DIY Pass Along Cards

Flooding the Earth with the Book of Mormon has a nice idea on how to make your own pass along cards. Wards often run out of these things. (At least they did in my mission.) Why not help your ward budget and missionary program out by making your own. For only $10, you can get 1,000 custom made business cards at Office Depot. Just type in the info where someone can order a Book of Mormon, and presto! You have a cheap missionary tool. Because you've invested your own money into the cards, it might motivate you to hand these puppies out.

Make your own DIY Pass Along Card today!

New Look at LDS.org

The Church's official webpage recently got a face lift. It looks much more clean and intuitive to use. Check it out.

Attention Church History Buffs: Use Footnote to tag primary source documents

Footnote is a neat web service that allows you to access millions of historical original documents and add tags to different parts of the document. It uses Flash so the presentation is really slick. The powerful tool on this service is the tagging feature. Say you're looking at an original journals of Wilford Woodruff, you can look at the actual document and add tags to every time you see Joseph Smith's name written. Next time someone looks up Joseph Smith on Footnote, they'll be referenced to your tag in Wilford's journal. Footnote is essentially, del.icio.us for primary source documents.

The only drawback with Footnote is the service isn't free. You can get unlimited access for $10 a month.

While the site has millions of documents scanned in to the system, I didn't find too many Church related stuff. Perhaps all you Church history buffs could fill this need.

Sunday Fashion Tips for Men at Nine Moons

For my readers who don't frequent the Bloggernacle, Rusty at Nine Moons has a great post full of Sunday fashion tips for men.

My favorites:

• 21) Regarding ties: no clip-ons or cartoon characters for anyone over the age of 12 and no bolos for anyone who doesn’t herd cattle for a living.
• 12) Black shoes with black suits. Brown/caramel shoes with navy suits. Other colors can be mixed and matched with a little more freedom.
• 7) Ties should end just above the belt.
• 22) Regarding socks: absolutely no white socks (church is neither a gym nor the temple); sport socks are not church socks, you know the difference; colors and patterns are great as long as they compliment your shirt/tie.

Missionary Hack: 5-minute shoeshine

When you're on your mission, you're supposed to shine your shoes everyday. At least, that's how it was in my mission. This could often take several minutes and on your mission, you don't have time to spare.

Slacker Manager shows how to stream line the shoe shinning process to less than 5 minutes. Check it out.

LDS Blog: Families.com

LDS Blog from families.com offers some nice posts on gospel living. They have tips on how to help your local missionaries and posts on Gospel Doctrine classes. Other categories include: Health and Fitness in the LDS faith, family home evenings, and church callings. They post several times a day, so there's plenty of content to look through. Check it out today.

Ladies: Turn your husband's dress shirt into something cute

This one's for the ladies. Every Mormon family has a plethora of white dress shirts. I'm sure some men have shirts they haven't worn in awhile. Ladies, why not put those unused shirts to use by hacking it into a cute cap sleep shirt. Whip Up has a link to a step by step tutorial that shows you how to turn any man's dress shirt into a cap shirt. Impress your hipster friends with your ability to be fashionable, yet frugal at the same time. Warning: requires sewing.

Use Foonz to conference call your next meeting

Foonz is a service that provides free conference calling. You sign up for your free account at the site and add your contacts that you want to include in your conference calls. Foonz will will issue you an access number.When you dial the number, Foonz will send a text message or an IM to your contacts inviting them to the conversation. They dial the number and presto! conference call.

This could come in handy for different types of leadership meetings in Church. Often members live extremely far from the chapel, so having weekday meetings or meetings later in the evening on Sundays can be burdensome. If you don't have to be at the chapel to have the meeting, then doing it on a conference call can work just as well. Do it like any other meeting, just over the phone. Start off with a prayer and spiritual thought, and get to business.

Practice for Exaltation

This is really cool. If you've ever seen Minority Report, you'll probably remember how Tom Cruise used his hands in an orchestral fashion to manipulate his computer monitor. I remember seeing this and being blown away by it.

Well, someone has come up with a DIY Google Earth Hack so you can manipulate the earth with your hands. They're called Atlas Gloves. With a wave of your hands you can rotate the earth or zoom in on your house The setup looks fairly easy and cheap. It uses ping pong balls, LED lights, a web cam, and free program that allows for the interface.

