1 Corinthians 15:44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. We can readily see the importance of taking care of our physical/natural body. We must feed it, rest it, wash it, exercise it. Do we likewise take care of our spiritual body? How do we feed, rest, wash and exercise our spiritual body? We must feed it truth, learning, wisdom, and knowledge from books and other media. We must feed it good, uplifting, wholesome interactions with others. We rest our spiritual body with meditation, prayer, mindfulness, positive self ..read more

This is a quick post to show how to control movie playback with Processing. /** * Loop. * * Shows how to load and play a QuickTime movie file. * */ import processing.video.*; Movie movie; void setup() { size(560, 406); background(0); // Load and play the video in a loop movie = new Movie(this, "tac.mov"); movie.loop(); } void draw() { image(movie, 0, 0, width, height); if (mousePressed == true) { movie.play(); movie.read(); } else { movie.stop(); fill(0); rect(0, 0, width, height); } } Code language: Java (java) There’s the code. It’s the basic default code to show a movie. But what if you ..read more

Ammon and Jessica Shepherd Family Petra: So I went to school. And I was sooo excited, because I love school. When I was in the hallway near ms edwards, she said Hi Petra we have Alex already in our class. She’s staying her all week. This week. Then we did lots of fun games. We went to music and played with xylophones and glockenspiels. And we had this thing that said, it was a video actually, about Christmas music. And then we did tests, two tests, mostly math tests. Then we had two short recesses. Then we did lots of other math tests, then after all of them we did center time. I colored and ..read more

One of the biggest challenges when collaborating with others in developing software and websites is setting up the development environment. The good ol “it works on my machine…” problem. Well, this is no panacea for development, but it does a good job of setting up a basic environment pretty quickly. You’re in for a special treat, because I’m going to show you not one (1), but two (2) different development environments; one for PHP, MySQL, Apache and phpMyAdmin, and one for Python (Flask) and PostgreSQL with pgAdmin. Each of these in a Docker container for ease of use. Pre-requisites For any o ..read more

Have you ever felt like life was a roller-coaster? You have ups where life is going great. You’re on top of the world. Everything is going your way. You’re performing at peak at work, home, everywhere. Things couldn’t be better. It could be something simple like a job well done at work. Or it could be something huge like making a big sale. And then, the next thing you know, you are arguing with your spouse or children. Or you’ve got a cold or feel sick, or some other way the Universe is letting you know what “reality” is. Like someone or something is telling you, “don’t go feeling too comforta ..read more

Carnegie, D., Carnegie, D., & Thomas, L. (2019). How to win friends and influence people. This is a highly recommended book from many people. I had a hard time getting through it, though, based on the poor editing, and the plethora of spelling and grammatical errors. I get the appeal of presenting the work as if it were the actual lecture notes from Dale Carnegie himself (or should I write Dale Carnagey, which was his birth name until 1922 when he changed it, perhaps to have his readers subconsciously connect him with Andrew Carnegie?), but at least fix miss-spellings of famous places or p ..read more

I have a goal this year to read a book each month and then write up a review of that book by the 10th of the following month. I’m making it by the skin of my teeth this first time around. The book I read in January (actually started reading it in November or December last year) is The Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, by C. Terry Warner. This book teaches lessons and principles that I need so much to learn… The fundamental argument is that when we recognize the truth about ourselves and others (our connection as humans to each other through bonds of love ..read more

New Year and New Role It is my extreme pleasure to announce a change in roles for me (Ammon Shepherd) in the Scholar’s Lab. Beginning this new year, I will be the full-time Manager of the Scholars’ Lab Makerspace and the Lead Research Technologist. I started in the Scholars’ Lab 5 years ago as a Digital Humanities Developer, building websites, working on various projects, and helping to maintain our technical infrastructure. Since then I have enjoyed learning the technology and skills available in the Makerspace, and, like the metaphorical camel, I found a way to get myself all in. From the b ..read more

Sometimes the seemingly long way round is actually the quickest way. I recently had a project at work that returned a bunch of results from a Solr database. The results are processed by Javascript and written to the page. The original page I was recreating had paginated results (10 results to a page). I thought it would be too much work to get that written into the page, and wanted to just let the JavaScript write all the results to the page. Unfortunately, this meant some queries took up to a full 30 seconds to load! That’s an eternity for the web! After playing with the settings and differen ..read more

We’ve been introducing this idea of setting BEST goals to our kids, and they want a way to track it. So I whipped up this sheet to track two months of BEST goals. BEST-trackerDownload Just write your goals on the right side of the calendar. Remember, B = brain E = exercise S = spiritual T = talent Then track each day by writing in a B, E, S, or T if you worked on that goal. Simple, easy, progress ..read more