Today’s rain would have altered plans, if today were thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, my family was sitting at a table on pea gravel under our deck eating a meal together, chalk on the concrete foundation proclaiming the venue “Augusta the Third’s” — a pop up eatery in today’s parlance — to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary. And they were ecstatic.
I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect keyboard for a while now, and the Royal Kludge RK100 offers an attractive option from a well-established brand that falls just below the attention around Kickstarter stars Epomaker and Keychron. In so many ways, this keyboard checks every box I was looking for and for a remarkably good price. Let’s give it a spin.
I see it on the faces of everyone I talk to. The war wearied look of two years and three months since life changed. As we peer into a fall in which COVID continues to roar along and many I know who had dodged it are now catching it, life-February-2020-style feels more distant than ever.
Livestreaming is all around us. Between streams on Facebook, YouTube Live, Twitch and the like, alongside ubiquitous video conferenced meetings have become a normal part of life. For the most part, we’ve reached a point this works well… until the Internet goes down and it doesn’t. Speedify is an affordable tool that aims to overcome that issue.
A few months ago, I found myself in a debate with a self-styled theological expert who made a stunning claim: sharing one’s faith wasn’t the duty of every Christian. That’s certainly what our squishy on truth society believes, but increasingly, it seems, so do the culture warrior Christians.
When I need a photo or video these days, I grab my iPhone, not my DSLR. Some of that is probably laziness, but it is more than just that. The iPhone produces a really good pictures — at times, significantly better pictures, than my more traditional camera. I wanted to take that excellent picture maker and make it more suitable for accessories without buying some sort of proprietary case and accessory system for my phone that is clunky to fool with. Here’s what I did.
As regular readers know, I spend my days as a pastor. The last couple of years have been a unique time to be in ministry and, doubly so, as I found myself “planting” (starting) a new church in the midst of it.
It was 2016, just after Amazon’s Prime Day, and I pulled a black cylinder out of a box: an Amazon Echo, my first smart speaker. Adding in a few Philips Hue bulbs, I got my first taste of the smart home and it felt amazing, like something out of Star Trek. I don’t know that I’d call it amazing any longer.
I sit here thinking about how things aren’t going right. Plans I’ve made, how I’m feeling — stuff isn’t how I want it to be. Ironically, even plans I’ve made as a pastor for Holy Week aren’t how I had hoped. I get wrapped up in all of that and then I have to return to the central truth of Holy Week: it happened because we human beings have broken the world. That things aren’t how they are supposed to be is precisely the point.
When the pandemic first hit, we quickly watched various staples become hard to purchase, including — as plenty of memes gleefully remind us — toilet paper. Though less attention grabbing, meat, milk and other essentials also became harder to find and that pushed me to rediscover an old friend: Aldi.