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The Value of Little Things

Dr. Albert Rossi reflects on the life of St. Silouan and the great value of little things.




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Joy in Small Things

Dr. Albert Rossi shares his understanding of how to discover Christ's joy in both the small and great experiences of our daily lives.




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First Things Foundation

Bobby Maddex interviews John Heers, the co-founder and director of the First Things Foundation, the goal of which is to help the poorest of the poor with sustainable and enduring aid without crippling the local economy or demeaning the recipients.




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First Things Foundation

Bobby Maddex interviews John Heers, Andrew Schwark, and Riley Dooris of the First Things Foundation.




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6 Things Orthodox Christians Can Learn From Billy Graham

On Feb 21, 2018 at 7:46 AM Eastern Time, the Rev. Billy Graham reposed at the age of 99 in Montreat, North Carolina. Dn. Michael Hyatt and John Maddex talk about six things we can learn from the life of Billy Graham as Orthodox Christians.




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The First Things Foundation and the COVID Virus

Bobby Maddex interviews John Heers, the director of the First Things Foundation, about the organization's work with the COVID virus.




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A Man Is the Measure of All Things

Fr. Pat explores three ways of looking at Protagoras's infamous assertion.




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Things that Jump Out

In this homily from the Sunday of St. Thomas, Fr. Pat comments on three things that jump out at him from the Gospel text of John 20:19-31.




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Three Things You Need to Know About the Bible

How do Christ and the Church teach us to read the Bible? Here are three things you need to know!




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Proclaiming the Great Things ...




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Think On These Things

How can we receive the peace of Christ during Great Lent and throughout our lives?




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★ Things that will destroy your goals

In order to accomplish your goals you need: (1) a clear goal; (2) a winning action plan; and (3) consistency. Take away or invert any of those things, and you’ve eliminated the possibility of succeeding at your desired outcome. Here’s what they look like when inverted: (1) unclear direction; (2) random acts of productivity / […]




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The 10 most important things to look for when choosing a music distributor

I’ve been researching the distributor space lately and watching with interest as more pop up and margins get squeezed. It’s got to a place now where you can actually distribute music for free. But what else should you be looking for other than a pipeline? I’ve spoken to a lot of artists and record labels...

Read More




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Things To Do This Weekend In London: 9-10 November 2024

The Lord Mayor's Show, firework displays and brand new exhibitions.




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Free And Cheap Things To Do This Week In London: 4-10 November 2024

Things to do for a fiver or less.



  • London
  • Free & Cheap
  • free and cheap events
  • free and cheap
  • LONDON ON A BUDGET
  • FREE AND CHEAP LISTINGS

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Things To Do This Weekend In London: 16-17 November 2024

A cheese market, new illuminations and a literature festival.




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Free And Cheap Things To Do In London This Week: 11-17 November 2024

Things to do for a fiver or less.



  • London
  • Free & Cheap
  • free and cheap events
  • free and cheap
  • LONDON ON A BUDGET

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Internet of Things - protocols and access keys

I've just read this article from Mark O'Neill on the 10 concerns for the Internet of Things. Mark brings up some very interesting aspects and concerns. I'd like to comment on two of those: protocols and access keys.

His primary concern is protocol proliferation. I agree this is an issue. Mark explicitly mentions CoAP, MQTT, AMQP and XMPP. Interestingly he doesn't mention HTTP, which I have found to be heavily used by devices, especially the new generation of Raspberry Pi based systems. Many Arduino's also use HTTP.

I will admit to a strong bias. I think that MQTT is the best of these protocols for IoT devices, with CoAP a distant second.

Let's get XMPP out of the way. I love XMPP. I think its a fantastic protocol. Do I want to create XML packets on my Arduino? Er... nope. Even on 32-bit controllers, there is still the network traffic to consider: suppose I'm using a GPRS connection and I have thousands of devices deployed: minimizing network traffic is important for cost and efficiency, and XMPP was not designed for that.