I wonder if this how it's like for God. Maybe this is what the celestial kingdom will be like. We just wave our hands around and we can zoom in on the worlds we've created. Hmm... well, if it is, this gives us something to practice with.

Track your food storage with Trackmyfoodstorage.com

Thanks to an anonymous tipper, trackmyfoodstorage.com was brought to my attention. Trackmyfoodstorage.com is an online food storage inventory tool. They offer two types of services: basic and premium. The basic service is free and allows you to inventory your food storage and well also help you establish food storage goals. The Premium site has some nice features like a rotation helper, alerts and notifications, and shopping coupons. 1 year premium membership is $15; three yeas is $40.

Overall, it looks like a nice little app. It would be nice if they would just offer the premium services for free like many other web 2.0 companies are doing. They could make money advertising. Maybe that will change in the future.

Notes from 20/20's Special "Flat Broke"

This is a post I did on my other blogs, The Frugal Law Student. I thought people in the bloggernacle would be interested considering the focus by our leaders to get out and stay out of debt.

20/20 did a special tonight on America's debt crisis. The broke it down into three parts: Spenders and savers, debt collecting, and cyberbegging. Here's some of the highlights of the show.

Spenders and Savers
This segment focused on two families living on opposite ends of the financial spectrum. The Peterson Family are big spenders. They've racked up over $60,000 in credit card, hundreds of thousands of dollars in time shares, and a few mortgages on their house. Despite their money problems, this year the family has gone on more vacations than any time in their marriage. They're on the brink of bankruptcy.

In order to help them, 20/20 brought financial planner Robert Pagliarini, author of the book The Six Day Financial Makeover. He set up a plan for the Peterson family that included selling their house and time shares. I wonder if the family will follow through with it.

Watching this family, I couldn't believe that people could just rack up debt like that. They never regretted a single lavish purchase they made because they figure they'll probably be dead tomorrow. I don't get it.

Lesson from the Peterson's: DON"T USE CREDIT CARDS! Cut the darn things up (don't cancel them; it hurts your credit score) and start paying with cash. Take it easy on the big purchase items. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. Duh.

The Economides are the cheapest family in America. At least that's what they titled their book. They earn less than $35,000 a year, have seven kids, a few cars, but no debt. They've accomplished this by buying everything used and planning grocery store trips so they're as economical as possible. They carry around walkie talkies in the store to report on the good deals to each other. They also buy expired lunch meat. They're hardcore.

Lesson from the Economides: PLAN, PLAN, PLAN. Take advantage of coupons; every cent counts. Buy whatever you can used.

Debt Collectors
This segment was a perfect torts hypo for Intentional or reckless infliction causing severe emotional distress by extreme or outrageous conduct (See? I learned something in law school). They interviewed a former debt collector about the techniques he and others like him used to get money from people. Tactics included persistence calls with death threats, threats to reveal their debt to neighbors, and just plain emotional abuse. It was heartbreaking to see the crap that some of the debt collectors could drag people through.

Of course John Stossel had to bust out his libertarian stick to show that we should be thankful for debt collectors. He points out that the bad debt collectors are a minority. The tactics they use are illegal. He then goes on to argue that if it weren't for debt collectors, prices would go up because companies would lose money on default payments. He also made a point that most of the clients of debt clients are small businesses. I always figured debt collectors were for big companies. Overall, I think Stossel made some good points. At least he got me thinking about things.

Lesson learned from debt collectors: keep only two credit cards, negotiate lower rates, and if for some unfortunate reason you become the victim of thug debt collectors, contact the FTC, your lawyer, and tape the culprit berating you.

Cyberbegging
Cyberbegging is a hot topic, especially in the blogsphere. Paypal donation buttons are popping up on blogs everyday. One law student started a blog to raise money to pay for his student loans. (However, one should note that he's converted the site into way of raising scholarships for other students and raising awareness about student debt.) Cyber Beg is a popular site where one can list their financial need like they would list an item on craigslist. The crazy thing is that people give money.

