Marmanold.com

Mark 6:30-52 and the Unanswered Question; Who is this?

On October 8, I was invited to preach at McKendree Village where I did my field education last year. It was a blessing to be back with so many friends and to see the healing God had brought to many of the people I had visited in the rehabilitation center.

Since I’m taking A.J. Levine’s course on Mark this semester, I decided to preach on the miracles of the feeding of the 5000 and Jesus walking on water in Mark 6:30-52. My focus was on how God has revealed himself to us and how we often miss the Mark. Though we miss the mark, however, there is still hope. As Jesus was patient with the disciples, he will be patient with us. If we, like the crowd, go to the places Jesus will be — among the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the widow, etc. — he will meet us there. If we open our hearts to him, Jesus will be our shepherd.

Automate Slack Status with IFTTT

Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours.

Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status.

Hugo Site on S3 and CloudFront

For a very long time I’ve hosted this site at Nearly Free Speech. I’ve been happy at Nearly Free Speech, but with the launch of LectServe and other IoT and Serverless projects of mine on the AWS stack, it made logistical and financial sense to consolidate on Amazon.

Moving my Hugo site to Amazon was a fairly simple affair. First I setup a simple S3 bucket to drop my Hugo generated files to. Nothing special there at all. Next, I setup a CloudFront distribution to handle TLS and serve the files on S3. With a simple change in my domain’s DNS record everything worked perfectly. Perfectly except that all my URLs had to end in index.html to work…

For Sale: Solid Cherry Chest of Drawers

This quality, solid wood chest of drawers has been lightly used since 2009. It was bought new at Sprintz Furniture in Nashville, TN and has been used by a single owner.

The chest is 48" high, 60" wide, and has a depth of 20".

There are a few marks of paint/scuffs from the most recent move — see images below —, but otherwise the chest of drawers is in perfect condition.

Hot about the Flag, Lukewarm about Jesus

Looking at social media over the last several days has been very disturbing to me. Though Puerto Rico lays in ruins, the Caribbean aches in destruction, Mexico City mourns, and our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa face true persecution for the faith, the so-called Christians of the States are hot about folk kneeling during the State worship hymn.

Though there is much to comment on the militeristic symbolism of American football, the troubling words of the State hymn, and Americans’ reverance towards the flag, I’m not going there. Though I choose not to salute a piece of cloth or pledge alligience to the government or people it represents, I understand why many do and I respect their agency.

Adopted into a Holy Family of Love

Humanity’s adoption by God as his children is a theme throughout Hebrew and Christian scripture. By his own free will God has chosen Israel and the Church established on her foundation to be his children. God’s adoption of humankind gives theological richness to what it means for people to be in relationship to God, to live a life of holiness, and to be free.

Relationship

Throughout Scripture, God is time and time again referenced as Israel and Christians’ father and parent. In Isaiah the prophet praises God on behalf of the remnant of Israel declaring “thou, O LORD, art our Father” (Isa 63:16, ʀꜱᴠ). In Jeremiah 31:9 God says that he is “a father to Israel” (ʀꜱᴠ). In Galatians 4:6 Paul teaches that believers are God’s children — sons — and that we should call God “father.” Jesus, too, teaches this when he demonstrates to his followers how to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven, ” “Father, hallowed be thy name” (Matt 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4).

Automated *Pretty* Tweets to DayOne

I’ve been using DayOne as my journal since 2014. Very early on, I realized that a good part of my daily journaling was actually done on Twitter. Over the years I’ve used IFTTT to import my tweets, but the fact that that system didn’t include images or quoted tweets removed a lot of important context. I wanted something nicer that showed the full Twitter card with graphics, etc. DayOne’s recent release of activity feeds seemed to be a good solution, but it, too, lost a lot of context and was very manual.

Audio in Windows 98SE on Parallels 13

When I first researched when why audio didn’t work in Windows 98 back when Parallels 11 was released, there seemingly wasn’t an answer. Going deep into some retro-computing forums, I found an answer that worked in Parallels 12 last year. I’m happy to report my solution for audio continues to work in Parallels 13.

Antenna Television: My East Nashville Setup

Back in May my Comcast — DBA “Xfinity” because that totally makes me forget they’re Comcast — bill went up to $150. We were paying $110 which was already more than I thought I should pay for data-capped mid-range broadband and some television, but that extra $40 pushed me over the edge. Mentally, $150 is a lot closer to $200 than I felt comfortable with.

In East Nashville, AT&T offers uncapped gigabit fiber to the home for only $80. I was sold. The only outstanding issue was television. Though more than half of our family television watching happened on Netflix, the rest came from Comcast. I did a quick audit of our DVR and realized over 90% of what we watched was available on Hulu or broadcast TV. With the wife’s buy-in, we decided to cancel Comcast and switch to antenna to supplement what we couldn’t get on Hulu or Netflix.

Charlottesville: Southern Identity in Whom?

The Arnold’s have been in Tennessee since the early part of the 19th century. On my mother’s side, the Harts have been in North America two or three generations before that and in Tennessee just as long. My family proudly fought in the Army of Tennessee during the American Civil War and continues to live in Tennessee and Northern Alabama’s Tennessee Valley to this day. My roots in Tennessee and the US American South run deep.

Daddy Status Page

A common problem for my wife and daughter since I started working from home more and more was knowing when I was on a conference call. My office has a glass door and the hallway behind it leads upstairs and to the master bedroom, so my family — understandably — likes to know if they’ll be on camera or not when they walk past. It’s also handy for them to know when they can ask me a question verbally rather than having to send me a text message from the room next door.

Archiving my Website with Workflow & Hazel

I really enjoy automating things using Workflow, Hazel, shell scripts, or just about anything else.

Last night I got the idea that it would be cool to have a graphical archive of each post to my website as it appeared the day it was posted. Over time I’ll have a visual history of how my website has changed and, who knows, might make a little coffee table book or something.

The automation for this is fairly simple. I took an existing Workflow I had that used the JSONFeed of my site to grab the most recent post and modified it

Mermaid CLI via Whalebrew

As I noted in my quick review, I love Whalebrew. Whalebrew has allowed me to use several tools I was too afraid of before in my day-to-day workflow. The biggest of these tools is Mermaid.

I’ve been using Mermaid for years to make quick and simple Gantt charts and other diagrams. Up to now, however, my workflow has involved saving my Mermaid file in a text document and copying and pasting the text into the online Mermaid generator when I need a new image.

Review: Whalebrew

It seems that each and every day there is a cool command line tool to try out to help automate or generally improve some part of my day-to-day. The problem with many of these tools, however, is that they require all sorts of dependencies (Ruby, Python, Node.js) each of which have their own package managers and sub-dependencies. Homebrew solves this for many things, but they are pretty picky about what they allow in, so more often than not, I’m left trying to decide if I risk messing up my machine by installing a web of dependencies or skip giving the tool a try. Not any more.

Booting a PowerBook 1400 from Compact Flash

The PowerBook 1400 is the last PowerBook to have a real keyboard and is wellknown for having one of — if not the best — keyboards Apple ever put into a notebook. Several years ago, I bought a PowerBook 1400c off eBay as my grandmother’s first computer. She used it lightly for a few years to surf the Internet on dial-up AOL, but since 2003 or so, the PowerBook has been sitting in a box unused.