Who Invented Books? | COLOSSAL QUESTIONS

This was really cool. A history of publishing.

Biblical Studies and Technological Tools: Bible Software for Android

I am always on the look out for good software for my Android devices. In looking for good digital lexicons and Hebrew/Greek texts for Android I came across a blog that is dedicated to biblical studies and technological tools. On it, I found a great post about Bible Studies software on Android! I'm familiar and happy with Olive Tree Software on my phone and tablet but it was nice to see what someone else thought about it. As per the recommendation I will also be installing Cadre's version. Sometimes to get all the features we need we have to use multiple apps/programs - nothing new there. Here are a couple of excerpts explaining why I'm making this decision.

OliveTree

http://www.olivetree.com/android/index.php

• Free BibleReader app with assortment of free Bibles: KJV, ASV, HCSB, JPS1917, NET (w/ limited notes)
• Most developed, most resources
• Study Bibles (e.g., ESV, HarperCollins, HCSB, NET w/ full notes: most in $10-30 range)
• Greek and Hebrew Bibles (SBLGNT for free; BHS, LXX, NA27 also available in morphological versions w/ lexicons: $30-75 range)
• Commentaries, dictionaries, devotionals, eBooks, maps, Strong's resources available
• Josephus and Philo (English) are free
• Android development lags behind iPhone/iPod Touch and earlier PalmOS and WinMobile, but they are busy expanding capabilities for Androi
• Many non-English Bibles available
• I have been a long time user of OliveTree, and I appreciate the ability to move my library from one platform to the next. (Palm > Axim > DroidX) I'm using versions I purchased previously like the NRSV and BHS, and the new SBL GNT is also on my DroidX. I have Philo and Josephus there too. The only problem is that I had purchased the Gramcord NT with its morphological analysis and dictionary, but this is not available on Android. They now offer a new morphologically tagged GNT (the Greek New Testament (NA27) with Mounce-Koivisto Morphology and UBS Dictionary), but it's still rather expensive, even with an upgrade path they offer. Given all the work OliveTree has done, their longevity in the business, and the wide collection of resources they offer, this one comes highly recommended.

CadreBible

http://cadrebible.com/index.php

"Over 60 Bibles, Dictionaries, Commentaries and Books available for offline reading"

Free versions include: ASV, KJV, NA26 GNT, Westcott-Hort NA26/UBS3 GNT, Scrivener GNT,

NET (w/ limited notes), Tanach (public domain Hebrew), LXX, Vulgate,

Search, bookmarks, notes, sharing, highlighting, reading plans

Parallel view (translations and/or commentaries; e.g., I have Gen 1:1 on screen showing NET, LXX, Hebrew, Vulgate!)

Can synchronize with Evernote

Non-English Bibles available

I am keeping this one on my DroidX because, as far as I have found, it's the only one to have a free LXX and Hebrew text. What's more, the Parallel view feature is extremely helpful to have Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English versions of a verse all on screen together

Biblical Studies and Technological Tools: Bible Software for Android

Marvel's Digital Comics Strategy: Making Sense of the 5 Ways to Buy - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Comics Alliance has posted a great article about Marvel Comics' strategy for digitally distributing their comic books. This article discusses a lot of repercussions for digital distribution for a lot of different types of media. They pointed out some things about Marvel's strategy.

Rather than embracing something like Amazon's "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" approach for Kindle books, Marvel has instead turned to "Buy Once, Read on One Specific Device." Marvel desperately needs to put those user accounts to good use and begin behaving like Amazon. What they have now is a confusing mishmash of apps and libraries, like a fistful of puzzle pieces that don't fit together.

Going with "Buy Once, Read Everywhere" would make Marvel's digital comics program much more attractive. Instead, we're stuck with varying price points, varying libraries, and varying user experiences. Something's got to give.

Read More: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/02/07/marvel-digital-comics-buy/#ixzz1DPMvPusd

I agree with Comics Alliance. I agree with them that Marvel is making a mistake and I wish they would follow DC Comics' and Amazon's Kindle strategy of buying content once and being able to read it on any hardware you own.

