Thank you. Bless you all for not voting me into the Family Tree’s Top 40 . I don’t even care why; I just thank you for not doing it. I’m happy right where I am without the pressure of expectations. As I’ve been intimating for the past year or so I’m trying to wrangle the circus of my computer life down to the essentials. Typically, I seem to be going the wrong way on a one-way street. As the genealogy world expands wildly, I’m in a mood to hunker down into a smaller space. As I said awhile back, I’m nowhere near where computing is going, which is ...

Someone emailed me last weekend for some help with linking web pages in a particular way. It wasn’t a difficult question but she had a list of requirements for how she wanted it to work and how she didn’t. So, having knocked every other option out of the ring, here’s what was left. Get a free Dropbox account. Install Dropbox on your computer. You’ll get a folder called My Dropbox. Inside My Dropbox will be a folder called Public and another one called Photos. These are special-use folders. Otherwise, it’s just My Dropbox. If you’ve been thinking about ...

Cousin Sam has finally put her foot down and she’s getting her own laptop. I’ve heard it said that when people get old they revert to a child-like state. So, what once would have been two eight-year olds fighting over rungs on a jungle gym becomes two eighty-year olds fighting over the family computer. Only in our time. I neglected to mention previously, there’s also a Mr. Sam. Mr. Sam is equally tech-illiterate but he has the added distinction of being terrified almost to death of computers. The fact that they even have a computer in their house, at their age, is to be ...

If you’ve been following along and getting your photos embedded with IPTC captions, keywords, locations, copyrights, etc. you will also be able to share this information by creating slideshows. You can accommodate a lot of different situations and needs with information that’s already embedded in your photos. And not just IPTC. Also GPS, EXIF and Jpg Comments, etc. I’ll demonstrate this with XnView because it’s available to most of us. Gather together the photos you want to use and click on the slideshow button. Click on ‘More Options’. You’ll ...

As I’ve been intimating for the past year, I’m trying to take a second look at my whole life, not just the train-wreck on my computer. I’ve set myself up for enough computer projects to last several lifetimes so that’s not going to work obviously. When I started out with my mind mapping experiment, I called the center post MY LIFE. Then I proceeded to expand out into the 12 main categories of my computer filing system. Little slip of the mind there. I forgot the rest of my actual life. The non-computer part. Funny how that happens. So, I renamed it MY COMPUTER. ...

I’ve decided to jump off the cliff and onto the webinar bandwagon but with a twist. Anyone who would like my personal time for computer assistance may ask. Please submit your question(s) in the Request Help contact form. If I think I can help you, I will email you back with meeting details. I will be using a combination of telephone and a secure screen-sharing service. Full-screen demonstrations are available on your computer or mine, as you wish. There’s nothing for you to register for or install. A headset for your hands-free operation is recommended. Unless you’re ...

I understand the old system of adding photo information to the front of photos is still in practice. And being taught. In other words, draw a wide border on your photo and type onto it. Because I’m old and cranky, I’d like to point out a couple of huge problems with this method. One, it takes forever if you have thousands, or even hundreds, of photos. Two, the information is not search-able unless you also include it in mile-long file-names. Two-and-a-Half, changing and updating is unbelievably tedious and messy. Oh, and Three, depending on the software you’re using, ...

This is a typical (although partial due to the scroll bar getting in the way) Assigned Sources screen in my Legacy database for a single individual. Assigned Sources in Legacy Family Tree Although the debate rages on over at Kerry’s place , if you’re a Newt quivering in the face of professionalism and you think sourcing is difficult, I’m here to tell you it really isn’t. However, that won’t necessarily save you from the Genealogy Police if it turns out one of your source documents is faulty. But barring that possibility for now, Legacy has it laid out ...

Someone left a brilliant comment over at Jasia’s blog awhile back. Jasia was asking for ideas on downsizing as she got ready to move from her long-time home to a smaller condo. The commenter was T.K. T.K. has six different blogs. Obviously a thinking person and she brought up the idea of “Toss Ten Things”. I like it. I’m trying to apply it to my computer. Specifically EverNote because it seems like the place I’d have the best chance at making it work. Or bookmarks would be another good one. The idea is to ‘toss ten things’ everyday. Although ...

It’s been a tiring week and it’s just getting revved up here. This thing about source citations. Someone posted a link to The Genealogy Police on their big important genealogy blog and it’s sending a stream of new traffic over here. At the other end, some little fella has grouped me in his ‘social history research’ experiment as someone who doesn’t care about sourcing. He obviously hasn’t seen my blog before. Hey, Harold, ever heard of MRIN Filing ? Maybe IPTC ? Having spent a few years studying marketing, I know the purpose of being online at all ...

I was surprised some friends showed up to laugh at my post about the police . I was also surprised no-one showed up to support the police but I did lose 10% of my subscribers. Like I didn’t see that coming. Meanwhile back at Organization Central … I got to the second bookmark of two thousand and fell asleep. What I fell asleep in the middle of was a link that took me to another link about The End of The World which is coming in 2012. A slew of videos with eerie UFO music in the background adding nothing to the credibility factor. I’ve been hearing about the world ending ...

I know many things I say are hugely irrelevant to genealogy and I apologize for the misleading subtitle of my blog. I have two major projects at hand right now, both involving cleaning up the mess on my computer. One is my bookmarks because, as it’s been niggling at me for years, there’s no point having two thousand of them cluttering up the place. I don’t even know why I bookmarked that many pages and if I never saw them again I’m sure I wouldn’t even notice. But, since I did bookmark them I now feel obligated to review every single one. The other project is ...

I had a visit from the Genealogy Police this week. I’d heard of the Genealogy Police but I’d never met them, or even one, so I thought they might be just a figment of someone’s worst nightmare. But, now it’s clear they do exist. And if she’d had her way I would have been shot, hung and quartered. Then burned at the stake and my ashes ground into dirt. And then I would have been flung into the far reaches of Hell. And, if there’s anything I left out that would insure my total annihilation, feel free to add it to the list. I’m sure she’d be ...

If you follow me on Twitter , you’ll know that I banished 1,377 distant (Quaker) cousins today. They’re not cousins so says an email contact. They weren’t even friends with the Presbyterians I thought they were descended from. OK, so historical religious affiliations and wars are not my strong suit. I have family that was brought up Episcopalian and now they’re Pentecostal. It can happen. We all, who are interested in this line, have had one measly un-sourced source from 1957 to base our conclusions on and when that’s all you’ve got, well, that’s ...

If you’re not using portable apps yet, there are more portable apps than you would believe and there are more being made all the time. I run as many as I can. You can literally carry around most of the software you need in portable versions. Occasionally I clean out my collection because I gather many more than I can use. Some of them I use daily. If you want to be truly portable, install the PortableApps Platform in your Dropbox . Make a folder for the installation first. I named mine PA to keep the folder name short. (In particular to accommodate OpenOffice where the file-paths ...