Recent content on Honza Pokorný

 

 I have used fountain pens on and off for 20 years. A few years ago, I discovered the fountain pen community on Reddit and immediately needed to buy a few must-have pens. I got to try a Lamy Safari, a Kaweco Sport, a TWSBI Eco, a Pilot Metropolitan, a Pilot Custom 74, a Lamy 2000, and a few Chinese knock-offs. For a long time now, I have thought that the Amber Pilot Custom 823 was…

 

 Before 
 And first, before hearing the Word, men break [the second commandment], 
 
 In not praying for the speaker. 
 In not praying for themselves in reference to this end, that they may profit by the Word. 
 In not setting themselves to be in a spiritual composed frame for such a work. 
 In not watchfully preventing what may divert them or distract them…
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To…
NixOS is great. Well, until you open up a Common Lisp project, start a REPL, and well… you get an error about missing headers to some C library. We can make this work with a few steps. 
 NixOS doesn’t really let you install libraries globally and you have to install these dependencies manually for every project. Let’s do that now and see how we can make our REPL find them.
I have been thinking about literate programming and markup languages for authoring documents. How can we write a document once and easily publish it in different formats? Markdown is user-friendly but bare-bones. XML does what we want but no one wants to write XML. I was reminded of Pollen . It promises to do what I want. Plus it’s a cool Lisp thing. But Lisp isn’t everyone’s…

 

 A speech by Theodore Letis 
 Introduction 
 I want to start off by telling you a little story that happened to me while I
was in Berlin last week. I was there attending an academic conference at an
ancient German university there, the International Meeting of the Society of
Biblical Literature, and I was addressing a session dealing with…

 

 Reformed believers don’t like to be accused of being Romanists. Yet it’s a powerful insult: you can shut down any argument if you can prove your opponent is using Papist logic. 
 Let’s talk about the text of Scripture. Modern critical text advocates call those on the Received Text side Romanists. And the Received Text folks do the same right back. Who is the…
A few times a week I go running with my dog on a local trail. I wake up early and immediately hydrate. Then I put on my running clothes and go downstairs. I fill up my water bottles and put them in the running vest. I grab a treat for the dog. I strap the heart rate monitor to my chest. I lace up my shoes. I select a workout on my watch. I put on a buff and sometimes a headlamp. I put my phone in…
Matthew Henry’s topics found in the book of Proverbs. Inspired by this post . 
 Of the comfort, or grief, parents have in their children, according as they are wise or foolish, godly or ungodly 
 
 The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother. Prov 10:1 
 
 
 
 A wise son maketh a glad father: but a…
Many LaTeX guides on the internet focus on writing documents in the math and engineering context but not many are suited for the humanities. What if you wanted to write a theology paper with Chicago-style footnotes and bibligraphy? 
 Let’s start with a new document called paper.org . 
 #+title : The Title of Your Paper 
 #+author : Your Name 
 Then we can add some document…
Source 
 Introduction 
 Habit changing facts about Bible reading come to light in the following pages. 
 By questions and answers over a time of 28 years and over 10,000 days, reading 30 pages every single day and some days many more, 4 words form the basis of a new, rich habit reading the Bible through. 
 It is my only wish in this publication to give you the essentials to begin…

 

 In the keyboard ethusiast community, the Ergodox is a bit controversial. It’s one of the few keyboards that are available pre-built, and with a warranty. If you want one, you don’t need to find a PCB printer, and solder your own switches, and controllers. But, many have tried it, and abandonded it. I think it comes down to a few things, and I’d like to discuss…
There is a seemingly endless stream of articles we come across daily, and little time to read them. A quick glance at Hacker News in between tasks can yield half a dozen open tabs with articles to read at some point later . There are many services that help with this problem by maintaining a queue of these articles for you. You know the type: things like Instapaper or Pocket. 
 In this…
by G. I. Williamson 
 
 

 The worship of God in song is found in the inspired book of Psalms, and
should be used to the exclusion of the uninspired compositions of men. 
 The purpose of this booklet is to present the evidence in support of the
following proposition; namely, that in the worship of God the inspired
book of Psalms should be used to the exclusion of…
I bought my first Kindle over 10 years ago. It was tall, and had a physical keyboard. Since then, I have bought many more: for family as gifts, and for myself because the kids kept stealing mine. And I absolutely love these things. 
 Single purpose 
 The Kindle is for reading. If you see me staring at it, I’m reading a book. I’m not drowning in some infinity pool . The size of…
Hare is a new systems programming language. The stable nix channel already provides packages for it but those become outdated pretty quickly with a work-in-progress language. Bootstrapping Hare is actually simple, and fast, and so it’s possible to do it often. Here are the steps: 
 
 Compile the latest QBE 
 Compile the latest harec 
 Compile the latest hare 
 
 Clone…

 