The segment discussed how an admitted shopaholic, Karyn Bosnak, got herself out of $20,000 worth of designer handbag and belt debt by asking complete strangers on the net. It worked. She wrote a book about it and made even more money. A movie deal is forthcoming.

They also discussed how Dustin Diamond (aka Screech from Saved by the Bell) used cyberbegging to save his house. His sex tape, "Screeched", has been picked up by a major porn distributor and he's raking in the dough. (That makes two former Saved By the Bell alum who've gone on to make porn. Don't do it Lisa Turtle! Resist!)

My first reaction is disgust. These people have no shame. Both Bosnak and Screech say what they did is creative, not shameful. Right... when was the last time you heard someone praise the creativeness of panhandlers and bums? That's right, never. Screech and Bosnack... you're bums. Jason Ryan Dorsey, author of My Reality Check Bounced: The Twentysomething's Guide to Cashing In On Your Real-World Dreams, discussed how Screech's and Bosnak's attitudes are common among twenty somethings. They're not responsible with how they spend money, so they don't want to be responsible for paying for their debts.

I guess one could make an argument that ad's or pay per post are a form of cyberbegging. That's what Bosnak tried to argue. Her site is full of content. She figures the donations were in exchange for the content But the difference between begging and posting ads are different. With posting ads, you're providing a service (putting a company's ad on your site) in exchange for money. With cyberbegging, it's just people telling us about their life and then asking for money so they can pay off debt or buy a handbag. It's like justifying panhandling by saying if the panhandler tells us about his cute dog or what he thinks about Lindsay Lohan and then asks for money, it's OK.

Lesson learned from cyberbeggers: Get a real job!

Conclusion
Overall, it was a good show. I thought they could have spent more time disusing the frugal family. Check out the 20/20 site for more details.

Official LDS Tech Web Site

LDS Tech is an official site of the Church. It basically allows members to see what the Church IT department is doing to use technology in furthering the Kingdom of God.

Their are profiles of the people working for the Church IT department as well as information on careers with Church IT.

I think this an excellent idea and am looking forward to the information LDS Tech will be posting.

Send your hometeaching route to your cell phone

Over at Lifehacker there's a post on Yahoo!'s Driving Directions. Driving Directions allow you to text message a link to your cell phone which will then take you to cell phone enabled web page with the directions.

This could come in handy for home or visiting teaching. I often get lost trying to find my families. It would be nice to have the directions right on my cell phone.

Build your family tree with Gini

Over at Lifehacker, they've done a write up about a great online family tree collaboration site called Geni. (It also looks like Sustaind has picked up on it to.)

How it works

You start a branch and include an email address of people you want to invite to collaborate on the family tree. They can provide information that you may or may not have about your family. They can build branches of people directly related to them.

The app is flash based so it's really easy and slick to work with.

What makes this site powerful is the social aspect of it. The power of the collective is amazing. This is one of the benefits of Web 2.0: the ability for several people to collaborate on a project. I think genealogy can especially benefit from online collaboration. Eventually, you'll be able to see how many people you're connected to both livig and dead. Pretty cool.

Start a free account today and invite your family!

Learn the Scriptures While Harnessing Your Inner Geek

Chapter and Verse has created a collectible card game like Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-OH based off the scripture mastery. Right now it's in beta. They're hoping to get feedback from users so they can refine it.

It looks pretty cool. Each card is a verse of scripture instead of some imaginary monster. Each verse has different action, light of knowledge, looking to the heavens for guidance, ect. points. So, one scripture verse could beat another verse of scripture depending on the point values. The cards are played in color groups to form "books." The first player to get three completed books of scriptures in their libraries win.

This is a really good idea for seminary teachers to use with students to learn the scripture mastery. It could also be nice substitute for Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh on Sundays. Check it out today!

The Book of Mormon- Disneyfied

I ran across Liken It's page while looking at the schedule for the LDS Film Festival. They make movies taking stories from the Book of Mormon and the Bible and turning them into Disney type movies complete with song and dance routines. I guess the goal is to present the scriptures in a kid friendly medium. I can see this being a nice substitute for High School Musical or the Lion King on Sundays.

Currently, they have films about Alma and King Noah's Court, Ammon & King Lamoni, Nephi and Laban, Samuel the Lamanite.

