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Friday, July 9, 2010

What I Do

Thomas MacEntree at Geneabloggers has started up a new meme where you list the technology you use for genealogy.

Here's my "What I Do":

  • Hardware:  3.5 year old AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2613 Mhz 2GB RAM; ancient Dell Inspiron laptop; Asus EEE Netbook.  Considering an upgrade to my desktop system as it's starting to crash now that I'm putting heavier photo editing demands on it.
  • External storage:  CDs and DVDs; External hard drive
  • Online storage:  Dropbox (free) which I have synced to all the computers mentioned above and my iPhone.
  • Backup:  Dropbox; DVDs; External hard drive. Oh yes, and hard copy. Not that I'd want to start re-entering.
  • Firewall:  Yes I do thanks
  • Virus protection:  Yes I do thanks
  • Spyware:  I hope not! I have antispyware software.
  • Printer:  Canon Pixma MP470 all-in-one. I'm considering if I want a flashy flatbed scanner, as I'm really enjoying learning to do photo restoration.
  • Phone:  Landline and iPhone
  • Mobile media:  iPhone
  • Music player:   iPhone
  • Car audio:  Ummm... the radio and CD player that came with the car... nothing special... can't say I use it for genealogy
  • eBook Reader:  Don't use one
  • Browser:  Firefox (and Safari on iPhone)
  • Blog:  Blogger
  • RSS:  Google reader
  • FTP: -
  • Text editor:  Microsoft Word 2002. I'll upgrade from 2002 at home when they upgrade from 2003 at work. I can't change what they have at work, so I'd rather not know what might be possible with more recent software. The computers at work are frustrating enough as it is! I also have OpenOffice.
  • Graphics:  Photoshop Elements 7 + Grants Tools (and a few other plug-ins). It occurs to me that when my son starts school he'll be eligible for student pricing. That takes the price of Photoshop CS5 from over $1000 to under $200 (Australian). Very tempting...
  • Screen capture:  Vista's built-in snipping tool, which I only stumbled on by accident. Type "snipping tool" into the search box on the Start menu to find it.
  • Social bookmarking:  Diigo (free), but I'm not using it socially.
  • Social profile: -
  • URL shortener: -
  • Office suite:  Microsoft Office Professional 2002. I also have OpenOffice (free).
  • E-mail:  Via my ISP; hotmail; gmail
  • Calendar:  Calengoo on my iPhone, which syncs with Google calendar
  • Accounting:  Had an excel spreadsheet but then I saw how much I was spending on genealogy so I stopped using it. 
  • PDF generator:  CutePDF, but it usually fails when creating larger genealogy charts. I guess you get what you pay for. Haven't got around to looking for other options. I'll take note of what others say in their meme submissions.
  • Genealogy tools:  Gensmarts - in particular the "customise records" feature when I've found a new resource.
  • Other tech stuff:  iPhone - for all the amazing non-phone things it can do! Roboform to manage all those passwords. Toodledo on the iPhone for my to-do list (free, also accessible by web). Starting to use Evernote (free - desktop and iPhone versions) for note taking and research planning. Wacom pen tablet for photo editing. Yahoo! groups which deserves a post of its own to tell you about what I've done there.

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