AMQP is not an appropriate protocol for IoT devices and was not designed for that. It is designed for "the efficient exchange of information within and between enterprises". It was certainly not designed for lightweight, non-persistent, non-transactional systems. To that end, my own system (WSO2) will be providing efficient bridging for AMQP and MQTT to enable lightweight systems to get their data into wider enterprise contexts. I also demonstrated HTTP to MQTT bridging with the WSO2 ESB at the MQTT Interop held last week at EclipseCon.

How about CoAP vs MQTT. Firstly, CoAP is more appropriate to compare to MQTT-SN. It is UDP only, and designed to emulate a RESTful model over UDP. My biggest concern with CoAP is this: most people don't actually understand REST - they understand HTTP. If I had a dollar for every time I've come across supposedly RESTful interfaces that are really HTTP interfaces, I'd be a rich man! 

Interestingly, despite MQTT having been around for 10 years, the Google Trend shows that it has only recently hit the public notice:
However, as you can see, it has quickly overtaken CoAP. In terms of traffic, it is a clear winner: every Facebook mobile app uses MQTT to communicate with the Facebook servers.

The other area I'd like to comment on is access keys. I agree this is a big issue, and that is the reason I've been working on using OAuth2 access keys with MQTT and IoT devices. I recently gave talks about this at FOSDEM, QCon London, and EclipseCon.  The EclipseCon talk also covered a set of wider security concerns and the slides are available here. OAuth2 and OpenID Connect are important standards that have got incredible traction in a short period of time. They have evolved out of 10+ years of trying to solve the distributed, federated identity and access control problems of the Internet. 

In my presentation I strongly argued that passwords are bad for users, but worse for devices. Tokens are the correct model, and the OAuth2 token is the best available token to use at this point. There was considerable interest in the MQTT interop session on standardizing the use of OAuth2 tokens with the protocol. 

My personal prediction is that we will see MQTT and HTTP become the most-used IoT protocols, and I strongly urge (and hope) that OAuth2 tokens will become the de-facto model across both of these.







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Five things your translator should know when translating legislation into English

Translating the legislation or regulations of a country, company or university into English requires certain skills and know-how. This post lists five things your translator should know when translating legislation into English. 1. How to apply English drafting conventions Conventions on headings, numbering, referencing and capitalisation differ from one legal language to another. For instance, […]




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A constant temperature control system for indoor environments in buildings using internet of things

The performance of a building's internal environment, which includes the air temperature, lighting and acoustics, is what determines the quality of the environment inside the building. We present a thermal model for achieving thermal comfort in buildings that makes use of a multimodal analytic framework as a solution to this challenge. In this study, a multimodal combination is used to evaluate several temperature and humidity sensors as well as an area image. Additionally, a CNN and LSTM combination is used to process the image and sensor data. The results show that heating setback and interior set point temperatures, as well as mechanical ventilation based on real people's presence and CO<SUB align=right>2 levels, are all consistently reduced when ICT-driven intelligent solutions are used. The CNN-LSTM model has a goodness of fit that is 0.7258 on average, which is much higher than both the CNN (0.5291) and LSTM (0.5949) models.




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WoT (Web of Things) for Energy Management in a Smart Grid-Connected Home




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Four things companies need to know about protecting employees during times of crisis

Published on behalf of SAP Concur. Are companies relieved of their duty to care for the wellbeing of their employees during this lockdown period? Angelique Montalto, Regional Sales Director at SAP Concur, clarified the situation: “Organisations owe it to their employees...




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JustAnswer Review: 5 Things To Know Before You Sign Up

If you’ve ever looked for a quick, simple answer from a professional, maybe you’ve stumbled across JustAnswer. I first used the website after my cat had surgery and I wanted to ask a few follow-up questions after the veterinarian’s office had already closed. Recently, I signed up again just to see what new users can […]

The post JustAnswer Review: 5 Things To Know Before You Sign Up appeared first on Clark Howard.




