.~Javier Plumey~.|Fatih, Technology, Politics, Whatever.

Sorry, I know this is silly, but I can’t help myself. I read this comment over at ChristianityToday, after reading a good review of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

New moon is demonic! You can justify it in your mind and water it down a million times but that won’t stop the effect it will have on you. It’s intentional by the devil to awaken the sextual desire in people mostly young people, to get your conscience use to, what is real bad become normal. WAKE UP peeps… be honest, it does affect you negatively. You don’t have to watch a movie like this to teach teenagers about love and brokeness. Halllooo…. life already does that! New Moon and Twilight is a really saying…. hey you, welcome to the dark side it’s good for you! Yeah well I don’t think so!

Just hilarious, if you ask me.

Like many parents now days, my son has been clinically diagnosed with ADHD. We’re working with the doctors and the behavioral specialists to keep him focused and to help him be his best, and to that end we have implemented a variation of a token system to help our son stay positive and to reward him for good behaviors.

Our token system is comprised of little pebbles that our son can collect when he was good days at school and when he exhibits behavior we are working on at home. He can then use these pebbles to buy certain privileges such as watching tv, playing video games, staying up past his bedtime, etc.

At home it’s easy to give him that instant feedback when he does well. He simply goes to the kitchen and gets his pebble. On the road and around town we have a hard time because we will either forget to bring his pebbles or his pebble bag. Enter Tally Counter for iPhone.

This is a free, dead simple app that lets you hit a big button to increase a counter. Whenever our son gets a pebble when we’re around town, I let him hit the button. The application also shows the counter value on the Home Screen by way of a badge. It’s easy to use and gives our son instant feedback when he does well, and when we get home, we have an easy way to tell how many pebbles he’s earned.

So the folks behind the famous Olive Tree Bible Reading software for iPhone and other platforms released an update (version 4.08) that features a sweet integration with Evernote.

Now you can take notes within the software and have them sync to a “Bible Notes” notebook within Evernote. It works VERY well. Not only is this a good way to keep your notes backed up, but now you can use your notes on any device Evernote supports. Plus, you can share your Bible Notes notebook and use it to publish notes for a Bible Study.

Here are some lovely screen shots.

Set up your Evernote account. Free version works just fine.

Bible Reader is really beautiful. If you haven’t forked over the cash to get it, please do it. It’s a great Bible.

Create a note.

Go to the Notes section under ‘Bookmarks and Notes’ and pull down the band.

It will go ahead and sync up to Evernote.

Your note(s) will show up in Evernote. Make an edit and re-sync.

At this point, you have your updated note.

You’ll see your updated note in the Bible upon clicking the snazzy note icon.

That’s all there is to it. I haven’t found a way to have it synchronize the notes automatically, but maybe that will come in the future.

… I used to blog. Sorry about that, but REAL life has gotten in the way of my digital publishing. Be on the lookout for two new sites from me: one professional and one personal. Lots more to come….

I almost regret sending you over to that site, but I wanted to post the comment that I made regarding a particularly ignorant comment on this post by Cristina Page. Go check it out, create an account, and post something yourself. Just don’t elect to receive their emails, they’ll send you more trash than your Inbox can handle.

“Considering that the average woman spends 23 years of her life trying not to get pregnant, the anti-contraception approach depends on a scourge of sexless marriages or a lot of wishful thinking.”

How grossly ignorant you are!  Ever heard of Natural Family Planning? There are natural forms of family planning that don’t require the use of medication or the use of unnatural devices during sex. The problem is that many of those natural forms require that couples be engaged in a committed relationship because they require communication and planning, two things that are not present in the “hookup” style of relationships used by many people that use contraception.

I dare you to look at the statistics around Natural Family Planning. You’ll find that couples that use NFP stay together longer, are generally happier, and that their use of NFP has the same percentage of success (or greater) than most forms of traditional contraception.

Having a problem uploading pictures to Smugmug from Picasa? I found that the pictures ended up in some funky, messed up order instead of how they appear in Picasa. I emailed Support and they responded very quickly with the following:

Thanks for emailing SmugMug. So this is actually an issue on our end
that we are working on the best way to sort out. When the photos are
uploaded they will sometimes get rearranged while they are being
processed on our end. For now I would suggest doing an arrange once the
images have all loaded into your galleries. I hope this helps clarify
things some. If we can do anything else for you please let us know.

What you can do get the default Picasa order is to go to Smugmug and open your gallery. Then:

1. Select Tools
2. Select Arrange, then Sort.
3. Select the arrange type (File name, Date Taken, Date Modified, etc.) and the Direction (Ascending or Descending)
4. Click Save
5. Enjoy your newly sorted pictures.

Smugmug is fantastic! If you don’t have a good way to share your photos online, go check them out at http://www.smugmug.com.

My five year old son is participating in the Advanced Reader program at school and in the Your Baby Can Read program. We bought the program for our pre-born child but we figured we would try it out with Lucas first. Plus, we have him learn and read from Dolch word lists so that he can increase his vocabulary and reading skills.

