This is a question provoked when I was playing with Stellarium (an open source planetarium program) and its Observability plug-in, realizing it’d be cool to use when making a calendar for the next year.
Anyways, that provoked a question of me, whether others already use some programs, apps and software in their faith and how?
That’s an interesting question Djehutinedjem!
I downloaded Stellarium, but I don’t really use it. I think it’s fun though!
I have an app called ‘Tide Times’ that gives me information about the tide & the moon in my local area. I also use an app called ‘Safer Seas & River service’ which tracks local sea pollution. These have a practical use for me when I go to the seafront or want to swim in the sea. In a way, being close to the sea helps with my spiritual connection. I often think of Akhu and Netjeru when I’m by or in the sea.
I have also done the occasional ritual for a Kemetic feast, where the local moon phase coincides with the ancient timing for the same festival.
I also downloaded ‘Daff Moon’, but that’s fun for me rather than spiritual.
I’ve also looked at Stellarium. I love those astronomy apps. I worked on something like this twice before, and I’ve been tempted to build my own calendar software.
I’ve also been exploring tools for writing hieroglyphs for a little while.
I’ve used sesh together with TeX, JSesh and SignWriter, so far.
SignWriter has a dictionary built in which is extremely useful.
However I’ve not been able to find anything geared towards producing beautifully laid out, rendered and coloured texts on Windows so far, although this project looks interesting for Linux, and the glyph images are available to download. I might have to install a virtual machine to try it out.
As interesting as these tools are, I’ve started creating my own with the aim of producing more aesthetically pleasing results, having features for translation and transliteration, including vignettes and adding decorative elements.
The text is the beginning to the sebayt of Ptah-hotep. Apologies for any offense caused by the mistakes in the layout.
I recently downloaded StarWalk2 as someone recommended it and I do prefer it to Stellarium. I like the notifications and it provides a lot of information about what’s going on in the sky each day.
The only bonus of Stellarium is that has an option to change the view of constellations and stars to different cultures/traditions including Egypt. But it doesn’t provide an explanation about the history behind the names, which is a shame (not that I can find anyway).
I haven’t found an option on Starwalk 2 to view the sky via different traditions, but perhaps I just haven’t found it yet.
Hieroglyphics is another interesting subject and it sounds like you have a worthwhile project there!
If anyone has the ability and inclination to create Kemetic Apps, how useful that would be!!!
I appreciate tech but I’ve never written software or anything like that. A fun and useful skill to have though!
Its neat that they have different cultures constellations, I have also been curious about this.
When I’ve looked into it myself I’ve found the official constellation boundaries from the IAU, and there are some standard sets of lines used for connecting the stars too… however I’ve never come across any organised data for anything else.
If anyone has the ability and inclination to create Kemetic Apps, how useful that would be!!!
I do want to explore this. It feels like a way that I can help satisfy Ma’at, and express my devotion to Ptah.
Hieroglyphs feel like an important place to start. I’ve struggled to find good quality copies of any of the surviving literature from our ancestors, and translations do not entirely do them justice.
I think often about the inscription on the Shabaka Stone, and the poor condition of the engraving and its transcriptions…
His majesty copied it anew so that it became better than it had been before, in order that his name might endure and his monument last in the House of his father Ptah-South-of-his-Wall throughout eternity, as a work done by the son of Re [Shabaka] for his father Ptah-Tenen, so that he might live forever.
(source)
Ooooo! Actually, there is a description of the ancient Egyptian constellations on Stellarium. You have to go into ‘Sky Cultures’ for a description of them before choosing to view it.
It’s based on the ceiling of Hathor’s temple in Dendera.
I did the engineer thing and went and looked inside at how it works…
following the domain name from the e-mail address…
Which led me to this delightful paper.
Marvellous!!! I’ve downloaded it and will read it when I have the time.
I’ve used Stellarium from time to time. I also have some ritual bots which I may have mentioned here somewhere.
I’ve not paid them a visit for a long time so I assume they are still doing things for me 
Certainly don’t see a problem using tech in our practices. They did, even if not electronic.
HokBot Book of Shadows looks intriguing.
http://aoineko.free.fr/index.php?lang=en
Just stumbled across this neat little tool for writing hieroglyphs online.
I should have something more exciting soon, but I’ve managed to create images that work nicely with wikihiero, from the tuxscribe glyphs and a bit of my own work to fix up some colours. I have a few more features to add before it has 100% coverage (currently it only handles about 750 of the 990 images, but the rest will be easy enough to add).
This enabled me to save a wiki page and swap out the glyphs easily… a little work means that they are less than twice the size of the ugly black and white ones that are currently used.
This means that I can make a plugin for chrome that will replace the images without requiring Wikipedia to make the change themselves.
All of the licenses have been followed along the way, and I should be able to release this work to the public soon, as a small first contribution along the path to much greater works. 
EDIT: I underestimated my speed… I’ll have to find out how to get this onto the store.
… and “Beautiful Hieroglyphs” will be on the Google Chrome extension store soon.
EDIT: its live now for both Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera, with a version for Safari coming soon:
If you are interested in the implementation details, I’ve also published it on GitHub. You can also download the .zip file there you want to install it yourself by following the instructions here
The option to download the .zip file is handily hidden behind the “Code” button:
Its still a work in progress, but it replaces the most common glyphs, and I will be able to update it periodically as I continue my work in this area. As well as wikipedia, it works on wikitionary and the original wikihiero webpage
I hope that others will benefit from this tool. I’d love to hear back if anybody enjoys it.
Taking this conversation one step further…
I have to disagree with this quote from the article: ‘Robots, unlike people, are spirituality incorruptible’. This is assuming that robots are spiritual beings?
But it is interesting to hear how some people in the Hindu community are using technology in their spiritual practices.
I’ve been working on yet another project, cataloging visual references for hieroglyphs by manually segmenting publicly available source images… its quite early, but I’ve managed to solve the fundamental problems and have something very rudimentary working.
The initial set of glyph images are of A1, D4, D35, G1, G43, G54, L2 and X1, but I will add more over time.
EDIT: now has the coloured glyphs from my web plugin project, and the alternate font glyphs it uses, so that almost every glyph has a reference image now.
I continue to make more tools… this definitely needs more work, but I’m hoping to move my hieroglyph and transliteration work over to something I can make freely available on the web.