I'll have to be honest. I thought this was a joke when I first started watching some of the clips. They have Nephi and his brothers doing an N*Sync routine, King Noah singing disco, and the Nephite Archery Core that shot at Samuel the Lamanite doing what looks like a scene riped right from Men in Tights (My question is why Mesoamerican archers look like Robin Hood and his merry men.) I laughed out loud as I watched these clips, but then I realized they were actually wanting me to take this seriously after watching Nephi and his mom sing this tear jerker of a song called "Thy Arms." (Check out the media center. You have to see them to understand what I'm talking about.)

I don't know what to think of these movies. They look hilarious. What makes them even funnier is that they're trying to be serious. However, I think if Liken It's goal was trying to get people to appreciate the scriptures more, they haven't done a very good job at it. Quite the contrary, I think they're just trivializing the scriptures. Haven't we learned from the Book of Mormon Movie that film makers should just leave the Book of Mormon alone?

Conclusion: Watch Liken It videos for some side bursting hilarity; read your scriptures to liken them unto you.

How to Put Your Ward Directory on Google Earth

I've read on several blogs about members putting their ward directory on Google Earth. Some of the possible benefits of doing this include:

1. Helping stake and ward leaders develop new boundaries.
2. Planning home teaching and visiting teach routes.
3. Getting instant directions to a members house
4. It's tons of fun seeing your ward from outer space.
   

Creating a ward Google Earth does take a little computer know how. However, I hope to break the steps down clearly enough so that anyone could do this. Here goes!

1. Download and install Google Earth 4- It's free!
2. Go to your membership directory under "Stake and Ward Websites" on lds.org- you have to register with your ward site to do this. You'll need your membership number to do so.
   
3. At the top of the directory there's a link that says "csv." This stands for comma separated value and is a type of file. You'll need it. Click and download. It will save as an Excell spreadsheet (or whatever spreadsheet program you use.)
4. You'll have to convert your csv file into kml file so you can plot the ward members on Google Earth. The quickest way that I have found to do this is using Batch Geocode, an online csv to kml file converter. Go to it.
5. Open up your saved csv file in Excell. You're going to have to mess with it a bit. Above the column that says "addr1" type in "Street" as the heading. Above the column that reads "addr2," type in City, State and Zip. Note: Many people have been reporting that they have to split up the city, state, and zip into three different columns for this to work. I haven't had to do this, but I would suggest doing it. Use the spreadsheet "fill function")
   


6. Copy the entire directory from Excell and paste it in Batch Geocode.
7. Click "Validate Source"


8. Under Location Fields on Batch GeoCode select "Street" for Address and "City, State, Zip" for the rest.



9. Click "Run Geocoder"- What the application does is turn the addresses into co-ordinates for Google Earth. This part can take awhile if your ward is especially large.
10. Scroll Down in Batch GeoCode and click "Download to Google Earth (KML) File


11. You're done. Each dot represents a family in your ward. Bring your mouse over the dot and the name of the family will appear, their address, and phone number. You can also chose to get directions to or from this direction.

This is a kind of quick and dirty way to do it. It is possible to include some neat features by manipulating the csv file, like color coding for different organizations, less actives, ect. I'll save that for another post. Until then, enjoy.

How have you all been creating kml overlays for Google Earth? Anything easier than the way I've done it?

Update: Some people have voiced concerns about privacy issues. This is done with Google Earth, not Google Maps. This won't be published on the net or anything like that. It's all done on your computer, not on the web. So, there shouldn't be any concerns about privacy issues.

Firefox Profanity Filter

If you use Firefox for your web browsing you can install a script that will convert profanity on a web page into ****. Before you can install it, you'll need to install Greasemonkey into your Firefox extensions.

This is great, especially if you have little kids using the net.

Thanks Lifehacker!

Parent Hack: Put food on a stick

Parent Hacks posted a genius idea. If your kid is a picky eater, put the food on a stick. I don't have kids, but this makes perfect sense. For some reason little kids will eat almost anything if it's on a stick. When I was little, I hated tomatoes. But if it was part of shish-kabob, the stick made the tasty factor of the tomato go way up. I'm definitely going to do this when I have kids.

