Now how do you think this can change ministry today?

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My family got together this last Christmas and gave me one gift – a Kindle. (well, two – they included a case for it as well)  Now some of you out there (like my high school English teacher) are saying, “Wait, I didn’t know Courtney could read!?!”  It’s true, I don’t normally read novels or classics like Shakespeare or Judy Blume however I do do a lot of research reading.  I’m constantly having to read this whitepaper about a technology or a book about discipleship and I’m an avid reader of a special book known as the Bible and because I’m on the go a lot, a Kindle is a great way for me to carry a lot of different books and articles without having a pile of papers or a hernia.

Now if you want to know why I wanted a Kindle over an iPad or reading this stuff on my phone or laptop, just ask but here I’m going to show you some of the tricks I found very useful in making the most out of using a Kindle or just because I like to be different.

The Key:  The “Manage Your Kindle” page on Amazon
Go to Amazon.com and login.  Then click on “Your Account” and scroll down to “Digital Content” and there you will see a link to “Manage Your Kindle”.  On this page you’ll see a lot of info about what you’ve ordered (so if you remove a book from your Kindle, you can always re-download it without paying because it stays listed on this page).  Let me draw your attention to a couple of places:

Under your Kindle, you see the name of your Kindle along with a space called “Kindle Email Address”.  Make note of that address – add it to your Address Book with the name “Kindle Uploads” or something you can easily remember.

Now this email address allows you to send PDFs (as an attachment) to your Kindle.  This makes it very easy to get that white-paper or eBook (in PDF) onto your Kindle to read later.  If your Kindle has 3G capabilities, be mindful that this feature can cost you money so if you want to make sure its free, change the email address to be “@FREE.kindle.com”.  While it won’t automatically download until you are on a WiFi network, you can save a few cents.  If you have a WiFi only Kindle then don’t worry which email address you send it to as it automatically processes it under the “free” way.

Now this only works if you are sending it from a registered email address.  So scroll down to “Your Kindle Approved Email List” and make sure you have every email account you might send stuff from.  Maybe you add your spouse’s email address so that they can easily send you stuff that they find and think you might want to read.

If you are worried about doing this and having charges because you forgot to send it to the free address, then scroll down to the “Your Personal Document Charge Limit” area.  Set this to zero.  It’s the “Just in case” way to be safe there especially if you’re never going to receive personal files through the 3G connection.

Making my own screensaver
Personally, I couldn’t handle having all those author screen savers.  I feel really stupid with those super minds being shown to me repeatedly.  Plus, I wanted to make my Kindle my own.  That’s why I used this hack that allows me to use my own pictures as screen savers.  While this hack has no warrantee and could void your warranty from Amazon, it seems to work flawlessly for me (I was even able to seamlessly do an Amazon update recently with no negative affects or problems).  Follow the instructions closely and know that there’s two parts – first a hack to be able to install hacks and then a hack to replace screen savers –> http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for_all_2.x_and_3.x_Kindles#How_to_Update_the_Screen_Saver_Hack

Web Articles to your Kindle
I read a lot of websites and sometimes there’s articles that I want to read later.  The Chrome plugin makes doing that real easy.  Basically, when you use Chrome as your browser and have this loaded, you can be on a website – click a button and it formats and send the file to your Kindle.  Real easy.  Its not a screen shot and clears out a lot of the “stuff” on the website but you’ll get the content which is what you wanted in the first place.  Check it out at LifeHacker –>  http://lifehacker.com/#!5736907/send-to-kindle-pushes-web-articles-from-chrome-to-your-kindle

Search the Amazon Store
I have a problem with impulse buying.  When I’m in a book store, I’m like – oh, I gotta get this and this and this.  Not good for the wallet or for my suitcases when I’m having to lug all that around.  Here’s some ways to help with that:

