for the file in the Bibleworks directory, since the most recent version does use that file:

cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Bibleworks\ 7/bw700.ini ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Bibleworks\ 7/bw700.ini_BAK

Should you have any problems in the future, just restore your backup file. Windows users will benefit from this as well (I get the occasional crash there too).

I have not had too many crashes. It is pretty stable, for a Wine app, and you can always use something like VirtualBox if you need more stability. Also, whenever you spend a good amount of time changing your settings (such as default search versions, etc.), shutdown and restart to save your settings.

Conclusion

I hope this helps Linux users use this wonderful software. Please post problems (and solutions) in the comments. Here is one last screenshot, with everything running: