If I had a dime for every time I heard someone in ministry say that they did not pray as much as they thought they should, I’d be doing ministry in the Caribbean somewhere or maybe a cruise minister.  Permanent vacationing aside, most of us really do want to pray more.  My bet is that you feel you’d do it more if you just had something like, say, a text message to jog your memory.

That is exactly what Echo Prayer Manager does: it reminds you to pray via email or SMS.  After signing up for the free account, you enter your prayer requests choosing how you want to recieve the reminder (email or SMS) and how often (more, normal, less, or non-random).  Then you go over to the reminders area and decide when is the best time in each day for you to be reminded to pray.

Here’s the genius thing, unless you tell it otherwise, it reminds you of a random prayer request from your list at that time!  Of course you can ask it to remind you to pray for your friend at the exact moment he is getting his appendix removed, but the real genius is that once you decide when you want to remember to pray, you don’t have to also decide which prayers to pray at which moment.

There’s also a prayer journal where you can keep more detailed info on the prayers.  The only thing I wish it did was have some group option to be able to use it to remind a whole prayer group and an iPhone app for adding new requests, but there’s always future updates to look forward to.  Check it out at www.echoprayer.com And, let me know see any cruise ministry openings!

It’s my experience that I can often tell when a site is going to spam me. However, there are those times when I need something, and the site requires me to fork over my email and “verify” it forcing me into the conundrum of deciding between and endless barrage of spam and whatever I think I “need” from the site.  This is where Mailinator comes in.  You simply give anything @mailinator.com … anything you choose… and Mailinator will have your email waiting for you when you surf over to their website:mailinator.com. Once you check your email you can have it deleted or just leave it and Mailinator will automatically delete the email in a couple of hours.

Of course there are other applications for this like giving a “persistent” teenager the wrong address or giving it to a vendor at a conference to obtain a free glowing pencil topper, but we do not endorse or participate in anything like that here.  It’s just a quick tip.  And it is FREE!

Though I have not received a kindle from a secret santa or generous church member, I have bought a handful of Kindle books to read on my iPhone.  I know that some people really don’t like the idea of reading on a backlit screen, but I find it less of a strain on my eyes than the hour or so I spent focusing on the lower contrast Kindle screen.

I LOVE the idea of the Kindle, but have a hard time justifying spending $259-489 on something that is solely for reading text. On the other hand, the iPhone screen is just small enough to become annoying when you are trying to read for an extended amount of time.

While doing some of my almost weekly ordering on Amazon, I noticed a “Kindle for PC App” link, downloaded the app and was excited, but not for long.  The app is simple, and focuses on one thing: reading a book.  It does well at that though it has a serious lack of polish.  Polish is one thing; functionality is another.

One of the books I have purchased is a textbook for seminary.  You can imagine how excited I was to be able to use my laptop to view it and make notes.  Wrong!  All the app does is view the text, bookmarks and notes you have created elsewhere.  This does not make sense.  If I can make notes on my iPhone, why not my Laptop?  It feels like Amazon is getting to preoccupied with selling the Kindle hardware (which is begging for someone to come along and perfect it) instead of the books.

The download is free and the app is stable, but don’t expect your book reader itch to be scratched by this app.  Also, it’s not currently available for Mac, but you can give them your email address here and have them send you a notice when it is released.

It seems that although everyone makes their forms downloadable online as a PDF, almost no one formats the files as editable forms that can be filled out within acrobat reader. This means I have to download the form, print it out, fill it out by hand, and then either walk it over to whoever needs it or scan it, save it, and attach it to an email. Sounds like it would be easier to just stop by the registration table and fill it out on the spot.  Formulate Pro fixes that problem.

I should say, that if you have Acrobat Pro, there is a typewriter and annotation tool that works relatively well, but at $449 from Adobe’s site, or $378 from Amazon, it is a little pricey just for filling out forms. That is where Formulate Pro comes in. This tool does one thing, and does it well. It allows you to type, draw and make check marks on top of the PDF.  Then, you can save it with those edits as a PDF of print it out. And, it’s free!

After downloading and installing the app it is as simple as opening the PDF, clicking the “T” (text tool) for typing, the squiggle tool for drawing, or the checkmark to check a box, then save or print. Right now, it’s only for mac, but the source code is available at GitHub.

I will be honest.  Today I took a longer than normal lunch so that I could watch live coverage of the Apple event on TWiT.  As a self-proclaimed fanboi, I was excited and intrigued by the latest thing I didn’t know I needed until Steve Jobs told me I did.