Marvel's Digital Comics Strategy: Making Sense of the 5 Ways to Buy - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Blogger Buzz: Introducing Blogger Android App

Finally the App for Blogger I have been waiting for!!!!

Blogger Buzz: Introducing Blogger Android App

Related articles

• Blogger Launches Android App (intomobile.com)
• Introducing Blogger Android App (buzz.blogger.com)
• Blogger Android App finally emerges, lets you publish on the move (downloadsquad.switched.com)
• Blogger Gets an Android App (readwriteweb.com)
• Blogger's Android App (googlesystem.blogspot.com)

Digital December: Do You Really Own Your Digital Comics? - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Comics Alliance continues asking the hard questions regarding digital publishing and distribution. While the article is regard to comic books, the things discussed are applicable to all media distributed digitally. Well worth the time reading.

Digital December: Do You Really Own Your Digital Comics? - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Blogger Buzz: Discover Your Blog's Community with OneTrueFan

OneTrueFan has been added to my blog. I added because I would love to be able to get more feedback from people who visit and read my blog. I appreciate everyone who stops by even those who disagree with me and the things I believe. This is why I have an open policy for those who comment. You can say anything you want and interact as you see fit. I've implemented OneTrue fan because it allows even more reader interaction. IF you look at the bottom of the browser as you scroll down you'll see a window that allows people to join the service for free and share the links that they have shared from the blog.

Readers earn points for coming to your site each day, reading content, sharing links and driving traffic to your site. The ten readers with the most points show up in a leaderboard, but those points only last for 14 days. Readers need to keep coming back because fanship is an ongoing process.

I think what I would like to do sometime in 2011 is offer prizes to readers in the reader board. I'll make an announcement when I know more information. Please feel free to follow the link below to learn more about the OneTrueFan service. Maybe you might like to add the service to your own blog(s).


Blogger Buzz: Discover Your Blog's Community with OneTrueFan

The State of Digital Comics: Censorship, Price, Distribution, and More - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

David Brothers' article on Digital Comics isd awesome. It's worth reading even if you dislike comic books. Why? Simple. It's about distributing and selling intellectual property digital format over the internet. The implications are enormous for everything: newspapers, magazines, movies, books, and music. Much of the points discussed have applications well outside of comic books. Brothers wrote:

Right now, digital comics are like a rock sitting on top of a hill, just inches from tipping over the edge. Digital comics are full of potential energy that's just waiting to explode into something new, but it will take nurturing, careful choices, and a willingness to break from tradition to make it work. Full penetration for the market is going to require relatively cheap reading devices, an audience that has been educated about the pros and cons of digital comics, a price point that customers and publishers find appealing, and some kind of standard format that scales across platforms and provides a chance for an open source solution to prevent monopolies.

We're living in exciting times, and digital comics may be the most important development in comic books since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman. It has the potential to change everything, but if handled wrong, it will change nothing. Staying educated about the risks, rewards, and vagaries of digital comics can only be a good thing, especially when you decide to take the plunge yourself.

We're obviously very pro-digital comics at ComicsAlliance, but no one actually believes that digital comics will destroy print comics. What's more likely is that the two would exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. Maybe some monthly comics will turn a profit digitally and end up in deluxe trades down the line. Maybe digital comics will provide an easy way to enhance printed stories. Right now, we don't know. We can guess, but most of all, we can hope.

Very thoughtful indeed!!!

The State of Digital Comics: Censorship, Price, Distribution, and More - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews

Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament: Biblical Fonts

Image via Wikipedia

Dr, Mariottini has been kind enough to point out some great Greek and Hebrew fonts. I'm real grateful because I'm sure I'm going to be publishing more Greek and Hebrew words as my study in those languages continue.

