096 – Failure For Free
This week the WELSTech podcast includes motivation to try something new for gospel outreach as well as an interview about midi music for worship.
Podcast: Download (27.8MB)
The discussion:
Do something! – Martin and Sallie return to their discussion of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, this time focusing on chapter 10, Failure For Free. In terms of ministry opportunities this chapter helps us realize that it’s easy and free for our outreach, communication and technology committees to brainstorm creative methods and test drive today’s digital resources as tools for sharing the gospel without fear of failure.
- WELSTech & YOU! – Help us celebrate WELSTech’s 100th episode by sharing your tech-in-ministry success stories via any of the WELSTech communication channels.
- One lucky contributor will win a WELSTech Sigg Water Bottle
The interview:
(16:00) Digital music for worship – Layman Danny Weymeyer from Good Shepherd in Deltona, FL joins Martin and Sallie to talk about the use of MIDI in worship settings, particularly when congregations do not have full time instrumentalist available for worship.
- Cakewalk sequencer software
- Request Danny’s MIDI CD from your District Mission Board contact
Ministry resources:
- (38:18) YouVersion.com – on the web and on your iPod or other mobile device
- A planned update to the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible
Picks of the week:
- (40:44) Mobile Google Sync – Sync Google calendar and contacts to your mobile device
- BackBlaze.com – Online file backup
Community feedback:
- (49:17) David Savatski from WELS Missions suggested Dropbox and Box.net for sharing large files
- Pastor Jeremiah Gumm from Cross of Christ in Liverpool, NY added his congregation Facebook page to the growing list on the WELSTech Wiki
- David Schumann from Peace in Janesville, WI asked about embedding a flash player for MP3s in his web site for cross-browser compatibility
- Flash audio player for WordPress blogs from 1 Pixel Out
- Apply that same technology to any web site using this Tutorial for Flash MP3 Player
Coming up on WELSTech:
(56:04) Episode 097 – Tips for maintaining your computer including fighting mal-ware, registry cleanup and disk de-frags wil be the topic of next week’s podcast. (Release date 09/16/09)
The featured artist:
(57:45) This week we close with the music of WELS artist Michael Schroeder (www.michaelschroeder.com) – Paradise from his CD titled “A Witness”
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Computer maintenance! I know you were being sarcastic when you said the topic sounds exciting, but it really is an interesting subject for me. Even though my profession is software development, I do computer building, repair, and maintenance as a hobby. It’s a great feeling to have someone tell you that you have breathed new life into their computer by making it run significantly faster.
Something that is closely tied with computer maintenance is computer performance. Tweakguides.com has a book called the Tweakguides Tweaking Companion with different versions for XP and Vista. There should be one for Windows 7 soon as well. This book is available for free in PDF form, and I recommend it to anyone that wants to know how to truly speed up his or her Windows PC.
Computer security is also closely tied to computer maintenance, but people often make the mistake of bogging their system down with unnecessary protection. Only run what you need. For most people, this means turning off your software firewall and virus scanner completely. Rely on your router’s hardware firewall and secure web browser to prevent problems. (Microsoft has gotten better at securing IE, but the documented facts of the matter are that IE is attacked more often and Mozilla still patches security holes much faster.) With these preventative measures, you should only need to fire up your virus scanner once a month for a full system scan. Spyware scanners are overrated.
Of course, adding unmonitored young children to the mix complicates things, but you should expect problems if that’s allowed in your home.
As far as cleaning and defragging, you can do 80% of the work with 20% of the effort by simply running Disk Cleanup and then Disk Defragmenter once a month. For an added performance benefit, I recomment using MyDefrag (used to be JKDefrag) instead of the Disk Defragmenter. Defrag your Windows system files using PageDefrag. In order to thoroughly clean your system CCleaner is a nifty tool, but I’d go so far as to say it’s overkill.
I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that there is any benefit to registry cleanup. It doesn’t increase your performance and it doesn’t protect your from anything. The benefits do not outweigh the risks, but if you must have it cleaned CCleaner will take care of that for you.
Every stinking piece of software today seems to want a startup process or service running in the background. This slows systems down immensely. Turn them off using msconfig and services.msc from the Run box in the Start menu. Only recommended if you actually know what services are not necessary.
One of the best ways to clean up your computer is to simply reformat. Partitioning plays a huge role in allowing you to keep your files while completely reformatting Windows. Gparted is probably the best tool for this. If you choose to upgrade Windows instead of wiping it clean, you should expect problems.
Almost all of this information is unnecessary if you use Linux. Ultimately, if you value security and stability enough, you should not be using Windows.
Finally, buy some canned air for a few bucks, take your computer outside, open the case, and blow out all the dust! Computers are one of the few things that collect dust more if you regularly use them. This is very bad for the electronics inside, so don’t let it pile up.
I could go on for hours; I’m sure I’ll have plenty to add once I actually hear the podcast.
Jeremy Johnson
jertech.blogspot.com
P.S. If anyone wants their computer cleaned or repaired by a professional, I work for beer.