Well to manage all of these words I had planned on using one of the many flash cards app for the iPhone. Unfortunately most of the apps are not very good and the better ones are quite expensive, especially when you throw in the cost of the desktop editions. I looked at them all and actually started to use one called Study Aid. It’s good but it doesn’t support landscape mode and there’s no way to change the font size for the card.

Just when I had given up hope of having flash cards for my son’s words lists, I realized that the iPhone’s Photo library would work just fine if I could make images of all the words. Well, that would have been a pain in Photoshop or iPhoto so I came up with a little something to speed things up.

I wrote an AppleScript bundle that implements the ‘convert’ command from ImageMagick that creates iPhone-and-kid friendly images from a comma delimited list of words.

I created over two hundred images in about a minute and half. They’re easy to read and my son has a great time flicking through them on the iPhone.

Here are some examples:

Here are the links to download the Word lists:

Dolch 2.zip

Dolch 3.zip

YBCAN-Starter.zip

YBCAN-Volume 1.zip

YBCAN-Volume 2.zip

YBCAN-Volume 3.zip

You can also take a look at the words on my gallery at:

http://catholicplumey.smugmug.com/School

Finally, here is the app bundle. I don’t have the time just yet to post instructions on how to use it, but if you have a Mac and have ImageMagick installed, you can use it to create your own word images.

Create Word Cards.app.zip

Here’s the code:

–By Javier Plumey for www.javierplumey.com

property folder : “/Users/family/Documents/flash/”
property IM_BIN_FOLDER : “/opt/local/bin/”

–Change your options for the conversion command here.

property CONVERT_COMMAND : “convert -size 480X320 -gravity Center -background black -fill white”

–I found this replaceText script on the web somewhere but can’t remember where. If this is yours, let me know and I’ll give you credit.

on replaceText(find, replace, subject)
set prevTIDs to text item delimiters of AppleScript
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to find
set subject to text items of subject

set text item delimiters of AppleScript to replace
set subject to “” & subject
set text item delimiters of AppleScript to prevTIDs

return subject
end replaceText

set theWords to {}
set savedTextItemDelimiters to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to {“,”}

–Here’s your dialog where you enter in the comma delimited strings.

display dialog “Enter the words you want, separated by commas: ” & return default answer (theWords as string)

set theWords to text items of the (text returned of the result)
set theCount to length of theWords
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to savedTextItemDelimiters

if theCount is 0 then return

set theFolder to POSIX path of ((choose folder) as string)

repeat with theWord in theWords

–Yes Mac OS X supports spaces in file names but I was having a hard time getting the spaces to work with the shell script execute.
set theFilename to (get replaceText(” “, “_”, theWord)) & “.png”

do shell script “printf ” & quoted form of (theWord) & ” | ” & IM_BIN_FOLDER & CONVERT_COMMAND & ” label:@- ” & quoted form of (theFolder & theFilename)

end repeat

Autism Screening On Obama’s Health Agenda: “Autism screening and funding for treatment of the disease is high on President Barack Obama’s agenda for the nation’s health, and is the only disease or disorder called out on his new website, Whitehouse.gov, taking precedence even over cancer and heart disease.”

(Via ParentDish.)

See, I can agree with President Obama on some things. This is one of them. I have several friends with children who are autistic and I think that more testing needs to be done to help families identify autistic traits earlier in life. What I don’t want to see happen is what’s happened to ADHD diagnosis, where parents and medical professionals are too quick to render a diagnosis that requires medication. I don’t know too much about autism, but I’m hoping it has clearer symptoms and indicators than ADHD.

Obama: Parenting is a public service: “‘For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.’”

(Via Thingamababy.)

Parenting is much more than a ‘public service’, it’s the sacred and lasting act that stabilizes society, enriches the economy, and fosters an attitude of reverence for the sanctity of life.

We Catholics have been saying this for years! Parents who are involved keep their kids away from drugs, teach them how to pray, engaged them in extra curricular activities, encourage them to choose good friends, and overall prepare them for a healthy lifestyle once they leave the nest.

So if parenting is a public service, why is there a government trend to make parenting more difficult? Specifically, government:

- denies parents from using their tax money to educate their children at home or in the private school of their choice

- denies parents the ability to teach them their own values regarding same-sex marriage and sexuality in general (at least in the public schools)

- denies parents access to good healthcare by preventing health insurance providers from crossing state lines

- denies the importance of parenting by allowing the destruction of the lives of children

- denies public schools the ability to introduce wholesome, religious values to students by barring the use of God and prayer in the classroom

- devalues the importance of traditional parenting (i.e., a father and mother) by not protecting the sanctity of marriage

So if President Obama wants parents to feel proud about their vocation and wants to instill and inspire others to be good parents, he needs to provide a good example, yes, but he needs to equip them and protect the fundamental rights and needs of parents as well.

Paintballs Can Cause ‘Devastating’ Eye Injuries: “Paintballs can cause severe and ‘visually devastating’ eye injuries, especially when used in unsupervised settings without proper eye protection, reports a study in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.”

(Via ScienceDaily: Latest Science News.)

File this in the ‘Duh!’ category please? I remember I went paintballing once with a good friend. He was getting married and apparently thought it was a good idea to place his face, and other useful parts of his body, in jeopardy. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Still, does it take a genius to figure this out?