Aldi/Tevion Video Chat Webcam

Last fall, Aldi had a great deal on a little VGA USB webcam — and I had been wanting to pick one up for a few reasons, not the least of which was trying the video “ISBN scanner” Delicious Library (and similar programs) has. I didn't have time to do much with it beyond plugging it in and seeing that the camera was not going to be a plug-and-play matter. So it sat there… until tonight.

When I could not get it to work with macam, I googled the USB string 0x60fe, which I found on the Linux-USB site as being the Tevion model MD85081. A bit more digging revealed that it uses a Sonix SN9C110 video chipset. After trial and error, finding that programs such as macam did not handle my little camera, I decided to look up the manufacturer of the chipset. Going to Sonix's web site, I found out they had a driver for cameras based on their controller, which I downloaded here. I was surprised and pleased that they actually had a Mac OS X driver! After installing that driver, the webcam now works in Photo Booth, Delicious Library and other programs that can look for a video source — other than iChat, which needs iUSBCam to find the camera. The little shutter button on the webcam even works — if you tap that, Preview opens up with a snapshot taken from the camera.

I'm rather pleased, I must say!

Accordance

I've been using the Accordance Bible Software package for a number of months now in preparation for a review on OFB. I've liked it enough that I bought several modules that were useful for seminary studies. After years of trying to contend that SWORD was a nearly ideal Bible software system, I finally have to admit it isn't — no wonder I typically didn't even use it. Accordance blows it away and works well enough I've finally all but kicked the habit of preferring BibleGateway to my copy of MacSword. That's not to be harsh on the SWORD folks, they are a dedicated and talented bunch — they are simply working at some what of a disadvantage.

But the big point is that Accordance is really amazing. Accordance just gets a lot of things right with its unique, well thought out interface, and they have a lot of the best, most authoritative study resources available.

All that to say, I attended an Accordance all day seminar on Monday and am even more impressed having been introduced to more of what this program can do. Case and point: using Accordance's nicely designed drag and drop query builder, you can build a rule that will search for occurrences of the Granville Sharp Rule (two singular nouns governed by a single article and a conjunction). Unfortunately, my Greek text does not have nouns tagged as being common or proper, otherwise it would be perfect, for Accordance supports throwing in the final condition of Granville Sharp, namely that the nouns must be common. I suppose if you buy a different Greek module, then, it would be quite possible to run the full rule through. But even with that limitation on the standard Nestle-Aland/UBS module, this still demonstrates a breakthrough in easy, powerful searching — it's surely saves a lot of time when trying to do textual analysis!

I'm just amazed.

Digital Note Taking

I've resisted taking notes on a computer for years. Through college, I stuck to my trusty five subject notebooks, which I would usually fill double sided in each section by the end of a semester. I like the feel of taking notes by hand. It keeps my penmanship up a bit, is an active way of embedding the content being talked about in my mind, and allowed me to stare at a computer a few less hours each day. Oh, and, if I really must admit it, I liked being able to doodle in the margins too.

But, all good things must come to pass. Last fall, I was in a small group at Covenant and learned that Microsoft Word:mac has an exclusive to Mac “notebook” mode which records audio as you type your notes. What is really amazing is that every time you press return to move to the next line, Word denotes the time on the audio recording and keys that line to the audio timeline. After you finish taking notes, you can click on any line in the document, hit play, and hear the audio from that point. This is so incredibly useful that I have become a convert to typing my notes.

I say all this because people are use to me complaining about Microsoft. When the folks in Redmond get something right to the extent that they did this feature, they deserve some major kudos! If you find yourself in a class or meeting that goes well with note taking, and you own a Mac, you really should check this out.

Thinking Different for Almost Five Years

Wow, time flies. Some friends of mine had an iMac DV (Graphite) that died, and in the process of getting the hard disk out to transfer their data, I removed the AirPort (802.11b) card. They gave me the card, and I popped it into my Ruby iMac DV, which had not been connected to a network in two and a half years (it had been up and running, just not on the internet). The system needed an update for the card to work, but my friends were also disposing of an ethernet cable, so I had an extra one right at hand and I plugged my iMac in that way. After the update, now my poor old Ruby is connected to my network two ways.