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Medicare: 10 Things To Know

With more than 67 million beneficiaries, around one in five Americans is enrolled in Medicare. The federal health insurance program has helped ensure adults over 65 and individuals with disabilities have access to health insurance since 1965. But with regular changes to the program — and our health system at large — it’s no wonder […]

The post Medicare: 10 Things To Know appeared first on Clark Howard.





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4 Things To Know About the Hulu + Live TV Streaming Service

If you’re tired of paying a big cable bill each month, you may find that cutting the cord and subscribing to Hulu + Live TV is a great money-saving solution in 2024. This live TV streaming service is an option for people looking to leave the cable company behind for good. Others include Sling TV and YouTube TV. In this article, I’ll […]

The post 4 Things To Know About the Hulu + Live TV Streaming Service appeared first on Clark Howard.







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Analog Equivalent Rights (12/21): Our parents bought things untracked, their footsteps in store weren’t recorded

Privacy: In the last article, we focused on how people are tracked today when using credit cards instead of cash. But few pay attention to the fact that we’re tracked when using cash today, too.

Few people pay attention to the little sign on the revolving door on Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It says that wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of every single individual is taking place in the airport.

What sets Schiphol Airport apart isn’t that they track individual people’s movements to the sub-footstep level in a commercial area. (It’s for commercial purposes, not security purposes.) No, what sets Schiphol apart is that they bother to tell people about it. (The Netherlands tend to take privacy seriously, as does Germany, and for the same reason.)

Locator beacons are practically a standard in bigger commercial areas now. They ping your phone using wi-fi and bluetooth, and using signal strength triangulation, a grid of locator beacons is able to show how every single individual is moving in realtime at the sub-footstep level. This is used to “optimize marketing” — in other words, find ways to trick people’s brains to spend resources they otherwise wouldn’t have. Our own loss of privacy is being turned against us, as it always is.

Where do people stop for a while, what catches their attention, what doesn’t catch their attention, what’s a roadblock for more sales?

These are legitimate questions. However, taking away people’s privacy in order to answer those questions is not a legitimate method to answer them.

This kind of mass individual tracking has even been deployed at city levels, which happened in complete silence until the Privacy Oversight Board of a remote government sounded the alarms. The city of Västerås got the green light to continue tracking once some formal criteria were met.

Yes, this kind of people tracking is documented to have been already rolled out citywide in at least one small city in a remote part of the world (Västerås, Sweden). With the government’s Privacy Oversight Board having shrugged and said “fine, whatever”, don’t expect this to stay in the small town of Västerås. Correction, wrong tense: don’t expect it to have stayed in just Västerås, where it was greenlit three years ago.

Our analog parents had the ability to walk around untracked in the city and street of their choice, without it being used or held against them. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same ability.

There’s one other way to buy things with cash which avoids this kind of tracking, and that’s paying cash-on-delivery when ordering something online or over the phone to your door — in which case your purchase is also logged and recorded, just in another type of system.

This isn’t only used against the ordinary citizen for marketing purposes, of course. It’s used against the ordinary citizen for every conceivable purpose. But we’ll be returning to that in a later article in the series.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.











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Small Things Vs. Big Things

I heard a sermon the other day that was challenging. You know the ones that speak right to you? Ugh, I hate when they do that. The pastor started saying (paraphrased), “Trying to change the big things in your life ultimately fails. It’s very hard to do and it doesn’t work as well as changing the small or insignificant things. You see, small things/ideas/habits that you can effectively change will build up overtime to become one big massive change. We don’t usually see it until we look back throughout our lives and see how much has altered. So today, based on that, I decided to give some practical small things we can alter today that hopefully over time will become life changing.

1. Prayer.

Ooooh... this is a goody. Naturally, every pastor/leader/teacher/parent/theologian wants you to pray more. But when talking with friends and peers, it actually seems everyone does! So why don’t we? Well, to some, prayer can be daunting. What do I say? Is God really listening? All this takes is a small change. For example, commit to praying for 5 mins alone everyday. Doesn’t matter when, just that you can commit to the 5 minutes. Then after a while, go for 10 minutes. Then go from there. If you want to cultivate that prayer life, start small.

