The Evolution of Spirituality

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by ‘Zeno’

First of all, I like to think of Religion as the mimicry spawning from revolutionary, charismatic, spiritual leaders (i.e. Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Joseph Smith, etc.). The religious institutions are just imitating the teachings of those leaders. So it’s really the evolution of spirituality that we’re talking about here. The religious morals are more like guidelines, similar in the way that courts are institutions acting on the guidelines of law to facilitate the way people interact with each other.

I like to think that all of humanity is trying to reach out to each other through misunderstood, diverse communication. Everyone is the master (God) of their own universe, in that we are all confined to our physical bodies and restricted by our imperfect senses. Everyone has a different interpretation based on their experiences and biology; nature and nurture. With that mindset it becomes just a matter of understanding the underlying message, through symbolism, that is being conveyed through diverse communication (i.e. art, poetry, prose, music, speech). The stories change in style and language and form, but the message remains the same. Another way of looking at it is that all myths are humanities attempt at explaining the unexplainable. Most myths are traditional and ancient symbols used to fill the gap of human knowledge. “God” then is a constantly changing name for the lack of human understanding. Much like evil is the lack of good, like night is the lack of dark. Given that the breadth of human knowledge is always changing with new information (technological and sociological evolution) we need to adapt our myths to the new input. One of the most common stories out there is the Adam and Eve myth. Here is an attempt at symbolic interpretation of the Adam and Eve myth from my perspective.

In the book of Genesis God created Adam from dust and breathed “the breath of life” into his nostrils. From a scientific, Darwinist point of view, this is just a metaphor for natural selection. God created man and woman in his own image; I interpret this as Pantheism, the belief that all is God. God created woman from the rib of Adam; a symbol for human equality and cyclical birth through the male/female dynamic; man gives birth to woman with sperm and woman gives literal birth to man.

God created animals so that man would not be alone. This is where the original sin and loss of innocence starts. One of the animals created is the serpent; a symbol often used for Satan. Satan is the name given to evil in the world, but I believe evil is just a name given to the lack of good. God’s qualities include omnipotence and omniscience, both of which are qualities of omnibenevolence. The loss of innocence through the knowledge is a metaphor for the struggle of humanity in nature. Another way of saying it is that the loss of childhood freedom through fear and anger results from a lack of faith. God created the animals to cope with loneliness; this is just another way of symbolizing how human beings attempt to control and label the outside, and inside, world through the Ego. Notice after the “fall” Adam and Eve start realizing their “nakedness” and developing fears and misconceptions of the true God (Pantheism; all is God, all is omnibenevolent, all is good). This is why Buddhist sacrifices for humanity remind our lost inner child how to free itself from the chains of egoistic control. Lose the notion of Self. This is the path to “heaven” or enlightenment. I think maybe the problem is that people get stuck in the literal meaning of the myth and it prevents them from getting the message. That and there is a lot of noise adding to the confusion in modern times (i.e. movies, games, internet, sex, conflict, etc.). If we are able to come to terms with our lack of self, we can see that it is only the Ego that creates notions of good and evil, God and Satan through judgments of the outside reality. Thus, all is. Faith becomes a flexible form of entertainment and a way of coping with our human condition.

Thus, given new information spirituality is in a constant state of evolution, much like technology and society. Where and what it is evolving toward is yet to be seen. I think the new scientific advances in Artificial Intelligence, Genetics, Space Exploration, and Nanotechnology make for some interesting possibilities. It is through diversity of human experiences that we can synthesize the eastern and western philosophies into a new spiritual compass.

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~ Isaac Newton

3 reasons to use Firefox instead of Safari

When I first got a Mac, I was all for using Safari. I liked its integration with Keychain, the way it looked and the way it operated. Those things haven’t really changed, and in fact Safari has been getting better and better the longer I’ve used a Mac. I use 1Password now to manage my identities, passwords, forms, etc. and once I switched back to Firefox for a while, I started to notice that I had begun to use it differently than I had in the past because of some of the powerful tools available. That being said, Safari isn’t so far behind. There are really only a few reasons why I continue to use Firefox instead of Safari and I thought I’d share them with you.

