The DAILY genealogy technology newsletter for genealogy
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The iPad tablet is a great device but, by itself, is poor at saving web pages for later viewing or printing. Michele Berner has created a YouTube video that shows a better way to save those web pages. However, her method only works with the Chrome web browser (available free of charge at the iPad App Store).
Once saved as a PDF file locally or on a cloud-based storage service (Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, or a similar service), you also can print that file, display it later on your screen, save it in Evernote, or send it to someone via email.
I have seen more and more live genealogy "webcasts" on Google Plus lately than ever before. These Google+ Hangouts are great ways to hold meetings and are especially useful for online seminars, classroom instruction, and more. Now Google has announced even more powerful features are being added. These are not revolutionary but are simply incremental improvements to the service. The features reportedly have been "highly-requested."
Here is a sign of the times: one town in New Jersey is converting to all wireless telephone service.
Hurricane Sandy destroyed many of the telephone lines and hardware all around the town. The cost of purchasing new copper wire, new hardware, and the labor to install all the new equipment is in the millions of dollars. Instead, Verizon realized it would be much cheaper to provide wireless telephone service to everyone. The new Verizon Voice Link service will connect each home's wired and cordless telephones to the Verizon Wireless network. There will be no copper wires running from telephone pole to pole.
The following announcement was written by the Digital Public Library of America :
April 30, 2013
Cambridge, MA — The Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce it is partnering with the David Rumsey Map Collection to provide online access to tens of thousands of significant historical maps and images. As part of the relationship, David Rumsey will provide metadata for over 38,000 maps and images, making the entirety of his notable online collection instantly accessible via the DPLA website and API.
A couple prominent examples of items from the Rumsey collections available through the DPLA are The Eagle Map of the United States, produced by Joseph and James Churchman, Philadelphia, 1833, (view on the DPLA; see left), and the Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, Across the Western Portion of North America, produced in 1814 (view on the DPLA). Other noteworthy items from Rumsey’s collections range from maps found in historic atlases to images of three-dimensional objects such as globes.
It seems like only yesterday and yet the world has changed in so many ways that we cannot even list all the changes. 20 years ago today, CERN made the technology behind the World Wide Web royalty free and accessible to all. This was because of the invention created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This one man has changed the world.
I know quite a few readers of this newsletter live in Provo, Utah. If you are one of them, you might be interested in today's announcement on the Google Blog:
"Today the Google Fiber team is in Provo, Utah, where Mayor John Curtis just announced that we intend to make Provo our third Google Fiber City."
Grant Aylesworth has begun a project, in partnership with the archaeological services unit of the Government of New Brunswick, reading “illegible” tombstones from the 1700s using 3D software technology.
Aylesworth, an anthropology professor at Mount Allison University, and the team that he heads has been able to read previously illegible inscriptions on 250-year-old tombstones using 3D software models derived from photos taken with a regular digital camera. “This new technology is enabling us to digitally preserve the old tombstones, important for many researchers, most notably historians and genealogists. More importantly, this has allowed us to bring back the name of a person that was lost to history, before we get to the point that there really is nothing left to read,” says Aylesworth.
I have written a number of times about VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephones. I go rid of my old-fashioned telephone several years ago and now use a computerized VoIP phone supplemented by a VoIP cell phone. (My previous articles can be found by starting at http://goo.gl/fNnHx.) Today I found that one company agrees with me that old-fashioned telephone systems are doomed and should be replaced by VoIP. The company that advocates replacing standard telephones with VoIP systems does have a bit of experience in the telephone business. The company is AT&T.
Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, a U.S. Forest Service scientist, uses original land deeds from colonial America to determine what a West Virginia forest looked like before European settlement.
Two hundred years ago, “metes and bounds” surveys used distances from trees, posts, rock piles or natural features to describe corners where property line directions changed. Trees were used as markers for the corners of a parcel, and these descriptions were included in deeds.
Mega.co.nz launched today as a cloud storage service. However, it is unlike any other cloud storage service I know of. First of all is the pricing: free for up to 50 gigabytes (that's 50,000 megabytes) of storage space. This is a huge amount of free storage. It’s easily more than the 2 gigabytes offered by Dropbox, the 5 gigabytes by Google Drive, or the 7 gigabytes from Microsoft’s SkyDrive! For those who need even more space, very low fees are charged: 500 gigabytes of storage space for €9.99 a month (roughly $13.31 US dollars), 2 terabytes of storage space for €19.99 a month (roughly $26.62 US dollars), and 4 terabytes of storage space for only €29.99 a month (roughly $40.00 US dollars) a month.
Radio4 in the UK has an interesting report about placing QR Codes on tombstones. (See the picture to the right for a typical QR code.) Edward Stourton of the Sunday morning religious news and current affairs programme, recently interviewed Steven Nimmo, a funeral director from Dorset, to find out how digital 'quick response' codes are being placed on gravestones. Scanning the code with a smart phone directs people to a webpage where they can find a wealth of information about the deceased.
I am told this happened in the conference hotel of the FGS conference in Birmingham, Alabama, last week: the hotel rooms were equipped with wired ethernet connections for Internet access. There was no wireless wi-fi service available in most of the hotel rooms. That works great if you are carrying a laptop computer but what about an iPad? or an Android tablet or a smartphone? or any other device that doesn't have an ethernet connector?
There are two solutions:
Solution #1: If you prefer to travel with only a tablet or smartphone device, you need to purchase a portable wi-fi router. They cost about $20 to $40 or so. It should pay for itself within two or three days. The portable ones take very little room in a suitcase or carry-on bag. It is just like the router in your house except for its size. Plug the ethernet cable in the hotel room into the router, turn it on, maybe do a bit of configuration, and you have a private wi-fi service that will supply signals to all your wi-fi devices within 50 feet or so. Best of all, you only pay one fee to the hotel room. That's better than paying double or triple prices if you are using two or three wi-fi devices!
I have often written about the need to store your critical data, including the results of hundreds of hours of genealogy research, off-site where it will be safe from any disasters in your home. Dozens of companies now provide storage space for backups and the field is very competitive. Like most everything else in computers, prices keep dropping and dropping. Now Amazon has announced what I believe is the lowest-priced storage of all: as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month. At these prices, storing data online in the cloud is significantly cheaper than purchasing your own disk drives.
The low prices will be practical because Amazon is storing the data on mag tape, not on disk drives. If a customer needs to retrieve stored data from the tapes, there may be a delay of 3 to 5 hours before the data becomes available for online restores. For most consumers, I would consider this to be an acceptable trade-off in exchange for the very low prices being charged.
Fred Brewin, a Product Manager at Google, has posted an announcement of greatly enhanced video conferencing service from Google. While the company has offered video chats for some time but video chat is now being upgraded to a more modern video calling technology -- Google+ Hangouts.
Hangouts utilize the power of Google’s network to deliver higher reliability and enhanced quality. The users do not have to be Google or Gmail customers to use the new service. All the participants need is an Internet connection, a video camera and microphone installed on their computers, and a web browser on their Windows, Macintosh, Android, or iOS devices. You'll be able to video chat with up to nine people at once, watch YouTube videos together, collaborate on Google documents and share your screen.
Have you noticed that CD-ROM disks have almost disappeared? At one time, CD-ROM disks were the preferred distribution method of big genealogy databases from companies such as Ancestry.com. Many of these disks required either Family Tree Maker for Windows or the FamilyFinder Index and Viewer software. FamilyFinder Index and Viewer is no longer available while Family Tree Maker for Windows is still very popular but the newer versions do not include the software required to read the older genealogy data on CD-ROM disks. Other companies produced disks in their own proprietary format although I think all of those proprietary products are now defunct. A few companies did and still continue to release products as PDF files, easily read on most any computer.
The moral here is to never produce (or purchase) data that is in a proprietary format. If you do, you will be locked into that format and sooner or later the data will become unusable. The preferred format today is PDF although that is certain to change also to some newer format within a few years. I'm guessing that EPUB will become popular. It is an open standard for e-books created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).
Many companies have abandoned CD-ROM distribution in favor of online databases. That trend is certain to continue.
Hurricane-like storms knocked an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, offline Friday night, and a chunk of the Internet felt it. The incident temporarily cut off a number of popular internet services, including Netflix, Pinterest, Heroku, and Instagram.
I have written often about the advantages of cloud computing, including lots of redundancy and high uptimes, so this news is especially interesting. In theory, big outages like this aren’t supposed to happen. Amazon is supposed to keep the data centers up and running all the time. In fact, Amazon has done a good job of keeping things running, but not a perfect job. Friday's outage proves that even Amazon has a few chinks left in the armor.
Visitors to Berlin, Germany's Jewish cemeteries can now use their smartphones to take an "electronic tour" that provides information about people buried there.
There is a QR code at the entrance of each cemetery which can be scanned by a smartphone and directly connects to the cemeteries' website. Each smartphone's built-in GPS capability enables visitors to plan their own "tour," choosing among about 160 of the 150,000 graves in the three Berlin cemeteries.
You can learn more in an article in Reuters news service at http://goo.gl/CwS3U.
We think of "broadband" as being high speed but, of course, everything is relative. A standard DSL connection to the home might be as slow as 256 kilobits per second although the more common speed is 768 kilobits. (A kilobit is usually written simply with the letter "k" such as 768k.) Cable modems typically run at faster speeds, such as 2 megabits per second up to 5 megabits. FIOS fiber optic cable connections default to 10 megabits per second but, for more money, you can obtain even higher speeds.
Now a new Ohio start-up company, called Gigabit Squared, has raised $200 million to fund a gigabit-per-second broadband project.
I have often written about cloud-based computing, including file storage, web servers, and even genealogy applications that run in the cloud. The question asked most often concerns security: "Is it safe?" In fact, cloud computing can be safer than home computing or networked computers in the office. The keywords here are "can be." Security is not automatic but can easily be achieved by paying attention to common sense security issues.
D. Joshua Taylor addressed the security issues at the annual RootsTech conference held in Salt Lake City earlier this year. He described the efforts and especially the security safeguards implemented on recent genealogy web sites. If you have any interest in cloud computing or simply want to learn more about what constitutes cloud computing, I suggest you watch Josh's presentation at http://bcove.me/59xmxxg8 or click on the image below:
A friend wrote to me about the situation with Megaupload, an online file storage service. He knows that I am interested in making sure everyone performs sufficient backups to protect genealogy data and other data from hardware failures, software failures, and human errors.
Megaupload was recently shut down by the federal government. The company provided file storage services and had a great method of allowing one user to share files with others. The problem was that Megaupload had both customers who used the service legally as well as some customers who used it illegally. Some unscrupulous users found that Megaupload was a great way to share movies, music, and other files that were protected by copyright. Despite repeated warnings from the government, Megaupload ignored the problem and allowed all users to share files as they wished, both for legal and illegal purposes.
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