• Samples:  Many of the books in the Amazon store allow you to download a sample of the book and read it.  Sometimes its a chapter – sometimes its more.  I’ve been looking for a good book on Android development and I’ve looked at probably 8 or 9 book samples before purchasing just one.  But I know I got the right one.
• Free collections: If you go to the Kindle eBooks area of the website and look at the list on the left, you’ll see a link for “Free eBook Collections”.  Basically there’s two of them – one is the “Kindle Popular Classics” area which are books like Sherlock Holmes, Pride & Prejudice, etc where the copyright for them has expired so foundations have put them into electronic format for all to have.  The other collection is “Limited Time Promotional Offers”.  This is the area where you want to periodically check as there can be some real gems in there.  I’ve found leadership books by top leadership development people, language helper books, educational resources, the Bible, and many others things in there.  I’ve probably ordered most of my books from this area.  [WARNING:  This area also has a lot of smut books. - I really wish they would remove those but apparently they sell]
• Check out the Newspapers, Blogs and Magazines that you can get automatically sent to your Kindle whenever there’s an update or new edition.  They’re fairly cheap and it saves trees going this route.

Outside  Amazon Resources for Books
There’s a lot of books out there being formated for the Kindle by various foundations like Project Gutenberg. Many of the books are similar to the ones found in Amazon’s “Kindle Popular Classics” but not all of them.  Doing a Google search for “Kindle books free” will give you a lot of places to explore.

Other than read books, what can a Kindle do?
There are many things the Kindle can do:

• If the book is formated for it, you can have the Kindle read the book to you.  Great for car drives – just get a cassette adapter (if you car has a stereo that can play cassettes) and it makes for a great way to listen to a “book on tape” only from your Kindle.
• You can also load some MP3s on it and listen to music while you read.  You just load the files while the Kindle is connected via USB into the proper folder and then you’re good to go.
• Did you know it has a web browser?  While not the greatest (I much prefer my Android phone over the Kindle for web surfing), if you ain’t got something else, it works!
• Synchronize your reading across platforms – I’m assuming you know that there’s Kindle Reader apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry, etc.  You can have books loaded on multiple platforms and haven them synchronize where you are so that when you stop reading on your Kindle and then later pick up your cell phone and open up the book there – it opens to right where you left off on the Kindle.  Nice, huh?

Ok, I’m not a Kindle freak (well, maybe a little) and I’m not paid by Amazon for this post but several people were asking me a lot of questions about Kindles so I thought I would post this.  I’m also not advocating a Kindle over other eReaders out there as they’ve got a lot of plus over the Kindle (and some minuses) so to each his/her own.  I have a Kindle and it works really good for me.

Got other ideas for how to use the Kindle even more effectively?  Comment.

The idea is that there’s sensors in an arm band that pick up low frequency sounds (inaudible to human ear) so that you when you tap different parts of your arm, it “sounds” different and so the computer knows where you hit and can act appropriately.  Totally cool but think about the implications – we could use this for helping handicap people to use computers.  What other ways do you think this could be used beyond the typical “coolness” factor?

Check out the full article at http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/19/microsoft.skinput/index.html?hpt=C1

EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.

Think differently about how online games and technology can change the world.

I hit a milestone in my life. While I have a 30 GB iPod to store my collection of CD music (which started in 1983 with Greg X Volz’s “River is Rising” CD), I found that I was continuously trying to find the 30 GB of storage space on my laptop. Now I didn’t want to just throw it all to my external firewire drive as that would mean I’d have to have the drive connected any time I wanted to listen to my iTunes and I’m a traveling kind of guy. But I also didn’t want to just reduce my library and delete all those CDs that I don’t listen to all the time but I wouldn’t mind them just being backed up and out of my iTunes library.

So here’s the technical finding for this week:

Problem: Too large of an iTunes library. Decided that I wanted to create a backup of everything and put it on my external hard drive. I wanted to keep locally on my laptop everything that was in my playlists (which is really what I use to listen to my songs anyways) but just keep a backup of everything else.