1. The Awesome Bar

Mozilla likes to call the location/address bar the “Awesome Bar” and I’m not really going to argue with them, because I use it constantly and I do think it’s pretty awesome. When I do happen to find myself in another browser, I tend to try to use the address bar in the same way and inevitably end up annoyed. This is generally the first feature I miss. Basically, in Firefox the bar uses your browser history, sites you may have bookmarked with tags, etc. to autocomplete addresses. This means that I can often find things incredibly quickly just by typing in a series of very vague words into the bar. For example, when I’m sweating away at my keyboard and am contemplating taking action against the heat and want to remember that site I read about homebrew air conditioning, instead of looking it up on google or searching through my bookmarks, I just type in “homebrew ac” to my Awesome Bar and hit enter, and it brings up the site I want. On a similar note, it even seems to find things that aren’t in my history, I assume by using Google. I use this often when I know something’s not going to be hard to find, for example if I wanted to look for Robin Hobb’s Wikipedia entry, I don’t have to type it out or search for it on Wikipedia. I can just type “wiki Robin Hobb” into the Awesome Bar and Firefox brings me there.

2. Add-ons

With Safari, I just don’t have this option. There isn’t a huge group of people doing awesome things to add to the functionality of Safari, but with Firefox, that is all very easily accessed. Sometimes I just like to head over to the Add-ons page and see what is new or popular to try them out, but right now I’ve got around 10 installed. Most of them are tools for web development or productivity tools, but I’ve also got a couple in there for social networking/bookmarking as well.

3. Ubiquity

Technically, Ubiquity should be considered a subset of the Add-ons section, but it is so important to the way I choose to do things that I thought it made sense to have its own description. Ubiquity is something like Quicksilver for the Mac. If you’ve ever used it, you’ll start to get an idea of what I’m talking about here. Essentially, Ubiquity is a hotkey activated tool which performs actions within the browser in a quicker, more effective way. It’s hard to describe in exact terms what Ubiquity does, because it could potentially do anything with in the browser, given the chance. You can write your own commands and UI for it, but generally the idea is the same. It pops up quick activated, and awaits your input. You can use it do update statuses on social sites, translate chunks of pages, look up maps for selected addresses, look up wikipedia entries, do searches, perform mathematical calculations, get reviews, perform browser tab actions, format text, interact with webmail and calendars, check weather, and lots of other things. It is quick, uses fairly plain intuitive language, and is under active development and continues to improve. If there is one Firefox Add-on you should install, it is this one.

Make Gmail Your Productivity Center – Part 3

This is Part 3 of my multi-part post detailing various features you can use to improve your productivity by using Gmail. If you haven’t read the previous parts, you may want to start at the beginning.

So in the previous parts of this series, I’ve talked about using filters and labels (I noticed today that Google has made labels a more prominent feature in Gmail, which should really help highlight how important they are) to organize mail, using canned responses to automate repetitive emails, using GMail as a central hub for all of your various email accounts, a little bit about keyboard shortcuts and I briefly mentioned a few preview options in Labs which can help save some time when viewing emails.

There are some more quick and easy tools which are easily enabled within Gmail which can really make a difference when it comes to usability and productivity. A couple of these features can be found under the General tab in your settings. The signature and the personal level indicator settings may not seem like a big deal to you, and they really aren’t. They’re sort of necessary features, which is why you should enable them. Who wants to have to retype their signature or paste one on from an external file? Also, isn’t it nice to know at a glance whether or not you’re the main recipient of a message? Easy.

Some more settings which I find absolutely necessary can be found in the Labs section.

