Archive for the 'Open' Category

DIY letterhead in OpenOffice.org

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Because sometimes you need a letterhead, here are directions using a popular free and open source office suite. I’ve used OpenOffice.org for years and recommend it; also, it has recently come out in a new version. (Hat tip.)

The Church’s questions about copyright

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

I really enjoy religious education professor Mary Hess’s Tensegrities blog. Yesterday she promoted a new World Council of Churches publication Love to Share, of which she herself is a contributor. You may download it here as a PDF and it is licensed in such a way that you may share copies.

Get past the typically overwrought […]

Folk Mass Hero

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Friday was a noteworthy day at Day Job and included — among other things — a lunchtime round of Guitar Hero. (Don’t ask.) I was very kindly asked to participate but

<li>the music associated with the game is very much what I call Straight Boy Rock, and I don’t care for it. (Had there been <em>Synth […]

Tiny church administration: making booklets

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

OK gang: I’m going to show you how to do something useful. Making booklets.

It takes essentially the same effort to make a four page order of service (folded over from a piece of letter paper/A4) as a 36 page booklet, and the uses shouldn’t be hard to imagine. Including a meditation guide or church directory. […]

Tiny Firefox diet hack

Monday, February 11th, 2008

You could use the Calorie King toolbar to look up the nutritional information of food — I record everything I eat — but I think that takes up too much monitor space.

Instead, I added Calorie King as a search engine in the pull-down search engine bar at the upper right hand side of my browser. […]

James Relly’s Union restored

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

A reader inquired about the copy of James Relly’s masterwork, Union: or, a Treatise of the Consanguinity and Affinity between Christ and his Church which I put up at my long-suffering UniversalistChurch.net site.

Seem that when I last updated the Drupal content management system, I somehow disabled the feature that allows me to store documents […]

UUMA letter: creative crisis control?

Friday, January 18th, 2008

I’ve got little to add to the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association decision to move their before-General-Assembly meetings to a location outside the port security area, and thus avoiding the brouhaha around an ID check for General Assembly proper. The UUMA decision seems right, the tone of the letter is appropriate and avoids it the […]

Wikipedia Day 2008

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Wikipedia, the community written and reviewed online encyclopedia, is seven years old today.

I think its value in collecting human knowledge is immense. (For as good as Google can be and for how much I use it, I’m a little chilled at its thrust towards amalgamating all data.) But it is more valuable being a […]

Why the license? The movie

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Or you can watch this three minute video. (The license in the video is an older version of the one I use. I forgot to mention that there are other options.) Oh, and yes this ethos is going to be part of the new church start.

Why the license? or, Scott Wells for the twenty-second century

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

A few minutes ago, my friend and colleague Victoria Weinstein, writing as PeaceBang, asked:

Maybe it’s my toddler-addled brain, but I’m confused. Excuse my ignorance, but I bet I’m not the only dummy out there on this. My main question is, “How does this change anything?” Because wouldn’t any ethical person attribute you appropriately even without […]


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States