2. Reading

The Bible, John Grisham, or Marie Kondo, I don’t care (well the Bible is something you should read, just sayin’). Start small. Maybe a few verses a day, or a chapter. Build that up over time and don’t allow the excuse of “I have no time” to rule you! I did this many years ago. I committed to read my bible daily, which at that point was a miracle. After one month I was hooked. God began speaking clearly through his word and honestly, life got better. Try it. But start small.

3. Food.

Well, here I go hitting a nerve. Mainly in my right heart valve. Losing weight is hard to do. Working out? Hard to do. Unless.... you start…. small. You’re getting it. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. Find a buddy to walk with, or when you go out, only order from the kids meal. Having a community that has your best interests at heart makes this easier, so take the small step and get people together to be active, and stay accountable. Start small and grow from there. I mean, not grow as in waistline... you know what I mean.

4. HAVE SOME STINKING FUN

I recently started posting random out of context bible verses on my Instagram (@njgalbraith) just as a way to have fun and let others enjoy the process. I’ve received many messages saying this is the highlight of their day! It didn’t take much for me to put it out there (or for you to go watch them) but the small step I took to try and give people some laughs is paying off. Who knows where it will end up, but I started small and am letting God grow it with me. You may have something just like that. That thing that makes people laugh or have fun. Do something small (like send a mass meme text to friends?) and see where the fun takes you!

So start putting these into practice today. Like, right now. NOW. And apply this to anything you have in your life that you want to succeed in. Businesses, relationships, church, anything! Start small, and see where God leads you.




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10 Things Every Owner Should Know About Succession Planning

The purpose of this article is to simply differentiate “exit planning” and “succession” and outline the main points for a CEO to remember when succession planning.




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Things To Understand Before Exiting Your Construction Business

Most owners continue to be stuck in their business until they can clearly see the path to replace their income and maintain their lifestyles in retirement.




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All Things Gypsum: Acoustics

What impact does insulation have on acoustic performance of a wall assembly?




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All Things Gypsum: Fasteners

I often see gypsum board installed using a combination of nails and screws, and I’ve always assumed this practice is acceptable. However, one of my superiors recently questioned the practice. Is combining nails and screws acceptable?




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All Things Gypsum: Fireproofing

What is the difference between fire resistance ratings and flame-spread ratings? Can they be used interchangeably?




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All Things Gypsum: Tile

This summer, I am undertaking a total bathroom remodel. I’m planning to tile the walls around the vanity and toilet, as well as those surrounding the shower. Mold has been a persistent problem in this room.




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The Finish Line: Things Not To Do With EIFS

Sometimes the limits of what EIFS can do get pushed too far, and problems ensue. Usually these misguided uses of EIFS are well intentioned, and are due to a lack of understanding of the properties of EIFS.




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All Things Gypsum: Testing

In a recent build, we used several designs found in GA-600 (Fire Resistance and Sound Control Design Manual). We selected designs shown to have STC ratings of 50 to 54.




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All Things Gypsum: Language

For many years, the Gypsum Association has published several technical documents in Spanish, as well as English. Are there plans to introduce Spanish-language offerings to the GA’s YouTube channel?




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All Things Gypsum: Firewalls

There is a lot of confusion in the field over area-separation firewalls and utility placement. I know that the GA has a position statement that clarifies criteria for the placement of utilities in the flanking walls on either side of a two-hour, steel H-stud, gypsum shaftliner panel area-separation wall.




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All Things Gypsum: Wildland Code

What is the International Wildland Urban Interface Code and why should it matter to me?




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The campaign that dared to do things differently

WaterAid's Untapped broke many of the traditional rules but still exceeded its fundraising target. Rebecca Cooney reports