Tuesday Mini Codices

Only two today... :)

• Librivox is just teaming with new audiobooks, including Letters Concerning Toleration by John Locke, The Antichrist by Nietzsche
, The Sign of Four by A.C. Doyle, etc.

• According to a Register article, Microsoft Windows Vista "suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files". This may have to do with the fact that they've loaded their new operating system with draconian "content protection". In Slashdot's commentary on this, they refer to security guru Bruce Schneier's article where he states that "trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet".

Condensed Book Reviews #3

More mini-reviews..

"The Dilbert Principle"
- Great business humor

"The Diaries of Adam and Eve" by Mark Twain
- What I would expect from Twain

"Reformed Pastor" by Richard Baxter
- Tremendous!

"The Kingdom that Turned the World Upside Down" by David Bercott
- More aptly titled "The Book That Turned The Gospel Upside Down"

"God Centered Evangelism" by R. B. Kuiper
- Great!

"Back to Freedom & Dignity (L'Abri Pamphlets)" by Francis Schaeffer
- Schaeffer skins Skinner

"How to Respond to Muslims (How to Respond)" by Ernest Hahn
- Short/balanced/useful

"Forensic Discovery" by Dan Farmer
- Interesting look at computer forensics, but most parts are beyond me

"The LSD story" by John Cashman
- Interesting early 1960's journalistic account of the psychedelics

"What Belongs to Caesar?: A Discussion on the Christian's Response to Payment of War Taxes" by Donald D. Kaufman
- Where all pacifists would arrive if they were consistent.

"Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up: A New Look at Today's Evangelical Church in the Light of Early Christianity"
- Ugh

"The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control" by John D. Marks
- Fascinating look at the psychedelics and cold war American espionage research

"Entrepreneurs of Life" by OS Guinness
- Inspiring!

"Did God Create in 6 Days?" (edited) by Joseph Pipa
- Interesting debate book!

"Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Modern Library)" by Hunter S. Thompson
- Typical of Hunter: entertaining but very vulgar

"Modern religious liberalism;: The destructiveness and irrationality of modernist theology" by John Horsch
- A pretty good Anabaptist assesment of the growing menace of modernistic theology

Saturday's Mini Codices

Here is today's installment. Enjoy!

• The Degree Confluence project is fascinating! It aims to to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.


• Librovox now has audio recordings ofThe Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells available for download


• Those music enthusiasts aquainted with the DMOZ project (Directory Mozilla, a community-maintained web directory) will love MusicMoz, which is a music-related directory which utilizes a similar concept. It has some really neat features!


• Ever wondered what Asian Classical Music sounds like? Asianclassicalmp3.org is a project dedicated to getting some old out of print recordings online.

Saturday's Mini Codices

From now on Ι'm going to share a list of interesting things every Wednesday and Saturday. Think of something roughly similar to Tim Challies "A La Carte".

I've already posted Wednesday's installment, now here are the featured blips on the radar screen for Saturday..

• The Archive.org Way Back Machine is very useful when you want to see what a web site looked like or what content it had back in time. It is accessible from the Archive.org front page.


• Check out the blog of Douglas Groothuis. Doug left some feedback on my blog one day, and shortly after I was looking at the Philosophy section in Chapters and I found his book "On Jesus" there. I thought that was cool!


• If you haven't discovered it yet, you should listen to the Men of Whom The World Was Not Worthy series on Archive.org by John Piper. It covers John Owen, Charles Spurgeon, John Newton, etc.


• For those interested in 1930's films, Archive.org has Rogues Tavern, The Man Who Knew Too Μuch, Shadows Over Shanghai, and Chinatown After Dark


• For bloggers that use blogging software that doesn't natively support category tags, there is a web-based technorati tag generator.


• A mockumentary is a fictitious and satirical documentary.


• I'm seriously considering reading Archive.org's scan of "Mistakes of modern infidels : or, Evidences of Christianity : comprising a complete refutation of Colonel Ingersoll's so-called Mistakes of Moses, and of objections of Voltaire, Paine, and others against Christianity". For more information, see the summary. It does look interesting!! Besides the interesting subject matter, it is also interesting in that it was published in Detroit and dedicated to someone from London, Ontario!


• Archive.org's scan of "The wars of religion in France, 1559-1576; the Huguenots, Catherine de Medici and Philip II" also looks interesting. Samuel Froehlich (who founded the ACC) was a descendant of Huguenots who fled France.


• If you haven't noticed, a lot of todays blips are from Archive.org. It's really a fine project that has a plethora of stuff!!

A Worthwhile Project!

Years ago, I discovered Project Gutenberg, a great project offering thousands of online ebooks, mainly older public domain classics. After ignoring it for some time, curisoty compelled me to return. Thankfully, not much is new, besides the design and more ebooks! If only more people knew about it and contributed to it!

I've already read the text of "Common Sense" by Thomas Paine, and have also worked through part of a book of Mark Twain's letters. I've put a hold on my e-book reading momentarily, but I'm sure I'll return soon.

The site hosts a plethora of works by well known authors such as H.G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Plato, Jack London, G.K. Chesterton, William Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and some less well-known ones too!

We should be greatful about the geek ethic of nurturing projects that benefit the community. This is not unique to the Internet, but this sort of culture seems to be thriving online! There are many great projects such as this one, Wikipedia, archive.org, ibiblio.org, and others that are paving the way towards free-flowing non-commercial streams of information, putting content in the hands of those who might not otherwise be able to access it. That is what Mr. Gutenburg's invention was all about. It shook the world mightly, particularly Europe, by enabling the Bible to eventually reach the hands of the common people.

For those interested in checking it out: http://www.gutenberg.org/