ChipIn to Raise Mission Funds

Alright, this is probably going to get the stink eye from many people, but I think it's a pretty cool idea. There's a new start-up called ChipIn that allows users to collect money from individuals all over the internet.

How it works:
It's basically a glorified "Donate" button on that you see on many blogs. Signing up is free. You can decide to receive your money through PayPal or check. After filling out the sign up info, you create your ChipIn projects. It can be anything from saving money to buy a domain name or raising money to fight breast cancer. You set how much you want to raise, when you need it by, and how you wish to collect funds. Your project will be posted on the site and people can decide if they wish to donate to your cause. You can also create a widget that can be placed on your blog or MySpace page which allows people to donate. Usually donations are small, but with the collective of the internet, small amounts can add up fast.

Over at Profy, they ran a test and were able to raise $1,000 in a week. Pretty impressive.

I'm sure people are going to think "Dadgummit. You gotta work to save for a mission. If you don't work, you won't receive the blessings." I'm not suggesting that one should only use ChipIn to raise mission funds. I think it would be helpful when potential missionaries come up short on funds. And who are we to deny gentiles the blessings of donating to building up the kingdom?

My concern is how does this site avoid scams? Because it seems pretty scamable. I guess it just works on trust. Some people are going to get burned, though. Check it out.

Become an Early Riser

Cease to be ^aidle; cease to be ^bunclean; cease to ^cfind fault one with another; cease to ^dsleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated.

D&C 88: 124

This year, one of my goals is to become an early riser. The scriptures counsel us to do it and all the successful people I've known or read about seem to be early risers. However, I haven't been able to consistently wake up early since my mission.

For those of you like me who find it hard to wake up early, head on over to Steven Palvina's site. He's got a great post on how to become an early riser. The trick it seems is not to go to bed and wake up at the same time everyday, but rather just wake up at the same time. You only should go to bed when you're actually sleepy. Some days you'll be sleepy at 10 PM, others at 12AM, but you still wake up at 5 or 6 AM.

I've been doing it this past week and it seems to be working. It's been really nice. I've been able to get much more done during the day by waking up a few hours earlier. Let's see if I can keep it up.

Letterpop for Ward and Family Newsletters

Lifehacker did a post on a nifty little web-app called Letterpop. Letterpop allows you to easily create slick looking newsletters complete with photos. All that it requires is for you to be able to drag and drop things. It's that easy. When you're done creating your newsletter online, you have the option of posting online with a url that Letterpop provides you or to print it off.

Letterpop would be very useful in creating professional looking ward or family bulletins. Check it out.

LDS Yahoo Widgets

Yahoo! has a program that that is free to download that allows users to put widgets on their computer desktops. Widgets are small programs that can be designed to do a variety of things such as give you the weather, update you on the news, or tell you when your favorite blog has a new post- all without opening your web browser.

There are a few LDS themed widgets in their widget gallery. My favorites are the LDS quotes and BYU Radio widgets.

One of my favorite widgets in the gallery is the photo frame widget. You can set the frame to a Flickr.com feed and get different pictures of the temple or other church art directly sent to your desktop.

Google Maps Hack: LDS Temples

Google Maps and Google Earth are one of the best ideas that Google has come up with. What makes them so great is that Google allows anyone to mess around with the script so they can adapt the map for their needs. In other words, they are very hackable.

Someone has used Google Maps' open source scripting to create a tour of all the temples in the world. You can zoom in and see the Washington D.C or Mexico City temple from outer space! Pretty dang cool.

It's fun and allows members to gain an appreciation that we have in the modern church to have such easy access to temples.

Kate's Calendars

My wife has a side business she's running called Kate's Calendars. They're personalziable advent calendars geared towards an LDS market. They're perfect for families that have a missionary in the field. Get a calendar, write some inspiring messages, and your missionary can open up a little door each day to get a new message. Here's the back story on how my wife came up with Kate's Calendars:

My wife wrote me the during my mission. One of the creative things she did was make homemade advent calendars for me. They were by far one my favorite pieces of mail that I received while I was on my mission. It's was nice to open a door each day for a month to read a message from Kate. After we married, I talked about how much I enjoyed those homemade personalized advent calendars that Kate sent me and how my companions were often jealous that they didn't have anything like that. We thought it might be neat if we could take my wife's idea and some how produce it so that anybody could make a personalized advent calendar for their missionary. Thus, Kate's Calendars was born.

