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Windows SteadyState

March 16, 2009 in Church IT, free, Microsoft, Technology with Comments Off

I recently rolled out 4 checkin stations for our Daycare, which will be used for checkin and checkout 5 days a week for about 350 children.  Two of these are also being used for Childrens checkin for their weekend service time and the other two will be used for the preschool area at the same time on the weekends.  These will also be eventually used on Wednesday nights for the Student Ministry.  As these computers will be on most days all day in open areas that everyone has easy access to it was important to me to be able to easily secure these computers and make sure that no matter what happens that the next time they are turned on they’ll ready to go same as the last time.  As usual I posed the question to the CITRT IRC chat and quickly was given the answer of Windows SteadyState. It’s a free software available as long as the Windows you are running is legal and legit.  I’m always a big fan of free! The homepage says exactly what I wanted it to:

You can’t always prevent problems during a user session, but now you can undo the whole session. Learn how Windows SteadyState can return your computer and hard disk to its exact condition before the user touched it, simply by rebooting.

It’s pretty simple to setup, just check boxes with all kinds of options that you can turn on and off.  After you get it set-up just the way you want the settings are exportable and importable so you can just load to other computers and have everything match-up just the way you want it.

64 bit guest on a 32 bit host

January 21, 2009 in Church IT, citrt, free, Technology with Comments Off

The rumor was that with using VMware virtualization software you could run a 64 bit host on a 32 bit host as long as you had the right processor. I’ve done pretty much nothing with any type of VM other than downloading them and letting them sit.  After deciding that it might be worthwhile to be able to have Exchange at Woodland I wanted to get a VM installed to play with to see if it would meet our needs. Our new server runs Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 32 bit, which was great except for the fact that Exchange 2007 will only run in 64 bit. Because of this I tried to do Exchange 2003 which also wouldn’t work on Server 2008 32 bit.  After much googling and talking with some other church IT guys, I realized that you can’t run any Exchange on 2008 server bit.  So this is where the search began for running a 64 bit guest on a 32 bit host.  It wasn’t possible with Microsofts virtualization product but it WAS possible with the VMware product.

There are a few requirements of your processor to allow it to able to handle 64 bit operating systesm.  It has to have Intel VT and also have EMT64.  You may have to update the bios to enable the Intel Vt before VMware will allow you to install the 64 bit OS. VMware has a free utility that will check your hardware to see if it can handle the 64 big guest, this is the easiest way versus looking up processor specs and such, there is a utility for both windows and linux.

After everything is setup the installation was quite straight forward, nothing came up out of the ordinary.

YouVersion to Blackberry

October 8, 2008 in church, Church IT, free, Technology with Comments Off

I’ve used YouVersion.com on the computer and a few times have even used the mobile version, m.youversion.com. So I’m very excited to see that lifechurch.tv has released their YouVersion Bible App for the Blackberry. While in it’s infancy at version .1, you just know more and great things will come down the road. If you have an iPhone check out the free iPhone app, of if you just have mobile web access use m.youversion.com. From their site:

* Use the reader to study any part of Scripture—the entire Bible is at your fingertips.
* Take your pick from 35 different translations available in 19 different languages.
* Search the entire Bible for a word, phrase, or verse, and you’ll get your results in seconds.
* The One-Year Reading Plan provides daily selections to keep you on track when you’re on the go.
* Learn from others by checking out recent contribs.

Using Google to spread The Message

September 17, 2008 in church, Church IT, free, google, Technology with Comments Off

As is pretty obvious by this blog I love God and technology and love finding new ways that technology can help share God with people.  Following the Google blog and some of the cool things they have coming out always seems to be cutting edge.  Today I noticed the Google Audio Indexing which from their own description is:

a tool that transcribes and indexes the spoken content on YouTube’s Politicians channels

Now I know currently it’s only for the political videos but I hope that at some time this will be available for any videos that you choose to have it index.  Think about having your weekly sermons uploaded to Google video, transcribed and indexed.  This can become an amazing teaching tool.

Combine this with the fact that Google Video is becoming part of Google Apps Premier Edition as well as Google Apps Education Edition which is free for non-profits with a 501c3 and this will be another huge score for churches and other non-profits to get more of their content searchable and useable on the web.

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