 Film photography presents a completely different workflow compared to digital. You can’t preview your images, you have to wait for your film to get developed, you have a limited number of shots available, there is no autofocus, and no lightmeter in your camera, etc. All of these things can be simulated on modern digital cameras that have an optical viewfinder, like my…
Every January, Kodak announces yet another price increase on their film stock offerings. A roll of Kodak Portra 400 in 35mm is now over $20. Developing and scanning is more than $30. Shooting film seems more and more expensive. However, compared to what it used to cost, it’s still cheap. My parents were telling me that in the 1990s, in Czechia, a middle-of-the-road colour film, and then…
Fiction 
 It’s that part of the late afternoon where the sun has dipped below the horizon but it’s not dusk yet. I walk out of the air-conditioned sanctuary of my house, and step onto the porch. The now weakened humidity of the mid-September breeze envelopes me. I love Indian summer. My bare feet relish the feel of the unvarnished, and uneven wood below. The road is full of dust.…

 

 Here are a few choice quotes from the The King James Version: Its tradition, text, and translation article in the Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible edited by Dr Joel Beeke: 
 Should we set the KJV aside because it’s too difficult to read? 
 
 Notwithstanding its age, there is no good reason to disregard it or to relegate it to the past. […] In every…

 

 Historially, I have struggled with consistent bible reading. I start a new reading plan with new zeal but then quickly fall off, and the habit doesn’t stick. I have tried the traditional one year plan like M’Cheyne’s, some more modern chronological plans, and of course Prof Horner’s 10 chapters a day plan . But for some reason, all of these plans end up…

 

 The Modern English Version is a 2013 translation of the bible based on the Received Text. 
 Albert Hembd, a consultant to the Trinitarian Bible Society, wrote an extensive article called An examination of the New King James Version . You can find it on the TBS website . In this article, he reviews the changes that the NKJV introduces over the KJV. In this present article,…
After much work over several years, I’m pleased to announce the public release
of my Greek New Testament project. This is something that to my knowledge
hasn’t been available until now. The Scrivener Textus Receptus in
machine-readable formats, with Greek accents, grammatical data, and English
glosses. 
 Please have a look at the project page , all feedback is…
I don’t think the book/year metric is very useful. 
 A few years ago, I tried to read one book per week. It’s totally manageable if
you read modern fluffy self-help books or short novels. After a few months, I
realized that my desire to read one book per week was keeping me from reading
the books I wanted to read because I was always choosing short, and easy
books.…
This is an article version of the original PDF by Prof Horner. 
 
 “I have more wisdom than all my teachers, for thy testimonies are my
meditation.” Psalm 119:99, right-hand page, left-hand column, dead center of
page. 
 Many people ask me how it is that I know precisely where virtually everything 
is in my Bible. The answer: this system. 
 I began in 1983…
Should children be allowed unlimited screen time? If not, what limits should we
impose? 
 This is a fairly common question that parents have to reckon with these days.
What I find missing in these discussions is that not all screen time is created
equal. 
 In my mind, there are two main kinds of screen time. On the one hand, there is
the harmful kind. It’s the…
One of the great things about Kindle readers is that you can read old books for
free. You can grab an epub from places like Monergism , Gutenberg , Standard
Ebooks , or Planet Ebook , and side-load them into your device. The problem is
that Kindles don’t support epub files, and so you have to convert them to
something it can read. Historically, the advice has been to convert…

 

 By Rev. Thomas Watson 
 “And it shall be with him, and he shall read it all the days of his
life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words
of this Law and to do these Statutes.” — Deut. 17.19. 
 What Cicero said of Aristotle’s politics, may not unfittingly be said of
this book of Deuteronomy, it is full of golden…

 

 I will argue that the Westminster Reference Bible in black calfskin published by
the Trinitarian Bible Society (TBS) is the best all-around printed bible that
you can buy today in the English language. 
 I will not be considering digital bibles, or bibles in languages other than
English. And by all-around , I will mean all-purpose . The bible should work
well…

 

 At this point, there is no denying that film photography is enjoying a
widespread revival. 
 What I want to do in this article is to go through the costs associated with
shooting film in 2020, and specifically in Canada. There are many YouTube
videos and articles about film photography in Germany or in the United States
but not much is said about Canada. If you…
Proponents of modern bible translations and the critical text in general argue
that the KJV should be abandoned for ecclesiastical use. The two main
arguments are (1) its archaic language, and (2) inferior Greek text. 
 Firstly, biblical doctrine is complex, and if we want to reach the world, we
should endeavor to remove as many obstacles as possible. The lowest hanging
fruit…
It is a universally acknowledged truth that remembering your passwords is a bad
idea. The modern Internet user will inevitably be required to register for
many services, and websites, and inventing a new password for each one will
quickly overwhelm him or her. The burden of memorizing one’s passwords is too
great to bear. Unless, of course, we grant that passwords may be…
From his Marrow of Sacred Divinity . 
 Chapter 35. Of ordinary Ministers, and their Office in Preaching 
 ORDINARY Ministry is that which has all its direction from the will of God
revealed in the Scriptures, and from those means which God has appointed in the
Church for its perpetual edification. 
 Hence they are called ordinary, because they may and are usually called…

 “In sum, then, God forbids any attempt to take the goods of others for
ourselves, and thus commands us to faithfully preserve for others their
property. We must judge that whatever a person possesses has not come to him by
accident but through the provision of God, and that to deprive him of his wealth
is thus to sin against God’s dispensation.” 
 
