James's Weblog

Notes from a sermon preached on 20th May 2018 (Pentecost Sunday 2018), based on John 16:12-15.

Iced coffee is usually prepared by chilling hot-brewed coffee. Cold-brew coffee can taste great if prepared well. Here's my very simple recipe and some commentary.

The BBC reports a fascinating development at this year's Pride march in London, which took place last Saturday (8th July 2018).

Here's the summary from the beginning of that BBC report:

Members of lesbian and feminist group Get The L Out demanded to march behind the rainbow flag, which marks the start of the event, organisers said.

The group argues the trans movement is attacking lesbian rights and said it protested to protect those rights.

Yes, I really am writing a review of a kettle.

For those who don't know, I love my coffee. A kettle is one of the most fundamental pieces of kit you need. The right kettle helps when it comes to brewing with a cafetiere, pour-over filter, chemex or aeropress.

Mid-Range

The AEG EWA7800-U 7 Series Digital Kettle (paid link) is a mid-range kettle. What I mean by that is that it sits between the cheapest and the most expensive.

I'm a big fan of Piwik, an open source analytics suite. Think Google Analytics, StatCounter, Sitemeter, etc. … only self-hosted an open source. There are many benefits of using it:

Yesterday, the Drupal Security team issued a Security Advisory for the Mollom module, SA-CONTRIB-2018-038. The module is now marked as "unsupported".

The security team is marking this project unsupported. There is a known security issue with the project that has not been fixed by the maintainer.

Paul Barnett has written (paid link) a very helpful, carefully applied, commentary (paid link) on 1 Corinthians.

The other day I was asked why we spend time in church (during sermons) talking about issues that may not be relevant for us today.

Unpacking the Question

On the face of it, it's a good question.

If I look out at the church family here, I can think of many subjects that speak directly into needs we know and feel. Maybe there are issues about unemployment, family life, over-demanding employers, ageing and dementia, the housing market, and so on.

500 years ago, William Tyndale lost his life in his campaign to give the English people one Bible in their own language. Today, we're spoilt for choice, with many excellent English translations of the Bible. Here's a paper I wrote in 2013 to help us decide which translation we should use in church.

Having recently bought and built a Calder High Sleeper Bed (paid link), I thought I'd leave a brief review here, together with a few tips when it comes to building it.