Solution:

1. First I wanted to get everything moved over to the external hard drive. I did this by changing my iTunes Music Folder location (on a Mac, it’s Preferences -> Advanced -> General tab). Click on the “Change” button and select your storage folder on your external hard drive.
2. Next, click “Ok” and then go to your menu bar and click on Advanced -> Consolidate Library. Make sure you have iTunes set to organize the iTunes Music Folder. This will move everything over to the hard drive. Give it some time especially if you have a large library (like mine) or if you are using a USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 hard drive.
3. Go to your local music folder and delete all of your music files.
4. Then I made sure that I had everything in Playlists that I wanted to keep and that my playlists were up to date.
5. I created a Smart Playlist that had as a definition where it was to Match “All” rules and then created a rule that said “Playlist is not _____” for each playlist that I had (including Movies and TV Shows). I also had a rule that was “Podcast is false”. This creates a Playlist of everything in your library that is NOT in your playlists.
6. After the new Smart Playlist (I called it – Not in Playlists) populates, go to it and select everything. Now you can’t automatically delete things from a Smart Playlist, so you have to hold down the “Option” key when you hit the “Delete” key. This allows you to “Delete from Library” but make sure you click on “Keep Files” or else it will delete them all from your external hard drive.
7. Now you have in your iTunes library only those items that you want to keep on your hard drive. So change back your iTunes Music Folder location (see step 1 above) to your music folder on your local drive.
8. Again, you’ll need to click on Advanced -> Consolidate Library which will bring over from your external hard drive all of the music you wanted.
9. Synchronize your iPod and you are ready to go!

I hope this helps someone out there that was going through the same thing as me. I know it took me a little bit to think this all through so that I didn’t loose any of my songs.

Problem: WordPress was designed to run on Apache and not on the Windows IIS server. However, my hosting is a Windows server and I want to use WordPress (which does basically work on Windows IIS) but I also want to use Permalinks (nice URLs, not those “?page=23″ type URLS). I’m on a shared hosting plan and my provider has PHP/MySQL but is not going to load a ModRewrite software package.

Basic Solution: I used a php.ini file, a customized 404 Error page, and modified a little bit of WordPress code.

Extended Solution:

My blog is in the root of my domain. I use WordPress as my blogging software and my CMS. You’ll need to alter this code as needed if you have your WordPress installation nested in the domain.

First, I put a php.ini file in the root of my directories (not the wwwroot but the actual root). This php.ini included the following lines:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1
cgi.force_redirect = 0

It may take a little bit for this php.ini file to start taking effect (I’m not sure what on the server level kicks it in).

Secondly, I created a customized 404 Error page. Many shared host solutions allow for this now. I put a file called 404Error.php in the wwwroot of my domain and used my control panel to direct 404 Errors to this page (see your specific control panel’s help files for how to do
this). In this page, I put the following code:

< ?php
if (strpos($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], '.htm')) {
echo '< strong>HTTP 404 Error - Unable to find the requested page< br />< br />';
echo '< a href="/index.php" target="_self">Click here for The Roes Garden< /a>< br />< br />';
} else {
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URL'] = substr($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], strpos($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], ':80')+3);
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URL'];
include('index.php');
}
?>

The first part of the “if” statement just sees if they are requesting a standard HTM or HTML file which means its a legitimate 404 error (since I run WordPress as my CMS). The “else” part of the statement does the work I need in redirecting.

Thirdly, I modified some WordPress code. I opened up the file link-template.php found in the WP-Includes folder.

1. Find the area for the function get_pagenum_link.
2. Then find the code:
   if ( $qs_match[0] ) {
$query_string = $qs_match[0];
$request = preg_replace( $qs_regex, '', $request );
} else {
$query_string = '';
}
3. Right after this, add the code:
   // Next lines to remove query string if its there because of 404Error
$phpError = "404;";
$pos = strpos($query_string, $phpError);
if ($pos === false) {
//Do nothing
} else {
$query_string = '';
}
4. Then find the code within that function:
   $request = preg_replace( '|^index\.php|', '', $request);
5. Right after this, add the code:
   // Next line is a replacement to handle Paging issues with IIS
$request = preg_replace( '|^404Error\.php|', '', $request);

Save the file and replace it on the website.

