A quick post to save this link:
Best free courses and lectures from diyscholar
Might elaborate later…
Crafternoon: Mass Quiet Book
So….I’ve been wanting to make AvaMarie a Mass “Quiet Book” similar to this one that I saw on Pinterest. This would be perfect to take to Mass because it’s QUIET and ca…
Source: Crafternoon: Mass Quiet Book
Maybe these holidays I can sink some spare fabric into something like this.
Free Latin Readers and Grammars and Texts
Maybe if I keep a list here, I can keep adding – maybe not the easiest format to maintain, but until I figure out a clever way via github jekyll page collections…
A List from 2007 from the textkit forum – all with answer keys, but not all available outside North America – though often searching the Internet Archive turns up identical copies available to download.
Latin for Beginners by Benjamin D’Ooge also scanned copy at archive.org (436p) 1911 with a community made Answer Key from Textkit. 79 lessons
Elements of Latin 1921 by Benjamin D’Ooge (470p) with Key (70p) – something of a rewrite, taking best bits of Beginners and starting over again. There are 56 lessons in the first “half-year” and the second “half-year” takes the total up to 110 with two optional lessons after that.
Easy Latin for sight reading for secondary schools another D’Ooge book, (174p) 1921. Selections from Ritchie’s Fabulae faciles, Lhomond’s Urbis Romae viri inlustres, and Gellius’ Noctes atticae. Short readings with questions following.
Jacob’s Latin Reader – 1833 – starts with simple sentences featuring elephants. pp277
A first Latin reader: with exercises by Herbert Chester Nutting – first section on Early American History, then Tales of Land and Sea, then stories from Caesar. 1913, pp493
Introductory Latin grammar and first Latin reader [microform] by Hagarty, E. W. (Edward William), 1862-1943 – regular Latin text-book, Nominative, Genitive order of declensions. 1906, pp462
Henry’s First Latin Book 1839 (133p) with Key 1879 (127p) – quite different – launching in with all 5 declensions side by side and three tenses.
A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language by G J Adler (737p) 1858 with Key (163p). A more conversational approach – very highly recommended by Evan der Miller of latinum.org.uk.
Latin learning
I’m homeschooling four boys aged 9-14. Today is the last day of Term 2, so a chance to review and plan and hope and hunt around for Latin texts.
Bouncing around the internet I found these two by E. A. Sonnenschein:
I’ll save the links here to remind me to see how they went. Right now the first book is rolling off our printer.
I still refer back to Catholic’s Latin Instructor by Fr Caswall from time to time, but looking for something more grabby and a bit more systematic.
Plus, Evan van der Miller has made a recording of the story:
An endorsement from the adverts at the end of the book:
Ora Maritima does for Latin what the modern oral methods do for French and German, i.e., it makes the beginner realize that the language is really a vehicle o expression, whereby commonsense notions can be conveyed. From personal experience I can testify how a few weeks are sufficient to gain this all-important idea; and it is worth adding that in a school which I have recently inspected a small boy of eleven employed his leisure time in working through Ora Maritima to the end and then came to his master for the sequel, Pro Patria. There was no need to tell that boy that Latin is something more than a phalanx of declinable nouns and verbs.—Alfred Hughes, M.A., Organising Professor of Education in the University of Birmingham.
Hopefully I’ll be able to let you know how it goes soon!
Print Etsy Inventory
Etsy does do some things well, but they leave the door wide open for third party helpers like Cr8tivity.com
Maybe this is strategic and wise, but downright frustrating when you want a printout of your 250 active listings quickly rather than printing each page of the listings manager – which handily gives one listing on each page, unless you’d like to do a screen capture…
So, a day spent hacking away at different Javascript solutions I found a good starting point with JQuery-csv and now I have my own Print Etsy Inventory tool ready for next time!
Now, to get back to working on www.peterbrandt.com.au
Fonts and scruples.
All fonts from the Ultimate Font Download
I was helping a friend with an Etsy shop icon. Her family had designed a lovely banner but translating that into a tiny square format proved to be an obstacle. The text used an ornate font which would be difficult to read shrunk down. I needed to find a similar but simpler font to match.
As it was a commercial use case I looked at, Font Squirrel but didn’t find anything quite right.
Then I looked at dafont and found a beautiful font called Birds of Paradise. It was free to download but $49 for commercial use. The comments pointed out that this was a revival of a font from the 1970s. This lead to several other revivals of the font, one of which is called Ballantines Serial by Softmaker. This font is a little less gorgeous than Birds of Paradise, but for a quick logo it is fine. But it is $14.99 per weight or $29.99 for the set.
Then I remembered back to a thing I bought “the Ultimate Font Download” as recommended by Ray Larabie. It’s a collection of second rate fonts, many of which are available for free, but also includes many older fonts from SoftMaker, including Ballantines Serial. It was the claim that they were all licensed for commercial use that got me. All for $19.95 – not sure how much gets to the designers, especially with their affiliate program – yes, I signed up too – if you would like to buy the pack of fonts through this link then I may get about $8 out of it.
Luc de Vroye is scathing about Parasites of Type Design over at his website. He is sceptical about the claim that the Ultimate Font Download has permission from all the designers. On the other hand, the Ultimate Font Download is quite transparent about what fonts are included and it does look like if there were any violations they would have been taken down by now.
You can download many, many old fonts off the internet. It’s the license to use the fonts which is the valuable part.
Other fonts – some that I have bought from myfonts, some freebies.
I did find that SoftMaker has a Free Font of the Month available.
Goodreads
There’s this website, a social media thing for book worms. It suggested I paste this into my blog, and me being curious had to give it a go.
Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Awesome book – people who get married and set off on a roller coaster ride – busting the myth that you need the perfect partner in order to be happy – showing the beauty of pain, faithfulness, love – real love!