What about time flying? Well, you see, the Ruby was my first real taste of the Mac world back when I won it in an eBay auction in June 2003. I wrote about it in this post that happened to be bookmarked on the system. I went all Mac just less than a year later when my GNU/Linux box was giving me trouble during final projects for college in May 2004. Amazing. When I got the Ruby, I intended to write a series on Open for Business talking about how good the Linux desktop was compared to the Mac. Now I'm one of “those” that goes around and preaches about Mac goodness.

The Ruby still runs nicely, which is pretty impressive for a system that was built nearly eight years ago (October 2000). I think I may upgrade the RAM to 1GB (if I can find a good deal) and move it up to Tiger sometime soon.

Concerning Stevenote 2008, Part 1

It’s that time of year again. If you are at all interested in the trends of technology in the next year, January is the time to learn what is coming up. And not at the CES mind you – these years, the future shows up at MacWorld. Last year it was the iPhone, which managed to shake an industry that had never faced Apple before and start a major shift in the way cell phone development is done. What will this year bring? Tim puts his money on more devices coming out of the Apple-AT&T partnership, for one thing. Read what I think that thing will be over at OFB.

The Future of Reading

Mark Pilgrim offers a simple, profound consideration of Amazon's Kindle TOS. It is well worth your time to read it.

It Came By FedEx...

…yes, Mac OS X 10.5 arrived at about 11:30 this morning. I'm getting ready to install it on one of my computers. Hopefully I will be good to go before the new OS even officially launches at 6:00 tonight!

Pradis

Just so y'all know, if you happen to be a Windows user (unlike me), Zondervan is being very nice and offering $25 worth of free modules for its Pradis Bible software. No purchase seems to be necessary, so you can pick up a couple of resources to use without actually spending a dime.

You can read all about it here.

Digital or Paper?

One of my big dilemmas is that I'm a gadget geek and a book buyer. I love the feel of a new book, the smell of a new book, and the joy of laying in bed reading a book. But, I also love highly searchable, cross reference-able digital texts.

I'm debating whether to buy BDAG — the premier Greek-English lexicon — in its impressive print form or to buy it in its less impressive, but perhaps more convenient digital form for Accordance. I've been using Accordance for a few weeks while preparing to review it at OFB and have found it sufficiently impressive that I've been considering the option of buying modules for it.

In fact, I did invest in a handful of modules. I bought the Scholar's Core to compliment the Library Premier package that I received to review. The Library Premier is a superb package that hits a bit of everything so that one has a nice start to a library (two good modern translations, a voucher good for three more modern translations worth up to $30 each, a boatload of commentaries, Thayer's lexicon and some other nice things), but Scholar's rounded it out with a few essential items: a Nestle-Aland 27th edition (as opposed to the Library's Textus Receptus), the UBS Lexicon, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and the Louw and Nida Semantic Domain Lexicon. The NA27, BHS and Louw and Nida were the primary items of interest to me. Using the digital Louw and Nida reminds me of why I should probably buy the digital BDAG: it is just so much easier to look things up using Accordance's triple click “Amplify” to my lexicons than it is to flip through a giant lexicon looking for the word I want.

Nevertheless, my inner bookworm wishes I could buy the printed version combined with a license to a digital copy… now that would be nice! Then again, I may hold off on BDAG completely, if I can — what has me really intrigued is the CNTTS Greek Apparatus which should be extremely useful once they get the Pauline epistles included in it. Reading the article about it that is attached to that link makes it sound like just about the perfect apparatus. I hope it stays at $100 in its final form.

A Week with the iPhone

After a week, I can still say I love this device. I'm working on a full fledged review for OFB, so I won't go into details, but all I can say is that despite the well publicized limitations, the device is such a pleasure to work with, one forgets about those things. There are a few complaints I have, but all of them are software related and could easily be fixed when iPhone OS 1.1 is pushed out sometime (I suspect) in the near future.

I setup my visual voicemail today and was surprised I didn't have to encounter a single voice prompt menu to do so. The iPhone recorded my message and set my passcode all from its own interface, then sent both the recording and the passcode to AT&T for me. No “press 1 to save your message, press 2 to hear it, press 3 to rerecord your message.”

I am a bit paranoid to walk around with this thing. I wish AT&T would offer its phone insurance for it. But, I figure I carry my laptop around all the time, so why not a phone?