A Look at the Weeylite Sprite 20 Light Kit
The Impressively Light Lights for Photo and Video
If you are new to photography or videography, it is easy to overlook the importance of lighting in producing truly great results. Advances driven by machine learning photography from Apple and Google are seriously reducing the utter necessity of lighting in many situations, but if you are aiming for the best quality video, pushing your live stream into pro territory or leveraging light for artistic photography, lighting gear is your friend. And an affordable set from the maker of Viltrox lenses is a really good way to get started.
The Evergreen Hope of Easter (April 5, 2021)
The hope of Easter is based on the foundation that Jesus intended to, was able to and did accomplish salvation for us. For my new Steadfast series — “Alive” — I turn to the hope we find in 1 Corinthians 15 regarding Jesus’s resurrection.
52 Verses, 52 Books, 52 Weeks (Week 14: Mark)
For Easter Sunday, I thought it would be good to turn to the Gospel of Mark’s ending (the shorter, ending — not the longer one we find in the manuscripts behind the KJV). The thing I love about this ending is that it fits with our own experience: we know the women overcome their fear, but Mark leaves us to dwell in it for awhile. I’ll share why I think he does that in the video. Happy Easter! He is Risen!
He is Risen!
Christ is Risen! “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.” — 1 Cor. 15:20-21 (ESV)
Good Friday
“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:7-8 ESV)
Resetting MySQL Primary Key in Chronological Order
As longtime readers of asisaid know, this blog — and my other sites — run a custom content management system called SAFARI that I started writing way back in 1999. For a long time, SAFARI evaded spam comments simply because most spammers targeted WordPress and other vastly more common CMSes. However, at some point in the mid-2010’s as I started serving as a pastor and professor, this blog went into something of a hibernation and the spammers went crazy with it. I later implemented more serious anti-spam measures, but there were already thousands of junk comments to deal with. I recently realized that my panicked hacking away at the comments back then wiped out nearly 4,000 early comments to the blog that were not spam.
I wanted to restore them from a backup I dug up, but since more comments have been posted since then, the unique id number given to each comment had been given away to other comments. The database table that stores the comments is set to auto-increment the ids, so I could remove the ids from the backed up comments before restoring them, but the result bugged me: older comments that were restored had higher id numbers than the newer comments. It didn’t ruin the function, but it bugged me.
So, I looked for a way to regenerate the unique ids and to do so in chronological order. I combined several of the answers on this Stack Overflow page to achieve the desired result:
SET @count = 0;
ALTER TABLE `uninet_comments` DROP `cid`;
ALTER TABLE `uninet_comments` ADD `cid` int UNSIGNED NOT NULL FIRST;
UPDATE `uninet_comments` SET `uninet_comments`.`cid` = @count:= @count + 1 ORDER BY `gmt` ASC;
ALTER TABLE `uninet_comments` ADD PRIMARY KEY(`cid`);
I figured I would share the queries I used in case anyone else needs to accomplish the same thing on a database.
Maundy Thursday
The last of the poisons in our series is “discord.” How do we know when we are causing discord and when we are standing up for what is good and righteous?
Overturning the Right Tables (March 29, 2021)
The last of the poisons in our series is “discord.” How do we know when we are causing discord and when we are standing up for what is good and righteous?
Are We Palm Sunday Followers of Jesus?
So Many Misunderstood Jesus Then and We Still Do Today
Palm Sunday was yesterday, marking the beginning of Holy Week. A week when Christians remember Jesus’s path toward crucifixion and His subsequent overcoming of death. While both Palm Sunday and Easter are filled with joy, the joy of Palm Sunday is striking in how the crowd was joyful – at least in part – for the wrong reasons.
52 Verses, 52 Books, 52 Weeks (Week 13: 1 John)
Jim Krenning continues our adventure through Scripture with a special Palm Sunday edition of #ThisWeekAtLittleHills, looking at 1 John. Please join us!