Technology has the power to change the world in incredible ways – bringing information to the masses in a more immediate fashion then ever before. While there is,as with anything in the world, the potential for this resource to be abused, every so often something comes along which reminds you that technology can be a wonderful thing. A case in point is the “Prayer Companion” that the Poor Clares of York have added to their daily prayer life.

The Convent of the Poor Clares of York was founded in 1865, and in those past 155 years they have always prayed for the outside world, with requests for prayer coming to them by post, phone and as of very recently email, via a single solitary computer. However, the Prayer Companion, known as Goldie to the nuns, has changed all this – making the nuns very up-to-the-minute.

The Prayer Companion is a piece of technology that has been designed by the
Interaction Design Studio at Goldsmiths, University of London. It is built to scroll news headlines delivered by RSS to the ticker display along the top from a range of news sites. When the Poor Clares see the messages, they pray for the people they read about.
“It is not there because we’re desperate for news,” says Sister Paul, one of the Poor Clares. “We are here for prayer, for channelling people’s needs to God.”
Not only has this proved to be a boon for the Poor Clares, but it has also had an influence on the designers as well. “This is not a dispassionate thing. We’re certainly not humouring the nuns” says project co-ordinator Bill Gaver, who goes on to concede that his spiritual side sees the impact that prayer can have.

Have you seen technology being used in new and interesting ways? Get in contact with the team at www.catholic.geek.nz and we’ll include it in an upcoming issue!

Previously, we’ve talked about the growing use of technology in our parish centres – from the use of projectors replacing OHPs and songsheets, to the use of the internet to make the mass available anywhere you can get connected. An enterprising padre in Italy however is about to take technology in mass to a whole new level – the priest’s missal is about to get an upgrade!

The Rev Paolo Padrini, a consultant with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, originally developed iBreviary as an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This excellent application provides the book of daily prayers as used by Catholics worldwide, and has proved very popular – with around 200,000 installs. With the advent of the iPad, Apple’s new book sized device, however, Rev Padrini has rewritten the application to add the functionality of the complete missal – with all that is said in the Mass .

This has the potential to be a huge boon to priests worldwide. No longer would your priest have to flick through pages to find the appropriate prayer for the day. And our mobile priests will find it most useful, with this easily able to follow around with them on their journeys. While this will not replace the need and usefulness of paper books, it’s a fantastic example of how technology can aid prayer and remove distractions from the awesome sacredness of the mass.

Rev Padrini will be launching this in July, which should time in nicely with the launch of the iPad in New Zealand, due to launch So you could well be seeing this in a parish near you in the near future.

Have you seen other ways in which technology is being used effectively by the Church? Share them with all @ www.catholic.geek.nz!

There are so many areas of our lives where technology is becoming ever more important. For most people their health is pretty high up on priorities so let’s have a look at how health and technology are moving on together. Did you know that there is such a thing as robotic surgery? Using robots surgery can be done remotely (over the internet!) in a minimally invasive way and essentially unmanned. Some of the theoretical advantages are that the incisions are smaller, the movements more precise and therefore there is less risk of bleeding and quicker recovery times. And this isn’t just science fiction – in 2006 an Italian 34 year old man had a heart procedure to ameliorate an abnormal heart rhythm by a surgeon in Boston, USA.

On a slightly different note there is a huge growth in the industry of what is called telemedicine. This is where clinical medicine takes place by the transfer of information over an interactive audiovisual platform. If you think about the Australian Outback where the average person is just unable to access healthcare, particularly specialist care, you can immediately see it’s usefulness. By employing satellite technology and videoconferencing technology a real-life and real-time medical consultation can occur between a patient at Ayers Rock and Central Sydney. This is also very time and cost efficient from the medical specialist’s point of view as there no longer the need to travel vast distances around the country – both saving money, and improving peoples access to quality healthcare.

Another fast growing are is telemonitoring – whereby a patient for example wears a blood pressure cuff and all recordings are sent directly to their GP, the same could be done for blood glucose measurements done at home in diabetic patients.

This is rapidly developing area in IT – so watch this space… and next time you visit your doctor, see how technology is helping you!

The internet is a continually changing environment. There are always new websites and technologies launching on an almost daily basis; the pace of change is that quick! And as adoption of the internet as a part of “normal” life continues unabated, it’s a good idea to look at the need to stay current.

