Every once in a while we hit an annoying issue with Adobe Flash. Some can be fixed with a quick reinstall of the Flash plugin, but others are much worse like this one with Flash 8 nearly 2 years ago.
In the past month we have had 2 computers come down with the same problem. Sites with Flash content don’t run, so you go to Adobe and try to update Flash. That doesn’t work, so you try a regular uninstall and a then a drastic attempt with Adobe’s uninstaller.
I downloaded and ran the SubInACL Windows Resource Kit tool (which I find to be very interesting), and the I extracted the reset script and ran with it. This time the install worked and life was closer to its standard level of happiness and contentment.
Now I leave this here so I can use this info again in the future.
1. Lighting a Jack-O-Lantern with Solar lighting. Last night my daughter and I carved a pumpkin during an Adult Bible Fellowship (aka. Sunday School) class party. I did the cutting and scooping while she told me to use triangles for eyes. When we got home I was looking at the solar power lights along our entryway and decapitated one (mwahahaha!) to use as the pumpkin’s light. This works better in the Sunshine State than in darker places up north, but it is perfect for us.
2. Keep a copy of Undelete Plus portable on your thumb drive and memory cards. When editing the above picture with Windows Live Photo Gallery I forgot that it automatically saves the file when you close the gallery. Since I knew the image was still on my SD card in spite of it being deleted, it only took a few seconds to recover it. You may not like Undelete Plus, but keeping one of these portable apps on all portable storage media is a great help. i have used it to recover files on hard drives since it gives a place to run it without writing to the drive andyou immediately have a place to start exporting the important recovered files.
I was playing around with Netstat* the other day (Does that sound geeky to you too? Nah, I didn’t think so either.), and realized that whenever I opened Firefox I was accessing tons of web sites. I looked them up and discovered that they were all the RSS feeds I had bookmarked in Firefox and used in Sage (simple feed reader).
There was no reason for them to keep loading and getting refreshed so I decided to clean them out, and here is how I did it.
Sage can display live bookmarked feeds an regular bookmarks of feeds, so since I didn’t need all of them to be live I opened up C:\Documents and Settings\MyUserNames\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profilename.default\bookmarks.html (the parts in Bold Italics will need to be changed to match your installation) in a text editor and replaced all instances of FEEDURL with HREF. Oh, and you will want to copy that file first as a backup.
Firefox seems to load much faster and run a little more smoothly.
*Netstat is a program included on Windows and can be accessed from the command line. It displays all the systems your computer is currently (well, very recently) connected to. If you are worried that some program is contacting undesirable systems, you can verify that here.
Open a “Run” box (either from the start button or by using [Windows Key] + R), type cmd and press enter. Type netstat to run netstat or netstat ? to learn how to use it.
[Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13]
Unfortunately, Chrome has some issues with the wordpress post entry text box, but it is more of an annoyance that a big problem and they are very annoying.
It is fast, but not smooth. It is more stable than Safari on Windows (as far as I can tell), but not great. It does at least work with Arena (which Safari does not).
I brought it down to a lack of responsiveness trying to download 7 podcasts from Bloglines, I dislike the tabs on top of the address bar, the download page cannot be cleaned up (as far as I can tell), New Tab is not letting me open my homepage instead of recently visited pages, and it is lacking important features (I really miss my FF extensions too).
Something interesting, about:memory brings up a lot of memory information. I found this by middle clicking on the top bar, selecting “Task Manager” then “Stats for nerds.”
I may use Chrome for GMail or just another browser option, but it is not ready to replace FF or IE (well, duh).
UPDATE: I won’t be using it for Wordpress posts any time soon. I am editing it in Firefox because Chrome completely goofed the posting.
In other news, churches use plumbing to provide water supplies to attendees and HVAC systems for climate control.
I thought this was an interesting article highlighting Fellowship One, but a good view of how technology is seriously affecting church connections. For the record, we are currently “growing into Arena.”
Finally, Microsoft has fixed the whole Quicktime Thumbnail issues with Photo Gallery.
