I used Anthropic’s Claude today for the first time and it flat out invented quotes from Pope Benedict XVI. When I asked it for references, it apologized and said that was a summary of a statement he made but could not say where from. All of the links it referenced were old and none of them worked. Artificial, yes. Intelligence? 🤷🏽

OpenTable shows a decent amount of emotional intelligence with this email about Mother’s Day.

I cannot think of a single reason why I would need the Humane AI pin in a world where I have an Apple Watch or have AirPods in and also have a phone in my pocket. Assuming that Siri gets much better at stuff after the AI updates this year, as long as I have a way to control its functions without actually touching the phone, I don’t see why I would need to use the AI pin.

3.5 hours, 9 musicians, 3 separate worship teams, all set up with IEM and vocal and instrumental presets. Whirlwind of a rehearsal but so good.

I was pleasantly surprised at the level of detail in this article I found about why I need to cut down the extra tape every time I print a label. It’s an annoying thing to deal with when you are labeling sound equipment to always need a scissor even when there is a tape cutter on the actual printer. The article even explains why it’s necessary:

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/79756/~/why-does-a-one-inch-piece-of-blank-tape-feed-prior-to-every-label-that-prints

Meg Hunter-Kilmer's Bible in a Year Plan in Verbum/Logos

I recently started, and then failed to finish, the Bible-in-year reading plan by Meg Hunter-Kilmer. So I decided to make a Reading Plan inside the awesome Logos/Verbum app. Here’s what I did:

  1. I converted the Kindle version of the book I bought to PDF and then extracted out the pages with the reading plan. The plan is actually available for free on the page linked above, but the book is done in a Journal Style which is nice, and I already bought it. It also had an easier time exporting in the following steps.
  2. I exported the pages as a spreadsheet inside Adobe Acrobat
  3. I cleaned up the output into three columns and then, one-by-one, I copied the column to the clipboard and then pasted them inside separate Passage Lists inside Verbum. This took a little time, as there were sometimes missing entries (didn’t total up to 365). In those cases, there’s an option inside of the Passage List to export, and choose a Copy to Clipboard option. Pasting that in the column next to my original list showed why some of the passages weren’t found. In some cases the chapter numbers had been incorrectly changed to a letter, and in others, like the book of Daniel, some of the verses were not in the version of the text I had selected in the Passage List. It was easy enough to add those manually in the Passage List.
  4. I created a Custom Reading Plan and added each of the three Passsage Lists above using the option in the menu to add a Passage List.

This all worked surprisingly well and I now have a synced reading plan on all my devices with reminders to read every day!

If you’d like to use this in the Verbum app, you can access the document here.

I’m looking to build a pattern for helping my church audio/video clients put together documentation on how to use their AV systems and run their ministries, and I think I’m settling on Craft Docs. Their free plans are quite good and you get quite a lot of great features for a wiki-style but nice looking set of documents.

I’m so glad I pulled all my data off Reddit before I left. No way I want Google tuning their models from my posts.

Agility (what used to be Version One) is quite possibly the web app that I hate using the most. It has a ridiculous amount of wasted space on-screen and the description editor is so unintuitive that I edit somewhere else and copy/paste into the app. Unfortunately, my team is required to use it. Anyone have any good hacks to make this terrible product more usable?

Am I the only one who likes to read the release notes when there are updates to apps? I don’t read them all, but if something catches my eye I’ll read the update and manually update that app first.

A screenshot of the Apple App Store with a bunch of apps needing to be updated.

I prefer to listen to audiobooks using the excellent Prologue app, which works with an audiobook library on my Plex server. I buy DRM-free audio and host it myself so I always have access to my library.

Check it out: apps.apple.com/us/app/pr…

A screen shot of an app called Prologue that's currently playing an audiobook of The Warmth of Other Suns, a book by Isabel Wilkerson.

When you think you’re ordering three windscreens and you actually ordered three packs of four.

A box of 12 wind screens, way more than the author intended to buy.

Micro.blog Check-In Shortcut

Created a Check-In Shortcut that allows me to search for a venue, select it from a list, add a note, select a category, and then optionally upload a photo, and then post that info to a secondary (currently hidden) micro.blog blog. This blog has a customized theme optimized (sort of) for these check-ins. I’m still figuring out how I want to expose this to my friends. But the shortcut works really well and now I don’t have to rely on OwnYourSwarm to do this for me. The only thing missing right now is that there’s no link back to a website about the venue. I am going to clean up the shortcut and offer it up to share once I figure out how to do that 😆.

Update: Here is the link for the Micro.Blog Check-In Shortcut

I’m currently doing quite a bit of research on white-label social networks and white-label learning management systems. This post isn’t about the findings, which are not ready to share, but to remark on the fact that there are so many options and I find it hard to believe there is such high demand for these kinds of SaaS offerings. If you’re using a SaaS offering or self-hosted solution for courses or a private social network, please let me know!