I sought without success for instructions on how to modify the gutter width, to adjust the inner margins of pages in a PDF so that they may be printed properly. So I had to figure it out myself. This is the solution I’ve devised for use with Adobe Acrobat Professional. . . . → Continue reading: Adjusting inner margin (gutter) width in PDFs intended for bound printing
Rabbi Schwartz asked prospective participants in his “Kenissa: Community of Meaning Network” to respond to his chapter, and in particular how our initiatives are aligned with one (or more) of the four propositions he offers to heading off the crises facing the American Jewish community, and in what ways they advance an area of Jewish life or practice outside of those propositions. Here was my response as founding director of the Open Siddur Project and co-founder of Open-source Judaism. . . . → Continue reading: Open-source Judaism and Charting the Course of the American Future, an essay for Kenissa: Community of Meaning Network
A Simplified Summary of Public Domain Status for Creative Works in US Copyright Law (excluding audio works) – Aharon Varady (CC BY-SA)
Among the many things I do in my work for the Open Siddur Project, I create digital copies of works in the Public Domain. These copies then serve as the basis . . . → Continue reading: A Simplified Summary of Public Domain Status for Creative Works in US Copyright Law (excluding audio works)
(credit: Core Jolts, from “Banana Writing for Meditation?“)
Wisdom. Shimon ben Zoma taught that the wise learn from everyone. My friend, Pesach, wrote a book of his accumulated life wisdom, Sustainable Bliss, and devoted three pages to pithy quotes he had picked up in the course of his readings and travels. While editing . . . → Continue reading: Tracking down the author of the popular quote: “Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past”
When my father wanted to share an album of captioned photos with a colleague, he used to be able to simply send them a link in an email. This no longer works since the captions he saved in Picasa are not displayed in Google Photos! The solution I worked out for my father relies on Google’s Picasa application installed. So if you need this, go ahead, download and install the latest Picasa application. The rest of the solution is as follows: . . . → Continue reading: Preserving and Sharing Photo Captions from Picasa (before Google shuts it down)
For posts with multiple contributors in Wordpress, showing multiple names in the byline requires some hacking. One must install the Co-Authors Plus plug-in and then edit the code for their particular Wordpress theme. Documentation written by Daniel Bachuber, the author of the Co-Authors Plus plugin is located here. For those using the Atahualpa theme in Wordpress, documentation is uneven, incomplete, and hard to come by. Hopefully, this post will provide more comprehensive guidance and save someone the time I spent I trying to figure this out. You can see an example of my solution in effect at the Open Siddur Project — check out the byline and multiple-author bios in this post. (Please share with me any improvements you might have to what I’ve written below.) . . . → Continue reading: Hacking the Atahualpa Theme for Showing Multiple Author Bylines and Bios with the Co-Authors Plus Plug-In in WordPress
From 2009-2010, I was a fellow of Yeshivat Hadar in the pilot year of its first year-long program of study. A couple months ago, Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, Dean of Students at Yeshivat Hadar, asked me if I would consider reviewing Mechon Hadar’s new website. At the Hadar reunion earlier this year, Jason had provided a . . . → Continue reading: Mechon Hadar is Open
Since we all live under the current terms of each of our respective nation’s copyright laws, simply making something available or accessible over the Internet doesn’t make it free under copyright for others to use and improve upon. That’s why open content licenses exist: to abrogate the restrictions imposed by copyright law, and it’s why we need to use them. . . . → Continue reading: SHARE WHAT YOU LOVE ♡ A Decision Tree for Choosing Free-Culture Compatible Open Content Licenses for Cultural & Technological Work
American Jewish World Service does important work, so when a site they built for educators and learners to access Jewish sourcetexts on social justice and other important activities disappeared overnight due to what appeared to be a domain registration lapse, I was motivated to write an essay on how organizations can appreciate their websites as more than “proprietary and Copyrighted marketing assets to better leverage their brand.” eJewishPhilanthropy, a well-read blog popular among Jewish professionals published it this morning. Here’s a snippet: . . . → Continue reading: Teach me your Open Source Torah, on one foot
Last year, I was interviewed by Alan Jacobs for the Atlantic Magazine on the potential and promise of an open source Judaism. This year I was privileged to write an essay for the Sova Project, a project that is considering the structures and processes of a sustainable society through the lens of biblical, prophetic, and rabbinic Jewish values and practices. In the essay I try to pose many of the same concerns from the perspective of community professionals: scholars, artists, and educators: “Those of us who make a living as crafters, educators, and servants of the Jewish community: how do we feel about sharing our work? I mean, really sharing? When, in working with Torah, I create a lesson plan or feel like I have some brilliant insight or analysis or make a translation, how do I give it, release it to the world at large so that my work can spread through adoption, adaptation, redistribution (and attribution)? Further, what are my anxieties and vulnerabilities in sharing my Torah? What honestly are my desires, aspirations, and needs? How, through my method of sharing, can I satisfy and reconcile these concerns?” In wrestling with these questions, I wanted to bring attention to an important orientation that guided Talmudic discourse in Torah — that of dimus parrhesia, a Greek term for a cultivated attitude towards sharing ideas, freely and openly. . . . → Continue reading: Making oneself into a Maqom Hefker (an ownerless place): On the Economy of Sharing Torah, Dimus Parrhesia (freely and openly)
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