…

 epub 
 mobi 

As I have been thinking through the arguments leveled by the advocates of the
traditional text of Scripture, a certain irritation with modern bible
translations has entered my mind. Not with any translation in particular, but
with the endless proliferation of them. James White echoes this: 
 
 I certainly believe we have all the English translations that we need.
There is…

 

 Bibles are notorious for being cluttered with all kinds of content besides the
actual Word of God. Here is a list of common things: 
 
 Chapter numbers 
 Verse numbers 
 Chapter headings 
 Translation footnotes 
 Cross-references (in the text, and in the center column) 
 Chain references 
 Pilcrows 
 
 The traditional setting also…

 

 In Matthew 18:23-35 we find the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant. The
story goes like this: a king wants to settle his accounts, and calls to himself
his servant who owes him a sum of money. The servant is unable to pay, and
falls down before the king, begging for mercy. The king relents and wipes the
servant’s slate clean. The story follows from there, and…

 The law of Christ is identical to the law of the ten commandments. Christ did
not give another law; Christ gave that law of the ten commandments. To this
law He subjected Himself and has perfectly lived according to it, leaving us an
example therein. He Himself is also a living law. Christ has never given
liberty to transgress any of the ten commandments, be it those that…

 

 We, as theology nerds, love our books. Especially by authors who have long
passed on to glory. And who wouldn’t want to save some money? 
 Here is what you do: 
 Step 1: Buy an Amazon Kindle 
 The base model is $79. You can find it on sale during the usual sale events.
Or, for a more comfortable reading experience, you can go for the Paperwhite,
which…
Recently, I came across an item someone in my Facebook timeline shared. The
author was thinking about what prayer is. Here is what it said: 
 
 Do you pray? 
 I love this interpretation of a Prayer. What is a prayer? Prayer doesn’t
only happen when we kneel or put our hands together and focus and expect
things from God. Thinking positive and wishing good for others is…
Several weeks ago, I had a few friends over to our house to watch Les Lanphere’s
excellent Calvinist documentary. I assumed this would be their first
exposure to Reformed theology, so I expected some lively discussion. About half
way through the movie, we had to pause to answer a simple clarification
question. Once that was done, one of the guys volunteered an…

 

 The way I see it, you have three options when selection an edition of John
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. 
 
 The final edition of 1559 translated by Henry Beveridge, published in 1867. 
 The final edition of 1559 translated by Ford Lewis Battles, published in 1960. 
 The French edition of 1541 translated by Robert White, published in…

 

 … or, ESV Pitt Minion in black goatskin review 
 I have been reading Mark Bertrand’s Bible Design Blog for a few years now.
Through his long-form writing, I have come to appreciate beautiful typography,
fine craftsmanship, single-column layouts, and attention to detail in modern
Bible-making. I even helped him with a website update several years ago.…
In conservative Christian circles, the English Standard Version seems to be the
Bible translation of choice. Many Calvinistic and Reformed leaders endorse this
translation, and use it in their books and articles. I have personally used
this translation for many years, and have enjoyed it. However, no translation
is perfect. This isn’t a superficial comment meant to appease…
I was born and raised in the Czech Republic. I learned to speak English and
French in school. When I was 19, I moved out of the country and have been
living in English-speaking countries ever since. Gradually, I have been losing
the ability to speak my native language. This is especially obvious in
professional settings (work, bank, government offices, etc) since I learned…
For years now, I have wanted to switch my keyboard layout from QWERTY to
something more ergonomic. QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriters from
jamming. Modern computers don’t have this problem. So, why are we still using
QWERTY? 
 So, for me, it’s a given that I should switch to something else. But what? The
Dvorak layout is the obvious choice. Most people who…
Just over a year ago, my son Wyatt received his first computer for his sixth
birthday. It’s a Raspberry Pi, and he has an old LCD monitor, and a
kid-friendly mouse and keyboard. I purposely waited until he could read before
starting to teach him about computers. He’s a pretty smart kid, reads a lot (a
Harry Potter book in a weekend), and is somewhat socially awkward.…
When I became a father, I didn’t know much about babies. Fatherhood is one of
those “learn on the job” situations. With a new infant in the house, one piece
of advice made my life much easier. 
 Infants cry a lot. The noise they emit is high-pitch, and designed to be
irritating to adults. It’s irritating because otherwise you would just ignore
the poor…
This morning, I read a rather click-baity article about the kinds of
questions that runners hate answering. Honestly, I don’t know why I clicked it
— blame it on lack of coffee in my blood stream. A common theme in the
article is the obsession with the marathon. When are you running your first
marathon? Are you training for Boston? The writer then goes on to say…