I guess you can say Kate's Calendars is kind of a Mormon hack. Instead of having to wait until P-day to get a message to your missionary, you can get on to him/her everyday for a month. It would also be good for missionaries in the field to use with their investigators. They can make a calendar with scriptures and inspiring messages while an investigator prepares for baptism. Check it out.

DIY: Mission Slide Show

If you went on a mission, you probably have a albums (or if you're a more recent missionary, mega bytes) of photos. Instead of just leaving them in your box (or hard drive) bring them to life by making a slide show with Windows Photo Story.

You can make a professional looking slide show for absolutely free with Windows Photo Story. (The download is free.) Photo Story makes making professional looking slide shows a cinch. You pick which photos you want, put them in the order you want them, add cool special effects (my favorites are the Ken Burns documentary style panning and zooming), and add background music.

Here's my slide show that I made from my mission using Photo Story. (It's kind of long.)



I downloaded the punk version of "Called to Serve," as well as the acoustic version of "Come Thou Fount" from LDS Audio. They have a large selection of LDS themed music. Downloads are .99 each. The song "Faith Like a Child" came from on of my wife's Jars of Clay albums. (Yes, that's right. Jars of Clay. The Christian rock band. I've always been suspicious of Christian rock music, but these guys are surprisingly good. Check them out.)

Making my photo story took me a few hours because I had to scan all my mission photos. However, after I finished the scanning, actually creating the slide show took less than an hour. So, this isn't a hard project.

Bottom line: photo story is a great and easy way to share the best two years of your life with your friends, family and posterity. You can also use it as a missionary tool by e-mailing it to your non-member friends or by posting it on MySpace and YouTube. Make your mission slide show today.

Google Calendar for Bishop Appointments

One of the nice features about Google Calendar is the ability to share with other people. This feature can come in really handy for bishops and Ward Executive Secretaries. The way the current system is set up, members call the executive secretary to make an appointment with the bishop. The secretary then has to call the bishop with all the appointments.

A possible alternative is for the bishopric to establish a Google Calendar for the various interviews that members need. As soon as the secretary or other member of the bishopric gets the appointment from a member, they can enter it into the calendar and make an assignment on who's going to cover it. You can set Google Calendars up so that everyone gets an e-mail or a cell phone text message when the calendar has been updated.

Some of the possible benefits include saving time, making sure appointments don't get forgotten, and better time management. Start your Executive Council Google Calendar today.

DIY Planner

A new year means new planners. Instead of forking over your dough, save it and visit DIY Planner. They provide hundreds of templates for all your planner needs. You can download the Classic Planner Kit that includes dozens of variations on daily, weekly, and monthly calendars. You pick which ones you like and print them off.

In addition to your run of the mill planner, DIY Planner includes several Franklin Covey and Getting Things Done inspired templates.

The files come in PDF format. All you do is download the kit or template you like and print off the planning pages you want to use. Get your DIY planner today!

Put a link to mormon.org in your email signature

Mormon.org has lots of great information about the Church for people don't know much about it. Why not help in the missionary work by linking to it from everyone one of your e-mails. Most e-mail services and programs allow you to set up a signature (a phrase that is included in everyone of your emails). You can set it up so it has a link to Mormon.org.

I would suggest only doing this with your personal e-mails. I'm sure most businesses have policies against proselyting or discussing religion at work. So use this with discretion.

Use Google Maps in Genealogy

Map Your Ancestors is a neat service that integrates Ancestry.com and Google Maps. You can make plots on Google Maps that show where your ancestors have lived. You can also include photos in the Google Maps plots to show what the area looked like when your ancestor lived there.

It's cool being able to see how your family migrated across the globe or United States. Check it out today.

Scripture Study Techniques

About LDS guide, Rachel Woods, presents a great list of different scripture study techniques. Her list runs the gauntlet. She covers:

• color coding
• footnote referencing
• marginal notes
• spiritual journals
• post it notes

Under each technique she gives a brief description on how to implement it. Check it out today.