Dr. Claude Mariottini - Professor of Old Testament: Biblical Fonts

Welcome to BibleTech : 2010

Welcome to BibleTech : 2010

Powerpoint Tool Showcasing Makayla

Okay, I have found a really cool tool for sharing powerpoint presentation. You can present them online live. You can embed them in blog/website or convert them into YouTube videos. Best part: It's free. This is a powerpoint that Mitsouky put together of our daughter using pictures from the first few weeks of her life.



Uploaded on authorSTREAM by mmcelhaney

2009 Inauguration Redux

It turns out that Microsoft's Photosynth is not the only way to come up panoramic HD pictures. If you recall, CNN used Photosynth to put together thousands of photos of the moment Barack Obama took the oath to become President of the United States in to a single high-def image. Turns out that there is another competing software out there that allows you do the same thing. It's called GigaPan. It not only allows you to find and share high-def panoramic pictures in a user committee like Facebook or Filckr, but also allows you to learn how to make your own. To be honest, the GigaPan way seems more intensive than than Microsoft's approach. Here is how GigaPan describes it's process. With Photosynth, the software does most of the work and you can take photos from different sources.


The GigaPan process engages with you in four steps:

1. Explore

Starting right now, you can search, browse and explore all of the panoramas that are available on the GigaPan sharing site. Dive into the panoramas to explore for yourself, or explore other users' snapshots to see what others have found.

2. Discover

As soon as you create your free user account, you can not only explore, but you can also annotate and share your discoveries by creating new snapshots and describing what you have found. This is a way to take part in the GigaPan community even if you have not done panoramic photography yet.

3. Create

We are pleased to announce that large-scale production of the GigaPanTM robotic camera mount is underway. The GigaPanTM robotic camera mount is capable of capturing multi-gigapixel, explorable panoramas with many compact digital cameras. The GigaPanTM robotic camera mount is manufactured and sold by GigaPan Systems.

You don't need specialized GigaPan hardware to take your own panoramas. If you have lots of patience, a high-quality digital camera, and a good tripod (or very steady hand!) you can take hundreds or thousands of overlapping, zoomed-in pictures for a gigapixel-scale panorama, then use off-the-shelf stitching software to combine the images into one very high-resolution panorama for upload.

4. Share

Once you create your free account, you can download our free upload tool to enable you to take any panoramic, high-resolution image and add it to the GigaPan sharing site for community exploration, annotation, and discovery.

Here is an example from their site - a shot of the Inauguration by David Bergman.

Marvel Motion Comics

Marvel.com has announce a new direction Marvel - a hybrid of comic books and animation. They call it "Motion Comics". What it is an online product that takes the flat artwork of comics and add animation and voice and music. It reminds me of the first cartoons based on Marvel Comics characters, only better animated. I like the idea. I want to see more. Here is trailer for the technology

Script for the "Dark Knight"

Warner Brothers has released the script for Dark Knight. I downloaded it and then put it on my Issu.com account.

Get your own - Open publication

Heroes Online Comics

On one hand, NBC has supported the show Heroes extremely well...especially in providing fun interactive content for the Internet. You can get interactive web comics that have voice overs, sound effects, and great art. They expand the story and sometimes feature characters that are not in the TV series. You can even download the stories as standard comic books. They are really well done and are released once a week. You can find all of this material at the official site.

Awesome Web Publishing Tool.

I have just found out about a new publishing tool for the web. It's called Issuu. It's free to use and to join. It allows you to generate and build your own online books and magazines! I really like it!! You can make and share your own content and have access to the magazines and book created by people from all over the world for free. Some of the content is very good! You can even post content from the site on your blog or website! You can even print pages that you want.

Now the bad news: This service is meant to be free and cannot be used in and of itself to generate income...not like the tool I shared in a previous post. And I can see no way to put video or audio into your publication. But If you just want to share some content that would have been deployed in a printed format on a global platform, Issuu is your tool.

I have an example I'd like to share. I did not make this but it led to me finding out about Issuu. I mentioned that I attended Wondercon earlier this year. The organization behind it, called ComicCon, publishes a magazine and in it's latest issue they summarize the event I attended. I had a great time.

