I wrote a really funny piece yesterday called Making Scents of the Past. O boy, sometimes I just crack myself up. But by the time I went to bed I was pretty well sobered. There’s a big difference between dredging up records of the already-deceased and chasing memories of the still-living. …[continued]
September 2009
The Admin tells me that she was a straight-A student but she knows if I’d been her English teacher she would have flunked. Yes, she would have.
But I understand. I hated English grammar myself. It was too constricting and borr…ring for my crazy adolescent mind, although we didn’t use the word borr…ring in those days. “It sucks” hadn’t come into prominence yet either, but it pretty well sums it up. …[continued]
If you haven’t discovered Picasa 3.5 yet, you really should. It’s a riot. They’ve added face-tagging and a geo-tagging panel. No-one does geo-tagging as well as Google so that’s a no-brainer. As far as the name tags go, I spent many months IPTC-ing 10,000 photographs in great detail and I was not keen to start over with something that’s not in the same league. But, as ever, Google has made this different enough and fun enough to be worthwhile in its own right and it’s not difficult.
First, prime the system by tagging a couple of dozen people and then just let it go. It will continue churning out thumbnails of faces and try to match them up with the faces you’ve already tagged. The accuracy rate is phenomenal. It’s having a problem with my identical twin sisters, (so do I) but other than that it’s stunning. Then you can do things like make collages or movies or desktop backgrounds.
If you want to go really wild, you can also add geo-tags with their new full-length geo-tagging panel and follow the life of your photos on Google Earth. It’s all integrated with Picasa Web Albums as well.
When you first install Picasa, it takes you to their blog where there’s an introductory video about what’s new.
‘Nuff said; just go there.
2010 update – but here are some caveats:
Picasa Backup
Picasa Tags
IPTC: Picasa
Picasa Summary
This is somewhat about computers and a comment on generational differences, so I’ll sneak it in here under the guise of computer-related stuff for genealogists.
This has gotten to be a sad excuse for a genealogy blog. It’s hardly about computers anymore either. Three years later I’m trying to remember how this even got started. I was depressed and I found dead people really interesting, I think that was it.
The background maker is back online. It’s safe to go over there now and let your creativity loose.
Here’s one thing you can do with your creations. Drop them into the WebPics/Backgrnd folder in your Legacy installation and use them in your web pages as alternatives to the default offerings. They save very small from bgMaker but they’ll multiply to fill whatever page you use them for.
They’re exported as .png by default from bgMaker. To be recognized in Legacy they have to be either so .jpg or .gif. So open the .png in whatever graphics editor you have handy and resave it as a jpg or.gif before putting it in the WebPics/Backgrnd folder.
They say as we get older, and older, we revert to childhood dreams. I don’t know a lot of old people so I’m not an expert in this subject. But I did recently hear from a close cousin (not mentioning any names) who, at the age of 80, just bought herself a bicycle. I bet that’s making her children nervous. First trip out she went straight into a hedge. …[continued]
As I’ve mentioned, I work at a college, and I go to school myself (somewhere else) so my genealogy life is pretty well dead and gone these days. I drop in once in awhile and say Hi to my dead people because I do miss them. But, truly, they’re in a position where they’re not going anywhere. They don’t need me to hover over them. Although, their remaining paperwork could rot and fade away so that is something to be concerned about. …[continued]
It’s just been a week for embarrassments. Did you hear over at Legacy News they have 250,000 subscribers? I’m so humiliated. That would be an understatement. I was happy to hear though that 4 and a half years ago Geoff Rasmussen didn’t even know what a blog was. Glad I’m not the only one.
