I bought The Nativity Story for my parents for Christmas (along with Planet Earth and Blue Planet) and remembered that I had never posted about it here. Shanna and I watched it last spring when it first came out on DVD. It’s not fresh on my mind, so I can’t give a detailed review, but I do remember enough to know that I enjoyed it and would recommend it.
[rate 5]
Someone pointed me to a helpful little piece of software that I now use daily, so I thought I’d mention it here. The tool is called PureText. It allows you to paste text into any program or file without all the formatting. I use it frequently when working on a document in Word, composing an email in Outlook, or writing a blog post in WordPress. Instead of using the normal control+v to paste text, you use windows+v (or another combination of your choosing) to paste text without its formatting. It’s that simple.
If you don’t have the Theological Journal Library published by Hampton Keathley of Galaxie Software, you need to get it—period. These journals are without a doubt some of the best theological resources that you can get for the money. Volumes 1–9 are currently available, and Volume 10 should be coming out sometime in October (assuming Hampton is on the same schedule as last year). Each volume includes 50 journals (Volumes 1–5 are sold together and contain 250 journals), and the average cost per journal is just under $1 ($.67 if you buy the bundle).
Here’s what you get if you buy all 9 available volumes:
Continue reading ‘Theological Journal Library to Add BibSac 1–90′
David Instone-Brewer (also here and here), the Technical Officer and Senior Research Fellow in Rabbinics and the New Testament at Tyndale House, has posted his review of version 2 of the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible (SESB).
Here are some selections from his section “Overall Usefulness: much better than paper”:
For those of you who don’t have a website with access to FTP and have an occasional need to share with others large files too big for email, you may want to consider Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s free and easy to use and gives you 500MB of space, handling up to 50MB individual files. Gmail allows up to 20MB attachments, but anything beyond that can be difficult to share over the web.
SkyDrive gives you three types of storage: personal, shared, and public. You can create as many different folders as you want.
I recently stumbled across and listened to two other free Bahnsen (Wikipedia | Theopedia) debates:
They aren’t quite as good as the debate with Stein (Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3), but they are still worth listening to.
Dave Wike. Still Waters. LightTouch Records, 2007. 47:30.
[rate 4.5]
My friend and coworker Dave Wike just recently released his second fingerstyle guitar CD entitled Still Waters (CDBaby | Amazon | iTunes). You might recall my blogging about his first CD, Waiting (CDBaby | Amazon | iTunes), back in January.
Someone recently asked me for my opinion about Logos vs. BibleWorks. I posted this at the Bible.org Forum in response to a discussion there. I’m reproducing it here (with some very minor changes) in case there are others who are trying to decide what Bible software to buy and use. This is by no means exhaustive, probably oversimplifies some of the issues, and certainly expresses my opinions and preferences, but it may be of help to some. I offer this not as a polished review, but as some off-the-cuff thoughts from one who uses and recommends both.
I’m getting downright tired of the junk on the web. I’ve been frequenting hundreds of blogs and news sites each week at work to find helpful material for our new PastorBlog. I’ve been disgusted with all the stuff you see on major news sites—obscene immodesty and sometimes even complete nudity (apparently the standard of what’s acceptable is lower in the UK). Amazingly, even some Christian news sites and blogs have this kind of σκύβαλον. That really burns me up, but I digress.
Michael O. Sajbel, dir. One Night with the King. 20th Century Fox, 2006. 124 min. PG
[rate 1.5]
Shanna and I watched One Night with the King last night and were incredibly (!) disappointed. We had just finished reading Esther in our Bible reading, so the story was fresh on our minds. We were expecting the movie to tell faithfully the story of Esther. Not so. Probably only 25% of the movie corresponds to the biblical account. I’m not talking about just filling in the details. I’m talking about totally scrapping the biblical story, picking up a handful of those scraps, and then putting them back together in such a way that they are virtually unrecognizable. Well, maybe that’s a little overstatement, but you get my point. Over and over throughout the movie, we’d stop and say, “What?! That’s not how that happened! Why did they change that?” Not quite The Gospel of John! (More like The Ten Commandments.) It wasn’t until the end that we learned that the movie wasn’t supposed to be retelling the biblical story of Esther but the fictional story of the novel Hadassah: One Night with the King. (I vaguely remember reading that, but had forgotten.) Knowing that up front would probably have helped significantly.
In preparation for the upcoming release of his second CD, fingerstyle guitarist Dave Wike, a coworker and friend of mine, is offering his first CD, “Waiting,” for a phenomenal price of just $1 (free shipping in the US). You can choose between the physical CD or downloading the MP3 files. Check out these four, two-minute samples to see if you like it. I enjoy listening to it as background music while I read or study. The play count in my iTunes is in triple digits! Read the reviews at CD Baby to see what others think. If you’re interested in purchasing a copy, email me at philgons-at-gmail.com. You can pay with PayPal or a personal check. Contact me for more details.
Update: I don’t have any more of these available. Visit DaveWike.com for details on how to contact Dave directly or order his CDs.
See also: Dave Wike’s New CD: “Still Waters”
Michael Barrett’s fourth book, The Beauty of Holiness, has just recently been released. He seeks to provide the foundation of a solid, biblical theology of worship that is missing in so much of the debate about music. As anyone who has read a Barrett book would expect, it looks like it’ll be a good read. I’ve posted an excerpt that gives an overview.
I just set up our company websites to use Google Analytics. It’s a free service (of course, it’s Google!) that will track traffic on your website and give you some downright amazing statistics to help you improve your site. Granted, the service is intended for businesses that are trying to get more page views and make more sales. But bloggers can use it as well. It’s kind of fun to know that someone from Singapore visited your blog! 
Just paste a snippet of code on every page of your website (or into your template), and you’re good to go. If you use Blogger, it’s fairly simple. You can go to your layout, add a new HTML page element as a footer, and paste in the code they give you. Enjoy!
Adobe Reader 8 is now available for download. In addition to it’s improved UI, it has some nice new features. It now handles booklet printing. It also has a built-in tool that will read your PDF out loud. Check it out.
Have you ever wanted to email a file to someone but couldn’t because your email server restricts the size of emails that you can send (e.g., Gmail’s max is 10 MB)? I recently came across RapidShare—a free site that will let you upload files (up to 100 MB each) to their server and give you a link that you can share with others. Here’s an example of a file I uploaded and the link that I received: http://rapidshare.com/files/5587830/02_Plantinga.mp3.html. Here’s some additional info that may interest you. I’m sure there are other sites like it, but if you’ve ever found yourself needing something like this, you might want to bookmark it for future reference.
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