Howto

Bible Software in the Classroom

Computers in The Classroom

There's a post on the Logos Blog about Logos in the Classroom. Actually it's a commercial for a 15 minute talk by Senior VP Dale Pritchett, which itself is basically a commercial aimed at Seminary professors to convince them to replace their single classroom textbooks with the full Logos Digital Library. If you have the 15 minutes you should listen. If you only have about 7, do a quick read of the PDF transcript.
I have two simple observations to make.

Upgrade the audio please

The audio is probably over compressed. It's either that or the audio is the result of several takes and a bad patch job. Dale comes into various sentences sounding completely different and it seems with different breathing patterns; almost as if they've taken two or more clips and sliced and diced them into one speech. The only reason I mention this is because I found it annoying to listen to. I'm tempted to say it's over compressed because I've experienced the same phenomena with other Logos media. Michael Heiser's excellent lecture "The concept of the Godhead in the Old Testament" was plagued in it's Camtasia format with horrible over compression that introduced all sorts of nasty audio artifacts into the speech. It's worth downloading the MP3 on that one instead of listening to the stream.

Yes, But...

I agree wholeheartedly with the principle message of Mr. Pritchett's speech. But I also see a problem

How can I get PBB books to show up in the Libronix Passage guide?

One of the limitations of PBB's is that they do not automatically integrate with the passage guide. You can build a book which happens to be a commentary, but the coding for declaring it such to the program is not included in the PBB file. In other words, Libronix doesn't know if a PBB is a bible, commentary or an issue of Readers Digest. But don't fear, there is a solution!
Collect Your Books

First you need to create a collection of your PBB's you want on the passage guide.
Go to Tools > Define Collections Select NEW and name your collection anything you want such as "PBB books"
Then scroll through your list and add the PBB's you want in that collection.
Now you need to add that new collection to your passage guide.

Passage Guide Integration

Open your passage guide and click properties. A dialog opens up which enables you to choose what you want to have appear on your passage guide. There are two options now. At the very top you can choose now which collection shows up for commentaries and there you could select your PBB commentaries. This isn't a bad idea if you've been able to get every commentary into the collection, but what if you missed one? I prefer to just create a PBB group and put relevant PBB's in there. Keep the commentary section default and activate your PBB's further down.

The next time you generate a passage guide your PBB's will appear there.

Should you buy the Libronix Library Builder this Christmas?

Logos Library Builder: Volumes 4-6

It's a big question considering that the whole set can set you back $399.95  but if you're considering the Library Builder: Volumes 4-6 then I encourage you to take a look at this collection file I created which catalogs the set.  Using that I can show you how to make an informed decision easily.

Building the Best Libronix Compatible PBB

As far as I'm aware there are no comprehensive sources of information on the net for developing the highest possible quality Libronix compatible PBB's. There are however a few resources which are worth checking out first.

  1. Free Options:

Installing Gnu Screen on your Western Digital Mybook World Edition

There is a comment on Nanalegumene's site which says screen wouldn't work on the mybook so we should use dtach. I found dtach to be inadequate for my needs. So I decided to hack out a way to make it work.
About Screen

How To

Having gotten it working here's what I did (as root).

  1. mkdir /tmp/myfiles # Create a directory under /tmp called 'myfiles'
  2. cd /tmp/myfiles # Change to the directory in order to work there
  3. wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/screen/screen-4.0.2.tar.gz # grab the file
  4. tar -xvf screen-4.0.2.tar.gz # unpack the file
  5. cd /tmp/myfiles/screen-4.0.2 # change into the directory.
  6. ./configure # If you fail to include the "without" statement Time: 1m44.111s
  7. nano pty.c #now you have to edit the pty.c file using your favorite editor. You might have to use vi pty.c if you haven't installed nano. on line 38 it reads # include You have to comment that out by surrounding it with slash star as in: /* # include */. The reason being the make will fail because stropts.h is not included in your /sys directory. By examining the 38th line of pty.c we find that stropts.h is called when HAVE_SVR4_PTYS exists. I don't know how to counteract that another way besides removing that include. (source)