Tech Tips for Catholics

Every Friday I post the top 5 favorite blogposts that I’ve come across throughout the week. You have all weekend now to check them out : )

1. The Top 5 Catholic Web Apps of 2009
2. Drupal: 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS!
3. Short Video of Nicholas Hardesty’s Wedding
4. Jorim’s List: Parents, do you know the content of your child’s video game wishlist?
5. Google Wave Anyone?

*Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

Every three months, our local Knights of Columbus council would sponsor a speaker for our Defending Our Faith night. This one particular night I was pretty excited, because one of my all-time favorite Catholic speakers was coming to our Parish. I arrived early, only to find a table of youth group kids eating pizza. Now even though I was in my mid-twenties, I had the appearance of a youth group kid and was invited to join the pizza-eating festivities. Don’t mind if I do : )

A man wearing a suit and a really cool mustache came and sat down at our table—as if I have the right to say that I was a part of this fine group of young people.  This man started to tell a story of Christ’s crucifixion in a way that I had never really heard described.  He then engaged us in an intriguing conversation that reminded me of  something C.S. Lewis might have said.  This man introduced himself as Dr. Ray and he proceeded to eat delicious pizza with us.

He looked different than what I had imagined his voice to be on the radio.  Dr. Ray Guarendi is one of the hosts of “The Doctor is In”, which I was an avid listener to on Living Bread Radio.  On the show, he takes calls relating to parenting, family relationships, homeschooling, adoption, and sometimes questions about our faith.

Over the year’s, Dr. Ray has appeared on national radio and television, including Oprah, Joan Rivers, Scott Ross Prime Time, 700 Club, Gordon Elliot, and CBS This Morning. He has also been a guest on regional radio and television shows in over 40 states and Canada.  Dr. Ray has authored several books, including “Discipline That Lasts a Lifetime”, “You’re a Better Parent Than You Think!”, “Back to the Family”, “Good Discipline, Great Teens”, and his newest book, “Adoption: Choosing It, Living It, Loving It”.

Dr. Ray Guarendi has a doctorate degree in clinical psychology and is the father of 10 adopted children.  I would say this makes him qualified!

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Last year or so, I attended the Media & Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.  The conference featured several well known freelance authors and journalists, a television news anchor, independent video producers, podcasters, bloggers, and students and faculty from surrounding Christian colleges.

These are the only pictures that half turned out from this fun-filled event! I had boughten a cheep B&W throw-away-camera at a gas station on the way there, because I realized that I had forgotten our digital at home : (

I really enjoyed this conference and getting to meet so many new friends. It was also really cool hangin’ out with all the SQPN people!  There were many non-SQPN speakers that were also excellent. Sherry Kennedy Brownrigg and Michael Kreidler were of my favorites.  I also got to hang out with my cousin Ross, who is a graduate of Steubie U, and spent some time in Prayer & Adoration too!

Me & Fr. Roderick Vonhögen of SQPN.com

George Leite of the Catholic Rockers Podcast, Dr. Paul Camarata of The SaintCast, Myself of The Perseverance Podcast, and Fr. Bill Kessler of TechnoPriest.

Me with Jennifer & Greg Willits of the Rosary Army Podcast. If I would have known they were smiling so nicely, I wouldn’t have thrown two thumbs up (which were cropped out of the picture)! Hints why my smile is such a weird looking one : )

Some friends I met from Lancaster, PA!

I finally got around to posting some of the talks from this conference onto the world wide web.  Here is the opening talk by Fr. Roderick.  You can view this talk in its entirety here.

There used to be some of the other talks on uStream, however they have since been taken down, which is kind of sad. I did some searching on YouTube, but the only video that I was able to find was this video by Susan Bailey.

Here is the list of talks that were taken down from uStream: The closing talk with Rosary Army and the open-forum with a pannel from SQPN. “Web 2.0: Challenges and Opportunities” presented by Eugene Gan, David Schaefer, Ruth Lang, Wally Metts. “To Liturgy…and Beyond: Boldly Bringing Catholic Music to the People” presented by Susan Bailey and George Leite. Friday Evening Opening Talk by Fr. Roderick Verhogen.

If anyone has this footage posted somewhere else online, let me know!  I’d love to link to it.

Every Friday I post the top 5 favorite blogposts that I’ve come across throughout the week. You have all weekend now to check them out : )

1. BXVI: Proclaim the Gospel on the “Digital Continent”
2. TheCatholicDirectory.com iPhone App
3. Ministry and connections in 140 words or less
4. Thesis on the Church & New Media
5. Protecting Our Kids in this Pornographic Culture

*Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

This tutorial will help you replace that “blank page” that comes up when you open a new tab in Mozilla Firefox.  There are a lot of add-ons that deal with the tab feature, including: Setting the “new tab page” to your homepage, Custom tab settings, or Removing the “new tab” button all together.  But, this tutorial is for the New Tab Page add-on.

As you see in the below screenshot, the page that opens by default (in Mozilla Firefox) is a blank page.

Step 1: Go get the New Tab Page (add-on).  Click on the “Add to Firefox” button and then restart Firefox.

Step 2: Once Firefox restarts, open a new tab (Ctrl+T).  You will see the custom page, but none of the “Favorite Sites” are filled in.  Click the “New Tab Settings” button at the bottom right of the page.

Step 3: On the settings’ page, click on the “Add Site” button and fill in the name and url of your top favorite site.  Click the “Add Site button again to add additional links to the list.