All joking aside, this is an interesting device.  Apple is positioning it as a media player, content creator, book reader, and TV.  It’s a lot to fit into something .5″ thick, but they seem to have done a pretty good job.  You can go to Apple’s iPad site for all the gory details and places like Engadget and TUAW for even more.  But here’s a brief overview:

1. It has a pretty 9.5 x 7.5″ LCD screen with an iPhone-style capacitive touch interface (there is a pretty wide bezel, but the people who have played with it say that it makes sense because you have to have some place to hold it without touching the multi-touch screen).
2. The screen is 1024 x 768 pixels which mean that HD movies are going to look pretty good on your lap.
3. It will have a full browser, email app, photo app, notes app, etc (think iphone standard apps).
4. They have totally revamped iWork’s UI to make it intuitive on a touch screen. Even keynote’s graphics-intensive elements seem to work without a strain.
5. It will have a new app called iBooks that is a book reader as well as an iBook Store.  They have already secured major US publishers and are adding more.
6. It has built in speakers (and 3.5mm headphone jack), mic and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR but no camera (there is no way this will be absent from the 2.0 release)
7. It will output VGA and standard A/V cable.
8. There will be models with 16, 32 and 64 GB of storage available.
9. It will have wifi built in and an optional 3G modem.
10. There will be a dock, keyboard dock, and case (with stand) available.
11. Though they released an updated SDK today, almost all iPhone apps will work on the device and can be used in their native size or at 2x to come closer to filling the screen..
12. Apple says it has 10 Hours of battery life (doesn’t seem like this is possible, but no one has them to test as of yet).
13. It will ship in 60 days starting at an un-Apple price point: $499

What it doesn’t have:

1. Multi-tasking
2. Support for flash
3. Across the board true GPS (only available in 3g model which is $130 more)
4. USB ports
5. Did I mention camera!??!

Now, that is a lot, but there are several things that are unclear:

1. Will it have the ability for external storage?  There are adapters that allow you to connect  USB and SD to the 30-pin iPod connector, but Apple says they are for importing pictures.
2. Will it sync with Mobile Me?  They say it will sync with a computer, but did not mention their “cloud” service.
3. Will there be magazines?  It seems logical, but was not announced.
4. The hands on experience.  This one is big, until people get to really sit down with it, we won’t know exactly how reality stacks up with apple’s claims

Overall, I am interested in the product, but I will probably not buy one for one simple reason: Apple’s second generation is usually far better than the first.  I did the same thing with the iPhone, and I got the 3G, and am not disappointed.

Apple generally sacrifices features for stability and user experience on the 1.0.  After they work out all the bugs, they release a product that seems complete.  The iPhone 3g added GPS, third party apps, streaming audio over 3g, push e-mail, and other niceties.  I fully expect the iPad 2.0 to have a camera, (maybe even two) some form of external storage (if that is not part of this version), higher quality screen (OLED?), and a couple more pieces of glory that I can’t forsee right now.

Bottom line: should you seriously consider buying it?

• If you were considering a netbook because of it’s size: yes.
• If you wanted a netbook because of its price and storage capacity: no.
• If you were considering a new laptop and do not need video editing or large amounts of storage (in other words you primarily use it for email and word processing): yes.
• If you have a church administrator who loves Apple and will let you play with $500: yes
• If you use keynote for your talks and cant afford a macbook but want something more portable than a mac mini: yes.
• If you need to run any traditional apps like Photoshop, Final Cut, etc.: no.
• If you were considering an ebook reader but couldn’t justify almost $300 on something for that single purpose: yes.
• If you are secretly in love with Steve Jobs and want to show him your undying devotion: yes.

There you have it.  Let us know what you think!  Although I said I was not buying one for myself, you are more than welcome to send me one in the mail, I would not even come close to turning it down… I am a fanboi after all.

I’ve seen many little utilities/preference panes I could install that would show me extra details on memory usage, cpu temeprature, hard disk availability, and everything else under the sun. iStatMenus puts it all into one nice package and displays all of them in your menubar. Though it has far more that would be interesting to get into here, here’s a list of what I like best about it:

1. You can view multiple CPU cores as one item or multiple graphs.
2. The memory usage meter will display your top five processes.
3. HD USage will monitor your mobile me space as well.
4. Network drop down shows peak as well as current bandwidth.
5. Every sensor from temperature to exhaust fans is available for monitoring.
6. The best date and time display.  It drops down a full month calendar with user defined alternate times as well.
7. Every item is configured via one preference pane in system preferences.

The best part?  It’s free!!  So, if you need to monitor your stats or just change your date and time display to a more helpful configuration, go to iSlayer.com and download iStatMenus.  Available for Macs only.

I have had an idea/problem that I have been percolating on for a while now.  The basic idea was that I wanted to have copies of several specific folders on specific, different external storage solutions so that I could have them with me when I needed them.  Complicating this problem is the fact that I am lazy.

