Get your Podcast on YouTube

Listening to Mac Power Users I heard about a new(ish) feature where YouTube will import podcasts for listening to on YouTube.

We’ve had a podcast hosted on the church website and listed with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the other major Podcast libraries for years–but lots of people at church or looking for a new church aren’t Podcast listeners. But they do know how to YouTube.

How to Download Video from a Private Facebook Group

My church livestreams services to a private/closed Facebook group. We started this a couple of years before COVID-19 hit to care for a family who’d moved to a remote town where the closest church was more than an hour away. That family has now moved back to us, but we continue to livestream for sick and frail members.

Reading Plan: Serving without Sinking

Recently, I re-read John Hindlay’s little book Serving Without Sinking. This time I was discussing it with a bloke from church. It’s a great book to diagnose some ways our hearts deceive us as we serve God from false motives and paints a beautiful picture of the God who serves us.

New iPadOS? New Firmware!

Just discovered something that can easily catch you out.

I often use my iPad to run presentations–particularly when teaching RI in schools. It’s a perfect device to carry into a classroom and play videos, presentations, or display bible passages from a Bible app. Getting things to display isn’t hard, but it’s expensive. I carry a little bag with both lighting to VGA and to HDMI dongles so I can connect to any type of projector or display in the classroom. (I also carry VGA, HDMI, and a couple of audio cables for good measure!) (These same dongles work with iPhones.)

Twitter Timeline

This week I’ve made a small change to Twitter that’s been good for my soul and productivity.

A bad habit I’ve developed over many years is taking regular, ‘short’ breaks to look at what’s happening on social media (I’m sure I’m the only one who does this). Recently my drug of choice has been Twitter—maybe because of the short, hot takes it serves up, I’ve been able to convince myself I’ll only do this for a minute or two. But, of course, this isn’t true. The system is designed to keep you scrolling and clicking, seeing more content, giving more data, and viewing more ads.

Agenda

Agenda is one of the many (many!) applications that have come into the plaintext notetaking sphere over the past few years. Agenda’s main point of difference is its date based organisation - and integration with calendars (and reminders).

Move Animation in Apple Keynote

When preaching, I often display maps on the screen. Maps are great, but the problem is giving people both context and detail. And so, what I’ve often done with keynote is created two slides - one with the ‘zoomed out’ map image and the next ‘zoomed in’ on the relevant location.

Email Updates

Email newsletters are a great tool to communicate with the church family. Possibly for a small church, sending out an email with everyone’s email in the BCC field might work—but often this method ends up with emails filtered out as spam. A great way around this is using a specific email ‘marketing’ system: one of the most popular ones being mailchimp.

What a Notion

Notion is the hot new tool for personal productivity. It’s often thought of as a note-taking tool, but with its support for relational databases, it can do much, much more.