I never cared much about Quicktime. I really dislike the program, so I use Quicktime Alternative instead. Once I purchased a digital camera that produced .mov files all of that changed. The good news is that Windows Live Photo Gallery shows thumbnails of .mov files; however the bad news was that it was slow and likely to crash Windows Explorer. That is until today when I downloaded kb955359 in Windows update. Now it works great.
I was delayed in installing it because I had renamed WLXQuickTimeControlHost.exe to WLXQuickTimeControlHost.ex_ to keep it from properly loading and causing its mischief. Once I named it back to normal the installation went through smoothly, and didn’t even require a reboot.
Those boxes of old photos we have in closets around here are great. Before our director of programming left a few years ago she dug through all sorts of archive boxes to pull together lots of old photos and items from the churches history. She had been here for 18 years, starting as the children’s minister.
There were a lot of pictures, but not piles of them. They were taken on film cameras and only the best ones were saved. Many of them had been lost or glued onto big poster board displays where they were linked into context.
This came to mind today as I was looking through the directory of our missions department. The director of missions recently went back to work at a church closer to where his family lives. A lot of things have changed over the 7 years he has been here, and one of them is noticeable by the pictures he left behind. Lots of them. As more and better digital cameras went out on missions and service trips our number and size of photos increased.
Between our missions and sports ministries we have more than 100GB of photos and videos. Our student and children’s ministry has a large collection, and our adult ministries have quite a few as well. We are starting to update our Arena database with many of the plain images of individuals, but that still leaves a lot of photos that we don’t want to just delete.
Is there a program out there to help us manage all of this content? Something we can dump it into and find it in the future?
“People who are rowing the boat don’t have time to rock the boat!”
That is the quote that Jason Calacanis chose from “the Purpose Driven Life” when asked what books he was listening to on TWiT 150.
As someone who has tired out on ministry books, I did appreciate that he said he was reading it because he got tired of all the tech books sounding the same. He related “The Purpose Driven Church” to business start-ups.
But don’t worry, Leo Leporte went from expressing interest in reading “The Purpose Driven Life” to asking about erotica books in just a few seconds. He didn’t want to sound too religious.
Note: I just realized that it was almost exactly 10 years ago right now that I purchased my copy of “The Purpose Driven Church.” And yes, I did read it.
You are looking at a picture of the Samsung sph-z400. Yes it is homely, but my current Motorola i530 ain’t pretty neither. Ever since my old phone came off my pocket while coming down the caged ladder in the Attic catwalk and had its screen hinge blasted apart after several collisions on its way down to the concrete I have been waiting for the new Nextel Direct Connect phones to come out. I am currently using a revived i530 that had been left for dead, but I want something better.
The phone matches some of what I want: no antenna sticking up out of the top, clamshell design, camera, works with Nextel Direct Connect. However, it is missing wifi. I really want a device I can use for accessing network data and security camera images.
This is exciting since Sprint has been killing off Nextel for a while now. They are losing much of the spectrum that the Nextel Direct Connect iDEN network runs on. Sprint wants to move all their users to the same system, but Sprint users cannot currently do Direct Connect with Nextel users. Since is used heavily by companies or extended organizations it is difficult to move a few people over at a time. Now Qualcomm’s QChat has the ability to do direct connect over CDMA and reach all Sprint/Nextel subscribers. Since Sprint has been killing off the old system, nobody has been making really good Nextel phones for a while. Hopefully that will change soon. After all, as of right now the clock on QChat runs out in January 2009.
I am looking at this from a pure administration mindset, but I am sure that if we took what we budgeted for Christmas programs this past year we could purchase a robot to it all automatically. Less hassle and stress, something not being done by every other church in town (nobody will hurry out of our service saying “Hurry, the robot show at the Baptist church starts in 20 minutes”), and we could even do a wax-drip free candle lighting service.
Just check out this video:
And for all you trying to recruit volunteers for the tech oriented parts of your ministries, just think of the geeks this will bring in. Not to mention the fun you will have making use of this investment throughout the year to come.
Those boxes of old photos we have in closets around here are great. Before our director of programming left a few years ago she dug through all sorts of archive boxes to pull together lots of old photos and items from the churches history. She had been here for 18 years, starting as the children’s minister.
You are looking at a picture of the Samsung sph-z400. Yes it is homely, but my current