The first two steps allowed me to have Permalinks but after using the “Next Posts” link a couple of times, it got all messed up with 404Error.php garbage that it wouldn’t work past a page 2. The third part cleans all that up and makes it work better.

Search still doesn’t work for me but at least users can scroll through the several years of blogs I have.

Let me know if you have any improvements or if this helped you in any way.

We are currently working diligently on putting together what we call an “eLearning Center” solution. In just a couple of weeks, a few of us eDOT’ers are going to be in Ukraine to install our first all Microsoft Windows based computer center. The problem is that we don’t have everything working together the way we want it. But we’ll get there. The fun part will be that we will be doing our first install in Russian (I have yet to learn Russia, but at least Microsoft puts the same icons and places everything pretty much in the same place when they do different localizations).

Anyway, all this to say that we found (through eDOT’er Andrew) this great way of filtering your content and reporting on where people are going that use your Internet connection. It’s called OpenDNS.

Now many of you are probably wondering what DNS is. Well, to use this free service you don’t have to know what it is but if you do desire to know – DNS is Dynamic Name System which is when you type in “Google.com” that your computer figures out to go to the IP address 72.14.207.99 (kinda like an Internet Server’s phone number) to view that website.

While this way of doing content filtering is not 100% perfect (none of them are other than just not going online), it is effective and easy to set up. And best of all, it’s free!

So if you are a person that just doesn’t want to accidentally see some of the stuff that is in the Internet world, or don’t want to be tempted by it, maintain a computer center or small office, or have a kids in the house that you want to help protect their innocence – consider setting up OpenDNS on your computers and networks.

My Dad is a catch-n-release fisherman. He loves the sport but he is not out to hurt any of the fish. Unfortunately, there are phisherman out in the Internet world who are about hurting those online. Those of us online are the (ph)ishes. So do you think you can spot the “hooks” that are out there in cyberspace? Take this quiz to see if you can spot the “hooks” online

PS – I only got 7 out of 10

I am going to start throwing out there some new types of blogs that are very different than the ones we have posted before. Because I also do some support for my fellow missionaries and have to support my own small home network, I have decided to blog problems that I have and the fixes I have found for them. Basically, if I have to search for an answer to a problem and I have a hard time finding the answer, I figure the more people who post the fix means its easier for the next person with the same problem to find the answer. (Did that even make sense?)

Sorry to most of my regular readers as you can feel free to skip them as they will be geekie and technical. So here’s the first one:

Problem: When using Front Row or Finder on Mac OS X, whenever I “preview” an AVI file, it seems to take forever to come up i.e. really long time. I was finding this especially to be true with Front Row when watching my movies and shows. Before it would be a second or two max before the show was ready to be viewed. Then something happened to make them take minutes (like 1-5 minutes depending on the size of the file).

Equipment: MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4.10 (Yes, I have a Mac – No, I am not going to go on about how Mac’s are better – It seems I can crash anything, Macs and Windows alike. Even blew up a Linux install but that took some work). Using Flip4Mac to help with the AVI files within QuickTime

Solution/Fix: Aparantly, when my Apple automatic updates happened a little bit ago, it updated QuickTime to QT 7.2 . With this update, things went screwy. Now QuickTime 7.2 update on its own isn’t bad but it makes the Flip4Mac plugin now work properly so it creates the problems in bringing up the viewers. So to fix this, you need to reinstall your Flip4Mac. I understand this might also be the case with Perian and Divx. When I did this, everything started to work lightning fast again.

Hope this helps someone out there. If it does, please leave me a comment so I’ll know. Thanks.