Take, for example, websites. While recently planning a night out with my wife, I checked out the website of a restaurant near the cinema we were going to. According to the website, everything was looking good – the food, the location, the prices: all were on target. Even the design of the website impressed.
However, upon calling to make a reservation, I discovered that the restaurant had gone out of business. I was more than a little surprised! Such a professional looking site, still up and running like nothing had happened.

While, thankfully, the Church doesn’t close parishes on a regular basis, the number of Church organisations that have websites that have not been updated for months or even years is astonishing. This is almost as bad as not having a website presence at all! Almost.

For parishes in New Zealand, there really isn’t a technical reason why they cannot have an easily updatable website. Free content management systems – like Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal – provide the ability to establish websites that can be updated by non-technical folk without too much trouble at all. In fact, in Auckland, the Spoke Project (www.spoke.net.nz) was established a number of years ago specifically with the mission of bringing this technology to our parishes and Church organisations.

It’s strange, therefore, that even with the ease of use and low cost of these options, some websites are static snapshots of the history of a parish, rather than dynamic pointers to the present and future.

In the past week, there has been an excellent Congress held on digital media in Italy, called "Testimoni digitali. Volti e linguaggi nell’era crossmediale" [Digital Witnesses. Faces and Languages in the Cross-Media Age]. For an insiders view of what the conference was like, check out our favourite priest from the Netherlands – Father Roderick (http://fatherroderick.sqpn.com) However, I’d like to focus this article on the closing address Pope Benedict XVI gave.

In his address, the pope talked about the challenge the world faces with the advent of the internet – the expansion of communication on a global scale and across multiple forms of media comes with the risk of both creating a new divide between those that have access and those that don’t, and also the risk of people becoming lost within the digital world – without a clear moral compass.

The attendees were called by the pope, as we are all called, to bring a human face to these new forms of media to counter the anonymity of the internet – thus helping the men and women of our digital age to sense the Lord’s presence.

To finish, in the words of Pope Benedict:

“Let us set sail on the digital sea fearlessly, confronting open navigation with the same enthusiasm that has steered the Barque of the Church for 2,000 years. Rather than for technical resources, although these are necessary, let us also qualify ourselves by dwelling in this world with a believing heart that helps to give a soul to the ceaseless flow of communications that makes up the web.

This is our mission, the inalienable mission of the Church.”

We have spoken about computer backups in the past in this column, and there are some things that you just can’t remind people of enough! However, some recent experiences have encouraged this column to be on more than just backup, but total disaster recovery.

Most large corporations have what is known as a “business continuity plan” which basically covers how the business can make sure that it can keep the doors open, even in the face of a catastrophe. Usually, the plan is a mixture of backup, redundancy and preparation: multiple, regular backups of all critical data; extra pieces of computer equipment as spare in case something breaks; and planning and communication to all staff to ensure that best practice is followed.

There is a lot the average home user can take from these plans. With the price of external hard drives so low these days, there really isn’t much of an excuse to not be backing up your critical files and photos regularly. But backing up isn’t just copying to a hard drive. Make sure you follow the 3-2-1 model – 3 copies (1 primary, 2 backups), 2 on different formats (e.g. hard drive and DVD), with 1 copy stored offsite (including online).

Also think about the less obvious outages: what happens if you lose your internet connection? Do you have a backup dial-up modem? How long can your home business run without email? Do you have paper copies of really critical documents in case the digital copies were lost forever? Do you test your backups to make sure they’re “good”?

The best time to plan for a disaster is well before it happens. So we suggest you hop to it!

One of the great things about the internet is it’s ability to allow people to connect all over the globe. By jumping online, you can be up and communicating with someone on the opposite side of the globe immediately. Now this reach has stepped even further with the ability for you to tap the internet to reach out and help someone on the other side of the world! Welcome to the world of microfinance.

Microfinance works on the principle that there are a lot of people who would like to try and improve their position in life, but due to falling below the thresholds required by traditional financial institutions, are normally unable to get access to loans. Microfinance institutions help give these people a chance to better themselves, and the internet has brought this concept into the 21^st century – allowing people to directly connect with others in need of help to lift themselves up.

