February 2008

If you live in Europe this may be common knowledge. I don’t, and it came as a complete surprise to me.

I’m told that Switzerland has outlawed chairs in schools for the past nine years. Students and teachers have to either sit on balls or stand at podiums. They’ve known since the 1950′s that sitting is killing people and the government finally did something about it. In the past year, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have all followed suit.

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Google MapsMarlo Schuldt of Heritage Collector sent me two emails about this.

And this will give some people pause. Google is photographing houses. If not yours yet, someday.

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How many of you re-install your operating system on a regular basis, or perhaps have someone around to do it for you? I only do it when things get so bad I have no choice. Now that I have a larger hard-drive I’m hoping “bad” is a longer way off than it used to be.

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KeePass Password SafeYour passwords. Where do you keep them? I used to keep mine in EverNote, in Firefox and printed on 15 pages in a binder. I’m sure there are still others and I’ll come across them someday.

There’s a much easier way and it’s called KeePass. It’s free. Download and open the Portable version. You might as well. This way you can also keep a backup of it on a USB key and carry it around with you. If your house disappears for some reason, you’ll still have a copy. If you disappear while you’re out, there’s still a copy at home that your executors might need. …[continued]

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I received the following letter which I reprint here.  It opens up the whole can of worms that’s been addressed in various forums before.  If anyone else has opinions please send them in.

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While February whiles itself away, and we wait and wait and wait and wait for Legacy 7.0, I’m scouring the web for other useful tools and oops, forgot this one. Skype.

Skype is a service for making phone calls through your computer. You’d be talking on the phone, as usual, except it’s happening through your computer instead of your land-line.

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Tip & Bits

2-08-2008

My, how times flies when I’m working in my database.  I’m sure I’ve made every mistake imaginable when it comes to data entry and I’m still cleaning it up.

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Announcing WVR’s new international offering, World Collection. The World Collection also includes all the U.S. records that can be purchased separately.

* Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild

This is a series of 9,000+ ship lists from all over the world. The coverage includes about 30 different countries (perhaps more). Of course, some countries have more coverage than others; England and France have records of several hundred voyages, where as Japan, Trinidad, Barbados, India, Sierra Leone, etc. may have only a few. …[continued]

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