Tasks – This is a tool which works great, integrates well with the interface, and gets out of your way when you don’t need it. You can create tasks from existing emails, which is an awesome feature. You may want to upgrade to a more robust task system later, but this is a great place to start.
Message translation – If you get a a lot of emails in languages you don’t speak (I don’t) you’ll probably find it useful. I have it enabled just in case I happen to need it.
Quick links – This is a pretty great tool. I actually use it to save searches which I use a lot so I don’t have to remember exactly how I found something.
Signature tweaks – this is just a preference thing. I prefer to have my signature before quoted text and without the double dash.
Sender Time Zone – I live in the UK, but most of my contacts and work is in the US. This means that I’m often awake while other people are asleep and that I may be sending emails at times which aren’t great for other people. This option helps me keep that in mind and reply accordingly.
Quote selected text – It’s just nice to be able to highlight a chunk of text and have it clearly displayed in your response rather than having to direct someone to the appropriate part of an email. It just makes things simpler.
Navbar drag and drop – not much to say on this one. If you have the option to be able to drag things around or not, why not choose to be able to do it?
Forgotten attachment detector – Oh, I think everyone has done this a time or 2. I’ve so careful about this these days that I rarely need this option, but of course I’ve got it enabled anyway. There is nothing more embarrassing than mentioning an attachment and not including it.
Mark as Read – Before I had this button, Gmail was sort of the bane of my existence. One button and my problems are solved. I don’t always want to open an email. Sometimes you already know what’s in there, right? Well you can select a veritable cornucopia of emails and with one click of this button they’re all marked as read. Simple? I would say so. I have no idea why this is an additional option instead of a built-in part of Gmail.
Go to Label – This option enables a really nice way of navigating through your labels. Once you start using labels you’ll realize how great this is.
Create a Document – If you use Google Docs you’ll want this. I use Google Docs all of the time, and I’d argue that you should be using at least some form of cloud based office suite as well. It’s really too good to not use. Anyway, this option enabled you to do awesome things like creating a Google Document from an email conversation. Pretty cool.
Suggest more recipients – Enough said. I use this all of the time.
Search Autocomplete – Why not make search better and easier?
Inserting Images – This lets you put images in the message body of your emails, if you want to do that.
Google Calendar gadget – This is a gadget which allows you to view and manipulate calendar entries from the left sidebar within Gmail.
Google Docs gadget – Like I said before, I use Google Docs a lot. This lets you see your docs, create new ones, open them, etc. It sits on your left sidebar
Add any gadget – this is great for adding third party support. There are tons of gadgets you could add. One example is the gadget for Remember The Milk, the popular task/to do manager.

After you’ve got all of this stuff enabled, you’ll probably find that things are a whole lot more usable, but you may not know exactly how to go about using this new system you’ve created. Don’t worry. We’ll get there soon enough. Head back this way for Part 4 or stay tuned by by subscribing now.

My Top 10 Mac RSS reader picks

I recently decided to take a look at the RSS aggregator/reader market for the Mac and see if I could come up with a better reader than the one I’ve been using for the past couple of years. I started reading some things, downloaded a bunch of them, and started to sort through them one at a time. This post sort of details how I did that and what my results were.

First of all, I narrowed down my choices to a list of 10 RSS readers. I did this mainly be reading reviews and asking around about preferences people had. I tried to get a sense of them and what sort of experience they offered, so I wrote very abbreviated ‘strength blurb’ for each of them. This is what I came up with as a starting point, in no particular order:

	1.Vienna Very intuitive interface, functional and simple RSS viewing.
	2.NewsFire Pretty interface, good search functions, great with just a keyboard.
	3.Shrook Intuitive customizable interface with a wide view, learning folders, synchronization.
	4.NetNewsWire Clippings, good search, good flags and folders, smart lists.
	5.RSSOwl Open Source, cross platform, highly customizable.
	6.Attensa Convenient publishing, email and tag buttons, synchronization with del.icio.us tags.
	7.PixelNews Looks nice, creates a sort of continuous news stream.
	8.Times Newspaper design, multiple pages, easy on the eyes, shelf for storing articles.
	9.Cyndicate Great tagging, label and visual customization support.
	10.NewsLife News bin for saving articles for later, very simple and easy to understand.

Ok, so at this point I already had some idea of which RSS readers weren’t going to work for me, but I wanted to pin down features I wanted and didn’t really need. I should also mention at this point that my original reader of choice was Vienna and that at this point it was still in with a chance of winning, maybe because the interface was very familiar to me and works perfectly well. I made this list:

Things which are not important to me:

1. Growl notification – I don’t want growl notifications distracting me from something else I’m doing. If I want to read my news feeds, I’ll read my news feeds when I get to it, not when Growl annoys me enough. I’ve made the mistake in the past of enabling growl notifications for too many things and ended up really hating it and ignoring Growl altogether, which doesn’t really make it a useful tool.
2. Cross platform support – I usually read my RSS feeds on my Macbook. Since I take my Macbook with me when I go away, I don’t really need an RSS reader that works on other platforms at the moment. There may be a point in the future (if I get a netbook or something and run Linux) where I may want cross platform support but at the moment it really doesn’t matter to me.

