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This is a follow-up to turning sermon transcripts into a book of verses worth memorizing. That post ended with one finished booklet and an honest worry: would the same script hold up across many more? Two weeks later I had ten booklets, and a new problem. They needed proofreading, and I wanted to hold the result in my hands as one real book. The Need: Proofreading Is Easier With a Pen Each booklet is built from a plain-text file. In theory, fixing a typo means opening the text file, finding the sentence, and editing it. In practice, I don’t notice mistakes in a text editor. I notice them when I read the finished page, the same way I’d read a printed book. And I don’t only want to fix typos. I want to say “underline this sentence, it’s the heart of the sermon,” or “this whole entry doesn’t belong, take it out,” or “move this paragraph to the end of the previous entry.” ...

I have a small side project that turns pictures into coloring pages my daughter can print and color with crayons — nine of them so far, kept in one page she can browse and pick from. In an earlier post about this same project, I mentioned I was starting to wonder whether writing my own small script would beat leaning on general-purpose AI image tools for this one narrow job — turning an already-outlined picture into a clean, coloring-book-ready outline. It did. That script has been quietly converting one picture after another since. Last week it hit the first source image its original assumptions couldn’t handle, and fixing it properly meant editing the script’s rules, not just running it once with different numbers. ...

I did something like this once already, turning scanned sermon pages into a searchable PDF. That project made an existing book easier to search. This one is different: I’m not searching a book, I’m deciding what belongs in one — turning years of sermon transcripts into a small printed booklet of verses worth memorizing. The Need: A Sermon Doesn’t Split Cleanly Into Verses I have transcripts of a few hundred sermons from a pastor whose talks I’ve been transcribing and correcting for years, and I wanted to turn them into a different kind of book: not a record of what was said, but a short list of verses worth carrying around in your head. The reason is a familiar one to anyone who grew up in church — a verse you’ve actually memorized becomes the sword of the Spirit, something to meditate on, something to reach for when you’re tempted. A verse you’d have to go look up doesn’t work the same way. ...

My podcast app has one job: every morning at 6 AM, it pulls the newest talks from one lecturer’s feed — AI and Christian-missions topics, mixed — downloads the audio, and adds it to a list I browse and play from my phone. Six hundred-some episodes now, sorted by category, searchable by title. It does that one job well. Then I found a novel online I wanted narrated into it, and there was no button for that. ...