Kiva is a fantastic example of an organisation working in microfinance. Kiva was set up in 2005, to provide a way for the public to directly help people in developing countries help themselves.To date, $128 million US dollars have been loaned to 323,000 entrepreneurs in needy countries with a 98.5% repayment rate. Kiva even partners with other microfinance institutions to broaden their reach – including a number of Catholic partners. You can find out more at http://www.kiva.org/ and sign up to get involved. Make a little change go a long way!

One of the things I like about the internet is its ability to foster innovation. Sure, there is plenty of not-so-good stuff on there – and some downright evil stuff too – which basically means that the internet has evolved to become a microcosm of our fallen world. But it is often out of such muddy soil that the best roses grow.

Take Twitter. We’ve written about this microblogging technology before, but a lot of people are still struggling to add any real value with the 140 character limit imposed by the site. So, we’re left reading a lot about what people are eating for lunch, or where they’re going on Friday night. However, amongst all this, there have been some examples of how the platform seems to be fostering some innovative and creative ideas.

On the most recent St Valentine’s Day, an online video company organised for the world’s oldest married couple to respond to questions using Twitter. Nearly 5,000 people signed up to “follow” @longestmarried to find out the secrets to the successful marriage of Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher – who have been married for 85 years!

The pair took fourteen questions and provided answers in less than the 140 character limit to share some of their experience and wisdom. The questions included my favourite at #14: “What’s the one thing you have in common that transcends everything else?” (answer: “We are both Christians & believe in God.Marriage is a commitment to the Lord.We pray with & for each other every day”).

They didn’t need to have to find the capability to create a website, or write an extra-long essay – Twitter provided a simple way to broadcast their wise answers to earnest questions. Sharing wisdom like this from incredible people I’d probably never make contact with otherwise is Twitter used well!

With summer drawing to an end, students across the country all drift back to another year of education. However, technology is helping make this return less of a chore with may neat ways the Catholic Geek can get into their education and have fun with technology at the same time. Firstly, what has become a staple for practically any student serious about their study: laptops . There are a great range of basic models available from as little as $700 now, which are all fantastic for taking your notes, writing assignments, and even a occaisional bit of entertainment between lectures. If you are looking for something smaller you can pick up a netbook for even cheaper – a light way of carrying all you need round on campus. However, it’s important to remember to back up your information in case your laptop suffers from an accident – keeping copies of important information on a USB stick or two is highly reccommended.

Moving on, more and more textbooks are moving into the digital era. While NZ doesn’t directly get great devices like the Kindle (www.amazon.com/kindle) and Nook (www.bn.com/nook), their software versions let you access their libraries on your PC or mobile device. For those who prefer the comfort of paper, www.amazon.com, and the local equivalents www.fishpond.co.nz, www.thenile.co.nz and www.realgroovy.co.nz have a great range of textbooks; often at cheaper prices then the University bookshops. If you have friends in the same courses go in together and save on shipping.

Finally, open to anyone wanting to broaden their education, iTunes U brings a heap of University content freely online – including content from a number of leading Catholic Universities. This makes for an easy way to study while en route to Uni via your MP3 player. Fire up the iTunes store (www.apple.com/itunes) and check it out!

As the internet and other digital technologies take an increasingly firmer hold upon many aspects of our lives, it’s important to think about your security in this new ‘digital continent’. There have been plenty of Catholic.geek pieces in the past talking about the need to protect yourself with anti-virus applications as well as tools for spyware and malware detection and removal, not to mention firewalls. And these are all important pieces of the online security puzzle.

But of even more importance (arguably) are your passwords. With a few exceptions, your password is the only thing between your personal data and nearly 2 billion other internet users. So why is it that so many of us have such weak passwords? There will be some of you reading this that have your personal financial data protected by some variation of “Password1”. There will be others who have their entire email archive – as well as the ability to impersonate them by sending email from their address – protected by nothing but their last name, or ‘1234’, or some other equally weak variation.

Such passwords are crackable in seconds. But complex passwords are hard to remember. So, what to do? Well, how about some divine inspiration? Even a simple bible reference makes a much stronger password than “Password1”. “Corinthians 1:10-16” makes for a pretty strong password. Even better is a concatenated, first letter Bible quote. Take, for example, “Itb,Gcth&te Gen1:1”, which is the first letters from Genesis 1:1 – “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” – with an ampersand and the reference at the end.

And, as an extra bonus, every time you log on to your email, you’ll be reflecting on God’s word – now that’s a holy password!