Marmanold.com

Twitter Mute Filters

Without explanation, above are the keywords, hashtags, and clients I’m blocking on Twitter.

If a topic doesn’t apply to you and/or does nothing but make you anxious, stressed, and/or angry you can block it. If Twitter isn’t bringing you joy or edifying you, it ain’t worth it. No one deserves a space on your timeline!

Z Shell One-Year Update

I’ve been using Z Shell for over a year now and I’ve been very pleased with it. Honestly, I should have moved off macOS’s antiquated default Bash ages ago. Below is an update on where my .zshrc is sitting a while down the road.

Oh My ZSH Plug-ins

I keep the Oh My ZSH plug-ins pretty light. Partially because I want to keep startup times low and partially because I can’t remember the commands anyways.

Simple Keyboard KVM Switch

I recently replaced my iMac with an M1 Mac mini and did an entire rework of my desk setup. With the iMac gone, I was finally able to buy a proper 4k montior to share between my work laptop and my personal workstation. I was also able to upgrade my keyboard to a Varmilo Miya Pro and get a new mouse. Since I would be switching between my work and personal machines several times a day, I wanted a simple and reliable system to share external devices between my systems.

Christians & the 2020 Presidential Election

There is no Christian candidate in this presidential election. Though I personally cannot look past his poor moral character and inappropriate use of Holy Scripture and the Church, many faithful Christians will vote for Trump. Many faithful Christians will vote for Biden. Other faithful Christians will vote for the Solidarity Party or for other political parties.

The &Campaign points a way forward for faithful Christian political engagement in all areas of the political landscape. Christians are called to be witnesses of the True King and his Kingdom in all areas of life. Our identities should be in Christ and not political parties. Our words should point to the Living Word and not temporary dramas of the present political moment. The laws and government of Israel in the Old Testament guide us in what types of government and laws followers of the Living God should desire. Christians should not focus on single issues in our political engagement, but pragmatically balance the whole revelation of Scripture and the character of God made manifest in the Incarnation of God the Son in Jesus Christ.

Drafts 5 Sermon Prep with LectServe

Drafts 5 for Mac recently introduced the ability to do some basic scripting in JavaScript as an action in the application. Each time I prepare a sermon, the first step for me is to lookup the readings for the week on LectServe and then paste the readings into Drafts where I can start doing sermon preparation and, eventually, write my sermon. As soon as I saw actions and scripting introduced for Drafts, I knew I’d have to automate my sermon prep process.

The Toddler Evening Office

We started a pattern of family prayer back in Advent. Each night after dinner, I’d lead the family in prayer. Oliver (23 months) would listen(-ish) and join in the amens and Rosemary (~4) would chime in with the responses — “Hear our Prayer” — and lead the Lord’s Prayer. Having established a habit of prayer after dinner, I wanted to keep it moving forward even after the Advent calendars were empty and the wreath was put away.

Review: Basis Bibel Auslese

Back in October I launched a German-language worship service in Nashville, Tennessee. In the lead-up to launching St. Mang, I knew I’d need to focus on my German to get back to the point where I could write a sermon in German each month.

I immediately switched to German for my morning prayers using the 1984 Luther translation. Though there is a lot I like about Luther’s translation in German, it is not a great entry point into theological/ecclesial German. I found the language to be a barrier to getting back into German and especially towards my goal of writing simple sermons that native and non-native speakers of German could understand.

Advent: Always be Ready

In my home it is no secret that I am no fan of secular Christmas. I was raised outside the Church. When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. The music. The beautiful colors. Nostalgia for a “better time.” The idea of joy, family, and peace. And, naturally, presents.

But, then, I answered the call of Jesus. Christmas, I came to understand, was not just a remembrance of a nice man that gave out pretty sayings and showed an examplary way of life. Christmas was a Christian feast of the Incarnation. God became human. God came to us! The world and the universe were bigger than I had ever imagined. God was real. God knew me and — even when he really and truly knew me — he loved me unconstrained and unconditionally. The nativity is the moment where everything changed. It is the momement were the Word of God took on flesh. My flesh. Your flesh. Our flesh. “Cur Deus homo?”/“Why did God become Human?” asked St. Anselm. One begins to find the answer to that question with Christmas.

Advent Family Prayer

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find a short and simple Advent liturgy to do each night around the advent-wreath. The family form of Evening Prayer from the 2019 Prayer Book is good, but it is still a little long for my very young children and still requires me to find short readings for each night. I wanted a resource that was short and simple for my young family, but still retained the character of the daily offices. This Advent I have finally found the perfect resource, The Season of Light by Jay Cormier.

Use Localtime in Debian Slim

Sometimes you need to run cron or other applications in your Debian container that rely on the system running in localtime. In Debian 9, switching to localtime wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. With Debian 10, however, you can switch your container to another timezone with just a few commands.

1. First you need to install tzdata.

   RUN apt-get install tzdata -y
   

2. Then you need to make a link between the timezone you want to move to in /usr/share/zoneinfo and /etc/localtime.

   Read more...
   Posted: Fri, Nov 22, 2019, Words: ~200, Reading Time: 1 min
   Tags: #debian #docker #linux #localtime #time

Migrate from Bash to Z Shell (On macOS)

In macOS Catalina, Apple is switching the default shell to Z Shell from Bash. Even if you haven’t upgraded to Catalina yet, getting used to Zsh is a good idea and pretty simple to do.

1. Install Latest Z Shell

First, install the latest verison of Z Shell from Hombrew. Since you’re going down the path of learning an alternate shell, you might as well keep on the newest version instead of just taking whatever Apple gives you.

God Calls Me

I am called to preach the Gospel and faithfully administer the sacraments under the apostolic authority of a bishop of Christ’s Holy Church because God saved a Mormon boy from the pits of despair and freed him from the chains of the law. This God, in securely calling me his own, redirected my heart to serve his one, holy, Catholic Church and to share the truly Good News of unmerited free grace to others lost in darkness. God calls me especially to minister to and establish the Church among those often overlooked and forgotten; the poor, the imprisoned, the foreigner, and the oppressed.

Instantpot Hardboiled Eggs

1. Place eggs on steam rack.
2. Add 1 cup of water to the pot.
3. Set Instantpot to cook on high pressure for five minutes.
4. Allow Instantpot to naturally decompress for five minutes.
5. Immediately place eggs in cool water to stop cooking.
6. Peel eggs and enjoy.

Logs in the River of Discourse

A feminist tried to fail me out of divinity school.

The last two weeks of divinity school turned out much differently than I expected. For my last semester I was required to take a course to fulfill a credit in the topic of gender and sexuality. There was only one course that fulfilled that requirement that would fit into my schedule with another required course, ethics. I spent my last semester as one of two men in a course exploring the intersections of theology and psychology for women. Out of character for VDS, the classroom was chaotic and stifled any opinion outside of the professor’s own progressive feminism. The course was a struggle for me to attend each week as the Church, great women of faith, and traditional Christian anthropology was drug through the mud. And yet, I persevered and dutifully attended each week and participated in discussions as I was able.

The Magic Variable 'count'

So, I happened to be looking back through some old files and I found an early programming assignment from my first computer science course back in college. In the middle of the code I found this wonderful line:

while (cownt<years) {
    cout<<cownt+1; //"cownt" = "count", but when I entered it spelt correctly it gave me errors.//

As it turns out early on in the code I declared int cownt=0;. I either couldn’t find this typo in debugging my mere 61 lines of code or — what I think was actually going on — I thought count was a reserved magical variable that made loops work — not something I had to declare. Sometimes it’s nice to look back and see how far you’ve come.