MacBook Pro Mid 2012 Internal Hard Drive Cable Hack
A known issue with the Mid-2012 13″ model Macbook Pro is that the internal HD cable can easily fail. This creates all sorts of problems that look a lot more serious than they are: Mac…
Indiana Jones: Headpiece of the Staff of Ra, transcription and translation
[[EDIT: See additions at bottom of post.]] I am now a semiticist and Old Testament scholar. This blog post fulfils a dream I’ve had since being a little boy: translating some of the stuff you…
Python helper tools for Hebrew characters
The following Python code will generate a python module called hebrew_dict.py that contains a dict called hebrew that has the unicode names and chars for the Hebrew codeset stored as key-value pairs. Compatibility Python 2.7:…
Python: convert list of dicts to csv
The following function converts a list of dicts to a unicode string that can be piped into a csv file. All cells are quoted. If the dict contains lists, then these are written as a…
A unicode friendly pretty print function for Python
Using Python 2.7 I struggle to get pprint to work well with unicode. So I wrote my own function for handling complex structures made of dicts and lists that contain linguistic data stored in utf-8….
MacOS script to open all files in a directory
The following script will open all files of type in the directory it is placed. Save as a file and make executable:
Creating Maps
Grasping the geography of Israel, the levant and surrounding regions is important, but something I find elusive. It really helps me to have, or create, good maps. I recently had reason to put some maps…
Errata for Gesenius 18d, (Donner, 2013)
Donner, H. (2013). Wilhelm Gesenius: Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament (18 ed.). Berlin: Springer. This is an excellent lexicon, and the death of Herbert Donner only recently (2016) is very sad for…
Awesome thing about Ethiopia #1: My 10 yr old has a natural talent for pronouncing Amharic
The Amharic word for “word” is ቃል. At least that’s the word for “word” used in John 1:1 in my Amharic Bible. The “ቃ” represents the sound “qa” with a long “a” and an ejective…