Things which are important to me:

1. Cost – I don’t have a lot of money to spend on something like this, and I’d prefer a free product.
2. Blogging/social network support – I’d like to be able to easily blog on topics I find in my reader or post them to social bookmarking sites, social networks, or microblogging services.
3. Email forwarding support – I’d prefer to use an RSS reader which allows me to easily forward article contents or links to friends or family quickly so I can’t have to do it manually.
4. Synchronization – This isn’t a huge deal to me at the moment, but if I ever decide to get another home computer, chances are it will be an iMac and I’ll want to be able to sync my newsreader between my home machine and the Macbook I have with me when I’m out and about.
5. Keyboard Navigation – I hate clicking on things unless I have to, and I’d always rather have an RSS reader which I can navigate easily with the keyboard, whether this be through the arrow keys and spacebar or hotkeys.

At this point, I made a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I could easily keep track of which reader had which features. I’ll stick it below here with Google Elements so you can see:

As you can see, PixelNews was really not what I was looking for here and the two which really seemed to shine were Shrook and NetNewsWire, followed by Vienna, NewsFire and Attensa which were only missing out on sufficient synchronization features which I wouldn’t be using right now anyway. I really enjoyed Shrook’s interface but I did see a potential problem in that it is obviously best viewed on a quite wide screen and may not be great when I don’t have another monitor and am just walking around with my little Macbook. I tested it out and I actually found my Macbook screen quite capable of pulling it off and I think I’ll be giving Shrook a chance. I’ll probably still use Vienna here and there, though – until I actually have something to sync.

Just a note before I go – in terms of the best keyboard navigation, I’d say that NewsFire was pretty great. On the other hand, in terms of the best overall design and idea, the best choice is Times. If I had money to blow and didn’t mind clicking occasionally, Times would be my choice hands down. It looks fantastic, is incredibly easy on the eyes, has good social network/bookmarking features and has a quite cool ‘shelf’ to store articles for later. Also according to the site, “Times shows you the entire story regardless of source” which “should work with most (but not all) major news sites.” Check out the demo if you get a chance.

WordPress feed redirection and hotlink protection

If you’re running WordPress on your site and would like to track your RSS feed subscription numbers, I’m sure there are quite a few ways to go about it. You can even do things like adding an html page in between your feed link and your feed and linking them with a meta refresh and then tracking those clicks in Google Analytics. More on that can be found here but in my case, I decided I’d be content decided to use Feedburner to do my RSS tracking, so I decided to read up on the best ways to redirect my built-in WordPress feeds to Feedburner. If you go by what Feedburner Help says, they would have you install a WordPress plugin to do the job for you. While this may work fine for most people and maybe some people would rather not deal with anything technical, I wasn’t really content with this. After all, why install another plugin when you don’t really need it? The best way to redirect your main site feed and your content feed would be to add something like this in your .htaccess file, making sure to edit it to reflect the appropriate values.


#BEGIN Feed redirect

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?(feed.*|rss.*|comments.*) [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/sitefeedpath [L,NC,R=302]
RewriteRule ^comments/?.*$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/commentsfeedpath [L,NC,R=302]

#END Feed redirect


If you’d like to read more about how things work and see some more examples for practical use of this sort of redirect, you can go to Jeff Star’s excellent post over at Perishable Press.

Another issue to worry about when running a site is the issue of hotlinking. Essentially what this means is that someone cal steal your bandwidth by linking to your files directly instead of hosting them on their own server space. There are people out there who do this intentionally and will strip images from RSS feeds or browse the internet looking to steal images links from sites. In order to prevent this sort of thing, there are more things we can do in our .htaccess file. As written in detail at altlab, to prevent hotlinking and replace the intended linked image with a different image, you could do something like this:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]


If you want to block specific sites from requesting the images, then something like this can be used:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]


You’d need to create an image in your /images directory called nohotlink.jpe (or edit the code to use a different file name) and any time one of the coded file types is requested for your domain from an external source, your custom image would display instead. You could create a simple warning image here, or get creative. An alternative to this would be just to simply return a 403 error instead of an image:


RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]


If you’d like to check whether your site is vulnerable to hotlinking, you can check over at altlab.

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