Peter Ex Texia

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Earlier this evening I was reading a book to my five year old son as I do almost nightly. He and his brother are blessed to have a large collection of children’s books, many of them they have not read yet. A significant portion were given to them by a family friend who is a former school teacher who natively speaks Spanish and English. Most of the books are in English but a few are in Spanish. I’ve looked at a few of the Spanish books before but for the most part I am not far enough along in my studies to read them. I’m very much in a beginner with Spanish and I just don’t know enough words yet.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

“Al rescate” is Spanish for “to the rescue.”

Some of you may have noticed my lack of posts in the past couple of weeks. My work life and my home life conspired to consume any free time I had so that I could not even study new Spanish or Greek material, let alone write about it. I did manage, with the help of Mnemosyne, to maintain what I had already learned so that I was able to pick up where I left off. That little bit of maintenance did the job fantastically!

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

In a previous post, I had decided to stop studying after a set amount of time to prevent being overwhelmed. I have studied Greek once since, completing a full chapter, and I studied Spanish tonight, covering about half a chapter. I didn’t quite study for a full hour, instead choosing to stop when I was tired. I think this is appropriate considering it was after midnight. I feel I made good progress today though.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Last night, having been delayed by sickness, I studied Step 2 of Spanish Step-by-Step. In this book, each chapter is called a step, which contains a list of sentences and phrases in Spanish which will introduce new words and concepts. At the end of each step is a section called “Instant Conversation” in which you read along with a conversation between Spanish-speaking people, followed by a quick test. Underneath each Spanish sentence or phrase is a line describing how to say the words, and underneath that is the English translation. Sprinkled between some of the sentences are little “sidebars” which explain new concepts or things to pay special attention to.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Quite by accident, I found a site with a recording of a Greek alphabet song. I personally am far too shy to sing this aloud, even by myself, but this could be a good memory aid for those just learning the Greek alphabet. The rest of the site is pretty interesting as well. The author is a Christian Missionary in Mozambique with his family and has interesting little stories about life there.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Εν αρχη (en archae) means “in the beginning.”

After 7 months without studying at all, I’ve finally sat down and spent some time a couple nights ago to study New Testament Greek (also called Koine Greek). I’m primarily following the lessons in a book called “Learn New Testament Greek” by John H. Dobson. I started on the third lesson as the first was all about the Greek alphabet, which I still remember, and the second lesson was mostly simple words that I also still remember.

Download Squelch for PalmOS

Squelch is a game I made for PalmOS in 2000. I used to sell it as shareware on a site called PalmGear for $5, and believe it or not, people would occassionally buy it at that price.

Pocket Freemind was an open-source Windows Mobile application for taking notes in a hierarchical structure. This allows you organize your notes as you take them. The file format used by Pocket Freemind is compatible with the desktop application Freemind, an open-source mind-mapping application. Although Pocket Freemind uses the same file format as Freemind, Pocket Freemind is not techincally a mind-mapping application because it does not display the data radially. However, you can still use Pocket Freemind for this purpose, as it was designed to be a way to create and modify Freemind mindmaps on the go.

Download Head Coach for PalmOS

Head Coach is a game I made for PalmOS in 2000. I used to sell it as shareware on a site called PalmGear for $7, and believe it or not, people would occassionally buy it at that price.

Wabajump was an open-source project to allow applications written for the Waba Virtual Machine to be compiled directly to a PalmOS program, so that the application no longer needed the Waba VM on the PalmOS device to run. This was accomplished using the Jump java to 68k assembly compiler.