PROVO, Utah, PRNewswire – Ancestry.com announced today it has launched a collection of more than 1,700 recorded oral histories from immigrants who arrived in the United States through Ellis Island. This is the first time this collection of poignant recordings has been available online. To celebrate the new addition, Ancestry.com is making its entire U.S. Immigration Collection free through Labor Day. “As immigrants created new lives in the U.S., the stories of their homelands and their remarkable journeys to America were often lost,” said Christopher Tracy, senior ...

Here’s a nifty little tool for editing pdf’s in case you need one. PDF-XChange Viewer . It’s portable and free. It’s not absolutely everything but it will take you quite far.

While the long wait for the new computer goes on, and on, and on, the laptop is still hanging in here. So, I can write you a quick post. I’ve been watching the OS stats lately. This is an average for the last 500 pages visited. XP users are still way out front. Windows 7 users are trailing behind at 24%. When I get back here as a Windows 7 user we will be in the minority. I did not know that people visited this site from their mobile devices. I’ve been looking around at Windows 7 from afar and I think the changes to the taskbar look pretty neat. Decent size thumbnails pop up ...

My laptop isn’t just old; it’s senile. I see a netbook in my near future. Any advice on which one? I may not be able to answer you right away but will read all comments when I can. Some interesting reading in the meantime: Intel Introduces Dual-Core Atom Processor for Netbooks Thanks. Signing off…

Hey Regs! That’s short for regulars. In case you don’t follow me on Twitter , (tsk) my desktop computer died. I’m limping along on an old laptop that could kick the bucket any second. I could be thrown into computerlessness in an instant. DELL is sending me a state-of-the-art replacement computer because they’re tired of hearing about the graphics card that kept crashing. 3.06GHz dual-core processor, Windows 7, 6 GB RAM, 1T hard-drive. Ho, ho, ho, More Power. It could take from 15-20 days they said. As we know, that’s an eternity in computer time. So, ...

I don’t want to leave you with a shortage of options for organization, so I had another look at FreeMind and I love it. I installed the newer version and it’s solved some of the problems I was having with the older one. So I threw a few of my to-do’s in there and this is the map in reduced size. I started out making a map for each of my 11 categories, but found there’s no way to open them all at once. That’s too slow so I copied and pasted them all into one map called MY LIFE. Here’s a way to get around that. If I export the main branches of MY LIFE ...

I decided to go looking at free outliners. I’ve had one for years, ActionOutline , but it took me a long time to figure out a ‘best use’ for it. At one time I had notes all over my computer in a dozen different programs. One day I decided it was time to skinny down to just one, before I lost my mind, and decided that would be EverNote . And EverNote has been good to me. But one thought that kept recurring was that it was not a good place to keep my to-do lists. EverNote is where I collect email and computer code and how-to’s. But it never seemed the right place ...

There’s the paperwork of the dead and then, there’s the paperwork of the living. Yesterday I was on a roll with the READ ME files, going into the second hour, just beetling along feeling confident to get through another two hours of other tasks. I had just finished a long document, was in the middle of printing out two pages when my 7-year old printer decided to die. I only print a few pages per year so I don’t know what its problem was all of a sudden. A long time ago, a lamp fell off the bookcase and a light bulb shattered sending glass shards for miles. It’s ...

I guess yesterday was Day 5 of the Diary. I don’t really remember yesterday. The Action Machine report says I put in half an hour on the READ ME files, an hour on scanning and an hour on my website. Other than that it’s a bit of a blur. I remember later in the day I downloaded an update for Task Coach and liked it even less than I did the other times. The Action Machine is functioning as a fuse to get me going where I most like to procrastinate and it’s working just fine. While I was tossing and turning in the wee hours, I got thinking about a friend who died in the ...

A study of time management immediately segues into health issues. That was such a profound thought in the middle of the night it kept me awake. Profound thoughts can be bad for my health. I grew up in a family that was run like The Army. Everything had a time, everything had a place, everything had a price. Even holidays were clocked by the odometer. From such and such town to the next place was 137 miles. We arrived at 1:14 PM. We had lunch consisting of blah, blah and blah. We left at 1:43 PM. There was a slight delay because one of the kids had to go to the bathroom. To be able to ...

I made some notes about this awhile back because I’ve seen people asking about it. What does “start sniffer” mean? This is an adjunct to the post Orbit Downloader . There’s some inconsistency in how videos download that I don’t think has anything to do with Orbit Downloader itself. So these instructions will work most of the time, but not all the time. Sometimes, I can’t get a video downloaded no matter what I try. There are two parts to the software to open, Orbit and Grab++. Assuming your Preferences are set to “Close to System Tray” ...

By the end of Day 2 I’d come to a different idea about setting up my timers. Having one for ‘maintenance’ is too distracting. I don’t need to be reminded about checking email, logging into my various accounts, upgrades, updates, data backup, etc. They’re already like breathing. You know what they say about changing habits. It’s not a matter of fighting the bad ones, it’s a matter of developing the good ones. Where your attention goes, so goes your energy. The Action Machine 'Default' Action List What I do need to do is focus on some projects ...

I got up late and did not make a list before I started my day. That was a mistake. Just winging it, this is what happened: - Carbonite backup has been running slow lately. Instead of comparing the importance of this issue relative to other tasks for the day, I clicked the Maintenance timer on and wrote to their tech support. I got back an answer which I answered with an obvious next question and it went downhill from there. One canned response after another including, Due to the complexity of your issue please phone us Mon-Fri. More time wasted on email but at least I can see where it ...

I set a variety of small maintenance tasks on their own timers, decided that was too complicated and lumped them all into one called Maintenance. I’m testing this at 1 hour/day: email, logging into various accounts, data backup. That’s an hour a day spent just treading water. I’m hoping to lower that. Email is important but it can be insidious. Checking it 20 times a day is just a nervous habit. Twice will do. Theoretically. Last night as I was on my way to bed, feeling pleased as punch for having had a more productive and efficient day than usual, I decided to check my ...

In talking about time management previously, I suggested that you make a list first thing in the morning (or the night before) about what your plans are for that day. Say, rather than get carried away trying to manage endless to-do lists all the way into next month and next year. We overstretch and then feel defeated when we can’t keep up. No matter what we do it’s never enough. I speak from decades of experience in overwhelming myself. I have no sense of time. That’s a fact. I wake up busy, I go to bed with my mind still busy and my dreams are busy. I tend to think ...