Of course, I could copy my documents folder the the thumb drive every couple of days, my video clips to my external HDD every time I added a new clip, and my seminary files to the small thumb drive each night before I went to bed, but that would take both time and discipline. The only thing I have less of right now than time is backup discipline.

That is how I ran across what is hands down the best Mac sync utility I have found: ChronoSync.  It does the standard things like let you schedule a sync or backup with a drive every X number of hours/days/weeks/etc.  But it has one incredible function that sealed the deal for me.  I can schedule a sync to happen whenever the target drive is mounted.  Now, whenever I plug in one of the aforementioned devices, the specific files on my computer I want synced with that device automatically get updated and update the external storage.  This, of course, reinforces my confidence in the idea that if I wait long enough, I will find a way to allow my computer to make up for my laziness.

But that is far from all the features of ChronoSync.  It will make bootable backups, lets you specify a range of methods for the sync process including ignoring deletions so that an accidental deletion in one location does not eliminate the file across all your storage.  It will create archives (think time machine) and connect to almost anything you can think of from webdav servers to all the computers you can “see” in the finder.  For those of you who really want to geek out, it has incredibly detailed filtering that will let you specify exactly what you want to backup.

The only con I could find is that the interface is not as intuitive as it could be.  For instance, several of the options at the top of the screen (trial sync, schedule, etc.) are grayed out until you save the sync you are creating. Similarly, several of the terms they use to describe the options are unclear (mirror, sync, blind) but explained well in the documentation.  All that being said, the program’s power and overall ease more than make up for the UI, and ChronoSync is well worth the $40.  There is a demo downloadable here.

While I was skimming the latest issue of Group Magazine, I found a great blurb by Lyle Huddlestun about a website called Wordle.net.  When you create your wordle, you can either input a bunch of text, input the url of your blog or your del.icio.us username and it generates one of these interesting images(The above image was generated by auto-scanning this blog).  The size is based on the word’s frequency, and the colors, word orientation, and font are set by you.  If you don’t like the first shot, just have it re-layout until you see one you like!  And, if you like it all, but want to delete one misspelled or embarrassing word, just click on it and remove it.

What’s even better, you don’t have to sign up to make them.  It’s totally free!  From volunteer encouragement to cool covers for the material you are writing/borrowing, this tool is worth taking a look at.

btw… I have been a bit silent lately as we just had our second child (Hannah-Claire0 and are finally getting adjusted to the chaos and lack of sleep.  (Pics)

Have you ever remembered reading something in one of your books, and maybe even remembered which book, but had no idea which of the couple hundred pages housed the beloved content?  Don’t try the index or thumbing through the pages, simply go to books.google.com.  There you can search within books to find where the content lies.

This works best when you have the book because many of the selections indexed by Google Books do not have full previews; however, the limited preview is more than enough to put you on the right page.

If your book is not available on Google Books, make sure you stop by amazon.com.  Most books that have the small “look inside” logo over the cover image will provide a similar search to help you find what you are looking for.

If you are anything like me, every time you go on a camp or retreat, you come back with tons of photos (about ten of which are usually any good) and maybe even some video.  Of course you want to do something cool with them, and every once in a while, you take the time to create a video that is a mashup of your pictures, videos, and some recent Christian Music.  Most of the time, your schedule rules out doing anything of the sort.

That is where Animoto comes in.  This snazzy little web tool allows you to upload photos and video, and then creates a really slick looking video of them.

You start by uploading pictures (no larger than 5MB each) and videos (no larger than 200MB each).  You can then set what portion of the videos you uploaded you want to include.  Once you have all your files uploaded, it’s time to select your music.  You can upload your own track or select from their collection.  If you are looking for Christian music, they have 27 selections ranging from Toby Mac to Christ Tomlin (who should be on your playlist).  All that’s left at that time is to determine your speed and cover image at which point their servers take over rendering an impressive video with a cool soundtrack.

The finished video is ready for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, email, and even exporting to YouTube and Smugmug.

Sounds too good to be free right?  Well that’s where you’re wrong and right.  This is a freemium service.  You get all the photos and videos you can cram into 30 seconds for free, and if you want to make a longer video (up to the length of your song), the cost is $30 (the All-Access Pass) for all you can eat for an entire year… seems like a steal to me!  In addition to making longer videos, the All-Access Pass allows you to download the videos though they will only be 432×240 h.264 mp4s.  If you want dvd quality, you can pay $5 per video for the upgrade.

This site focuses on speed and ease of use.  Which means that you do not get a whole lot in the way of editing control.  As a matter of fact, you get NO control.  If you don’t like the transitions or timing, your only option is their “one-Click Remix” that sends it through their randomizer again to hopefully spit out something you’ll like.

However, if you want to be able to make a quick video about last week’s trip for this week’s worship service and have less than zero time, Animoto is a great choice, and an incredible value.  Check it out!