Step 4: When you are done, click on the “Save Settings” button.

Here is a screenshot of what your new tab’s page should look like when done.

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Every Friday I post the top 5 favorite blogposts that I’ve come across throughout the week. You have all weekend now to check them out : )

1. 14 Year-old Speaks Out about the Danger of Internet Creepers, Grateful for her “nosy mum”
2. Child Molesters, Anonymous Proxy Servers, and Spyware
3. GE VScan Portable Ultrasound (How great this device could be for the Pro-life Movement)
4. Twitter Founder Speaks About His Catholic High School
5. Creative Kids Spreading Awareness About Cyber Bullying

*Bonus Tweet

If you have a blogpost that you would like to share with me feel free to contact Catholic Tech Tips and I will get it.

Have a great weekend!

Joshua

In a fairly recent article, written by William J. Doherty, Ph.D., he points out the importance of eating meals as a family.  He says, “Research has continually confirmed that eating meals as a family affects nearly every area of a child’s life.  Kids who eat regular family meals get better school grades, are better off psychologically, receive better nutrition, don’t smoke as much or do drugs, and are less sexually active as teens.”  He goes on to say, “… it’s not only the quantity of family meals that contributes to their life satisfaction, but also the quality of meals. For years, experts on family meals have preached turning off the TV — but now texting, iPhones, and video game consoles also compete with family dinner.

Tom McGrath and Bret Nicholaus have teamed up to improve our “quality of meals” with The Meal Box.  The Meal Box contains 54 cards, each one featuring a creative question guaranteed to spark fun family conversation during family meals.  The questions, such as If you could have the voice of any famous person, whose voice would you have?, are sure to engage everyone in the family.  The reverse side of each card features a quick “Food for Family Thought” tip from family expert Tom McGrath.

“The Meal Box” card game would make a great expansion pack for the “Loaded Questions” or “Loaded Questions Junior Edition” Board Games!

And now, you can Get The Meal Box on your Kindle! This would be great for long, family road-trips.

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Today, you may have noticed that the leading, trending topic around lunchtime was “No God”.  Apparently, Christians all over Twitter tried to get the trending topic to be “No God, no peace; know God, know peace.”  Not a bad goal, except for the fact that Twitter only picked up “No God” and “Know Peace”.

But, I don’t think all has #failed.  More and more people are talking about it now than had the plan worked as intended.  It’s funny how God works.  He can take something bad and turn it into something good.

As always, feel free to comment. God Bless : )

Angela and Joshua (myself) have joined up to bring you a new micro-blog on Twitter called HolyRoadies.

Angela brings a healthy dose of Christian Rock tweets and I pretty much post stuff about Catholic/Christian Hip-Hop.

If I were asked, “Have you any Twitter tips for the Christian music community,” I’d probably answer this one of two ways:

• For the fan of Christian music, searching for #catholichiphop, #christianhiphop , #christianrock or #christianmusic on Twitter is a good way to read about the latest in the Christian music scene.
• Because we follow so many Christian artists, our Twitter stream is very wide and flows very rapidly—the chances of us seeing a general tweet from an individual band is slim-to-none.  So, for the Christian band or musician who has some news that they would like for us to share with our readers, they can either “@” HolyRoadies or direct message us by putting “d HolyRoadies” in front of their tweet (we must be following you to receive a direct message).

Follow HolyRoadies and pray for Righeous B!

Many of you know that my son Eric is in the throes of applying to college. It’s likely during the next several months that I’ll be writing a great deal on this topic, not only for those of you with high school seniors, but also for those with younger children too. You’d be amazed how quickly this process sneaks up on you, and it seems impossible to be “overprepared” to apply to college.

So many things have changed since I applied to college, including the many technological advances that now exist. So when I ran across this USA Today article this week entitled To friend or not to friend? College admissions in the age of Facebook, it caught my eye immediately. This article deals with the ethical issues that surround college admissions officers’ use of social networking sites. Here’s an amazing statistic from the article:

While 86% of college students have a Facebook account, according to a 2008 survey by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, only 13% of the 401 admissions officials surveyed this year say their schools have a policy about interacting with students on social networking sites, Olson says. “That’s the picture of the changing landscape that we are in right now.”

I’m certain that most of you with teens who are online are carefully supervising your kids’ use of tools such as Facebook. But it’s worth having a discussion today about the types of “friends” your child should be accepting online. We had a personal experience of this during the summer, when Eric received a personal letter from the Dean of Admissions at an Ivy League school. This professional shared all of the usual information about their wonderful college and then invited Eric to be his “friend” on Facebook. Thankfully, I was standing nearby when my son zealously grabbed the letter and headed to the computer. I was able to stop him and have an immediate conversation about the propriety of this use of Facebook. While I’m certain that the college official in question is likely simply using Facebook as another marketing tool, we were able to discuss the importance of Eric’s personal profile – both his own postings there and what his friends write on his profile.

It seems that history is now being written about the role of Social Networking profiles in the college admissions process. We’ve always discussed around our home the need for Eric to have the attitude that his Facebook profile serves in a way as his “online resume”. In other words, don’t post (or allow the posting of) anything you wouldn’t want a potential college or future employer to consider.

For those of you who use Facebook or have teens who are on any social networking site, I’m curious to hear how you handle these issues around your home. How do you regularly monitor your child’s online presence? Do you feel it is ethical for colleges and universities to consider information posted online as part of the application process? Please chime in with your thoughts!

This post is courtesy of the Productivity @ Home Blog.