Links for Friday | 27th March 2015

Maybe you get time to do some reading on the weekends – Here’s my pick of some things to read on the web this week;

Video

  • If you want to spend a few minutes being inspired by incredible shots of the Isle of Skye in Scotland, this video is worth a watch. It also includes some pretty impressive mountain bike riding, but truly the views of scotland are enough to make even me nostalgic about our time living in Scotland.
Theology
  • Who’s side is God on? – Our friend Floyd McClung posted something written Greg Albrecht that invites us to re-examine the creeping sense that God is always on our side, whether individually, nationally or militarily.

  • Palm Sunday is coming up, and NT Wright, one of the most accesible and widely read new testament theologians around right now wrote an excellent piece on ABC Religion helping us to understanding the implications of Jesus’ unexpected entry to Jerusalem which bypasses much of the sunday school folk lore the christian calendar entry normally evokes.

  • Another NT Professor doing lots of writing these days is Scot McKnight, here he discusses 3 greek terms used for Church, and explores how each of them could impact our sense of who we are as the People of God.

Tech


This isn’t so much as something to read, but a little software solution to consider, Fantastical is an alternative calendar application for mac (they also have iphone and ipad apps). I’ve used a previous version of fantastical which sat in the menu bar, but this new iteration is a whole calendar application. The stand out feature that makes the software worth paying for over the existing calendar app bundled in with mac’s is whats called natural language parsing.

The most common time I need to put a calendar reminder in is either right when I remember something, or as I am talking to someone and they are inviting me to something. This is where ‘natural language parsing’ comes in. Normally you open a calendar app finding the day, then writing a title, selecting the time, not to mentioned, adding location, invites and maybe even a repeating option. Fantastical has an input bar and lets you write a sentence which is then scans for trigger words that select the options. For example, If I write “Meet with Oscar Foundation in Scarbourough next tuesday at 12pm for 3 hours”, It creates a calendar entry called Meet with Oscar Foundation, schedules it for the following tues, fills the locations out as scarborough1 beginging at 12 and ending at 3. You can also create repeating calendar entries, for example; ‘ Meeting with Oscar Foundation, every tuesday for the next 3 weeks’ and it will create a 3 events for you with the same info.

Miscellany

The UN and Ikea partnered to create a better alternative that the stock UNHCR tents that are synonymous in the west with conflict displacement news stories. Ikea used its knowledge in flat pack furniture and after testing in Iraq and Ethiopia, the UN has now ordered 10,000.

Ot arrive in 2 cardboard boxes which can be lifted by 4 people a box, and can be assembled by the same amount of people within 8 hours. It is designed to be used for upto 3 year and unlike the previous tents is setup to have locking doors, connection to solar power and the ikea instruction manual is all visual requiring no translation for deployment in differing language regions.

Found via Brett Jordan – Original article on Gizmodo


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