Get your own - Open publication

By the way, you can click on it to open another larger window so it's easier to read!

Mugen Character Development Part 1 - Black Panther

Disclaimer - I thought I would start posting the development process for making my first development character. If you are not interested in mugen or video games please feel free to ignore these.

Still here? OK, good. One of the first things you need to make mugen characters is what are called "sprites" the art of the characters. They are typically several pictures of the character is various poses and positions that can be animated together. This for me is the hardest part because I'm not much of an artist. Sometimes sprites are posted by people that can be used. I thought that I could use some of those to make my own characters and save the hard part of art later. Much of these completed sprite sets are of characters that are already complete. I have been thinking about what the Black Panther character should be able to do. The suits claws on his costume is made of vibranium so when he blocks he should be able to cancel out energy based attacks I'm thinking about a few special moves right now:

1. Double -strike Claw to his opponent - high
2. Double -strike Claw to his opponent - low
3. He runs up to his opponent and throws multiple combinations of punches and kicks for several seconds causing maximum damage.
4. He flips backwards over his opponent striking high with the claws
5. He flips forwards over his opponent striking high with the claws

As of yet. I have been able to find only one Black Panther sprite. It is pictured above and I found it at the Scrollboss website.

A cool applet

I found the following applet on Iron Man Armor. It is great! I also highly recommend the site. Go ahead and play with it. Move your mouse around. You can find the applet at the following url: Java Boutique

New Tekkaman Blade Gif

Good news! I've found a way to update the previous gif I made by getting rid of the Black Background! I used Paint.net and it took all of a minute on each image to pull off.

Animated Gifs

Back in the day (say 1996) when you didn't have access to streaming video technology and FLASH, but you wanted to show moving images on a website what did you do? You used an Animated Gif. An Animated Gif is just a collection of images that the web browser plays to give the impression of movement...same way television and movies work. Today, we have many more options. Do you use a Java Applet? What about FLASH? Why not just stream the video over the Internet in real time? How do you know which to use? Everyone has their own opinions. If the media is short and doesn't need sound, I like to use Animated Gifs to save on bandwidth. They are perfect as avatars on social networking sites and forums. If I need sound but it's still short, I like to use Java applets because you can even have interaction. I think more people are using FLASH in this situation but I am personally more familiar with the applet route. If I don't need interation but the media needs to be television quality or better in audio and video, and the media is several minutes long, I like to stream it over the Internet from YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, GodTube, and VM Direct or from a site or blog that allows embedding. In this day and age you find that you sometimes have a file in one format but you need it in a different one. No Need to panic because somewhere somehow someone has written software to do the converting for you.

Here are some animated Gifs I created:

So what is the difference between and Animated Gif and an AVI (video file). Look below




The Gif is on the left. The video is on the right. The video can be longer and moves a little smoother.

I decided to go back to animated gifs when i realized that they could be used to make mugen characters and vice versa. I've decided to make a character from which I can get sprites before I try something like Black Panther that has fewer than no sprites. I like the Anime series Tekkaman Blade. I have found no Tekkaman Blade character but I did find a Super NES video game based on the series. I can get my sprites from there!

Here is an example of sprites gleaned from the game and about 11 of them animated together. I still need to learn how to make the background transparent. Mine is on the Right.

Here are some informative links for learning how to create Animated Gifs:
So, You Want An Animated .gif, Huh?
Tutorials: Sprite Ripping
Make Animated Gifs
Ripping and Using Sprites

Software that you may want (Just "Google" them):
ImageTasks
GIF Construction Set Professional
Easy Graphic Converter
Ulead GIF Animator
Free FLV to AVI Converter
Any Video Converter
Free FLV Player
SWF and FLV Toolbox
Camstudio

My Second Animated GIF

Here is my second attempt at making an animated GIF. It's the same except I made the background transparent. I plan to make more of them in the future. Especially when I get my Black Panther mugen character working.