We have mentioned the PrayerMate app before (check out this post). It’s a great way to organize your prayer life. And, you can also get live updates of prayer requests directly from the Cottrill family from right within the app. Contact us for details!
If you’re still on the fence about using PrayerMate, check out this new video, with some testimonies from real people who use it regularly.
Everybody has their special strategy for their prayer life. Or – wait – no, they don’t! And even if we do, we don’t always stick to it.
But prayer really is an important part of our service as believers. So let me share an idea or two that I’ve found useful.
For many years I had a piece of paper in my Bible that served as a prayer list. I think I got this idea from Canadian pastor/author Erwin Lutzer. You take a letter size sheet of paper, fold it once, and then again (lengthwise). You should now have 8 columns – and you can make a list of things to pray for each day, and then have a “title page”, or a page for daily prayer requests.
Simple, and it can be updated easily every once in a while.
But now I’ve joined the digital age. I tried two or three different apps for prayer requests, and finally settled on what I think is the best – PrayerMate.
PrayerMate basically files everything you want to pray for. You can even include the latest newsletter from that missionary you pray for, a picture of your Mom, and some special details about that ministry you pray for. You can also set prayer requests to “archive”, so that you pray for your pastor up to the date of his surgery, or pray for Aunt Carolyn who asked for prayer for the week’s work at prayer meeting, and then have the request “disappear” from your list.
That’s only a few things PrayerMate can do – I’m including a video below to give you a more visual picture.
Basically, the app chooses what you pray for each day – and you can choose how big a priority a request is (for example, tell it who you might want to pray for every day).
Here’s the video, and then I’ll leave you with one more tip.
One thing I have done even back in the paper days is split up some ideas from “the Lord’s prayer” over each day of the week. It looks like this:
That’s it – in PrayerMate, just make a category for the Lord’s Prayer, and make each of those things a separate prayer request, and you’re good to go.
So why not sit down today with your prayer tool of choice, and start making a list of things to pray about in the coming year?
* Yes, I know this last part of the prayer may have been a later addition to the text of Matthew, and not in the original. However, the sentiment is very biblical. If you’re in doubt, see 1 Chronicles 29:11 and Psalm 145:10-12.
I have a whole lot of (legal) music on my computer. For the most part, we left out CDs and cassettes (remember those?) and LPs (yikes!) back in Canada and just brought the music in MP3 format on our hard drive.
This means that we can technically play most of the music we’ve ever owned randomly (not that we do that exactly, but we do play large collections on "random"). That’s all very well and good, but as you well know recording quality varies, and some recordings are set at a much LOUDER volume than others. So you can be listening to one song just fine, and the next might BLAST you out of your seat!
Software developers, who also occasionally listen to music, came up with volume normalization, which attempts to keep your music from drastically changing decibels from track to track. But there are problems with this too. For one thing, it can slow down the program you’re using. You may also use more than one program, and each one must normalize the volume. Finally, many programs have trouble understanding how the human ear hears the song, and so the results that come out of your speakers are far from perfect.
One of the most perfect solutions out there is a program called MP3Gain. MP3Gain simply normalizes the volume of MP3 tracks, but it attempts to adjust how the track actually sounds to the human ear. The results are far better.
You can also maintain the volume difference between songs in a single album, and yet lower the general volume of each album.
The only complaint I have is that the setup is a little confusing at first. But there’s a help file, and once you figure it out it’s very quick to set up and very simple – you basically press a button to analyze your MP3s, and another button to normalize the volume. All done! Go listen to some music!
The program is free, of course, under the GNU General Public License. It was developed by Glen Sawyer. It’s available in a number of languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese and Uzbek. If you listen to music via MP3 on a regular basis, this is a must have program. Go to the MP3Gain download page and grab yourself a copy. MP3Gain for Mac is available here.
Essentially, Winamp is a program that allows you to watch video and listen to audio, much like Windows Media Player. Created by Justin Frankel many years ago (and since developed by many), the program does what it does with style. You can listen to CDs, to MP3s, even to streaming audio off the internet (and you can even do it on a dial-up connection in many cases). You can listen in sequential order, or random order, or make your own order. You can watch video full screen or in a little box. You can watch pretty flashing lights while the music plays.
I set up a little menu on the bottom of my screen with playlists of the music I have on my computer. With a couple of clicks I can play all the music I have by one artist, or play a certain theme, or just play kids music. This is the beauty of Winamp playlists.
A pay-for version, which I haven’t tried, also allows you to convert music into MP3 format.
That’s just a hint of what you can do with Winamp. Perhaps its biggest problem is that there is just so much you can do with it – you’ll never finish checking out all the features, plugins and skins. But in the mean time, just download it, stick in a CD, and press play. You can learn from there.
CoolRuler is one of those little programs that every once in a while makes something a whole lot easier. The concept is quite simple, really. CoolRuler is a little ruler that appears on your screen. It can be horizontal or vertical. It can measure in centimeters, inches, pixels, or a custom measurement. You can move it around the screen and put little marks on it just where you want them.
There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to use something like this. If you’re working with graphics online or emailing to a friend, you might want to measure how big the picture should be. If you’re writing an academic paper, you might want to see just how big those margins really are. Anything that’s going to stay on your computer, or be printed out, might need to be measured with CoolRuler.
Sure, you may not want it now, but the day will come when you’ll remember what I said and go looking for it. So why not just get it now? It’s a tiny program available from FabSoft. Click here to go to the CoolRuler download page [edit: looks like the link is no longer available. Sorry! Contact me if you’re interested in Cool Ruler.].
Some of the applications I use have a spell checker. Some don’t. And even when they do, they certainly don’t have all the words I need. And what if I want a definition?
No problem. All I have to do is highlight the word and click [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[W]. Low and behold, up pops the definition, and synonyms to boot. It will even tell me how to pronounce the word – and believe it or not, that comes in handy sometimes.
Even more amazing, WordWeb will differentiate between Canadian, British and US spellings. Now at last I can spell colour my favourite way! It’s not exactly a spell-checker, but I use it to check spelling often. It does give suggestions of “close” words, and it’s lightening fast.
If the definition doesn’t appear, I can click the link and it will automatically find a definition on the web. Pretty smooth.
The program is called WordWeb. WordWeb is free for personal, non-commercial use, and only US$19 for the Pro version, in which you can add your own definitions, solve anagrams, and do wildcard searches. WordWeb will even work on Windows 95.
By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the nifty dictionary I used long before WordWeb. This one just uses online information, unlike WordWeb which has a built in dictionary. It’s called the Magical Jellybean Dictionary. But I prefer the offline abilities and speed of WordWeb. The nice thing is the ability to press the keys from any application and get it to bring up the word.
WordWeb – dictionary, thesaurus, all at the push of a button. Visit their website now to get yourself a copy of WordWeb, free!