I have been adding the basics of my family tree to the new Familysearch – dig that new fan chart!
Today I was working on one of my Czech lines, which of course contain all sorts of fun and exciting ácčěntéd characters. After I added my great-grandfather Vaclav Vaňáč and started to work on his parents, I looked up and realized there was an issue. Although the name shows properly in the “Vital Information” section of the main page, his name in the profile header mysteriously doesn’t contain the “ň” or the “č” – but still does have the accented “á”. Hmmm.
I tried to send a message to the Familysearch support folks via their help center, but kept getting the error “Unable to create a case in our support system. Please try again later.”
Thus, wrote up this blog post to use when trying again later.
I was about to write up a post on the Notability App for iPad as a useful note taking and annotation tool. Then I started to peer about and saw a few resources already out there that will give you a good idea of the features and possibility.
Before I link to those resources, I’ll just add a couple of points below. (I know there are a few negative ones here, but don’t let them scare you off.)
1. First, Being a fan of Evernote, I tried using their Penultimate app which is billed as a “handwriting app.” While it has some very nice features and is free, the lack of any ability to type is a deal breaker for me when it comes to note-taking.
I have a fairly neat handwriting in real life, but on a tablet there is a point when handwriting sloppiness kicks in and typing wins. Notability’s ability to include typewritten text means win.
2. In the Notability app, I find selecting objects is sometimes hard to do and takes me many finger mashes. Also, even though I have the long slender fingers of an artistic 19th century consumptive, for the life of me I cannot get the Page Up/Down to work most of the time – especially since my iPad is usually in a Tactical iPad Cover.
3. Following on that – for any note taking app I would strongly recommend getting a tablet stylus to use for screen drawing. I find using an index finger to draw on an iPad both tiring and cumbersome in general. When it comes to annotation of documents and drawings, a pen is even more useful for clarity and accuracy in selection.
The jury is out on my finding one that I love, but I CAN tell you that Slim Jim jerky snacks are not the answer.
4. Various types of media can be added to any note, including photos (from your library or take one on the fly), web clips, sticky notes, and figures. I tend to use figures most often when taking notes. My work usually has me identifying things by type and I like to use various colors and shapes to do so.
However, I find the figure creation and editing features a bit annoying. When you create a figure it is done in a separate page from the active note page and then is inserted when you press Done. I find that disconcerting, and adds another step to the process since you then have to move the figure to where you want it and often resize it. Also, creating even a small figure means a giant rectangle of whitespace is inserted along with the figure. I am not sure what the value is in that.
5. Audio notes: Nice in the field when you are walking through a location.
Q. Postings online have various prices listed – as of this writing, the app is a steal for $1.99.
So, now: On to two video recommendations that each do a nice job of going through Notability features:
While there is some overlap, I also recommend Notability on the iPad from EdTechTeacher on Vimeo. They have a TON of useful videos out there, so be sure to click on their username and shop around.
Anyone who has scrolled through website logs know that all kind of odd things are being thrown at servers on the Internetz daily. So, it was not a particularly surprising thing that I noticed a distinct uptick in WordPress login attempts on my self-hosted blog a few weeks back.
(I am, perhaps naively, assuming I didn’t black out, fly to Romania, Turkey, the Phillipines, and Guam and try to login from each location.)
Usually when I see these fun activities I look around the Googles and see if some new vulnerability has reared its head or just if others are reporting similar things in their logs. Until today, I have not really seen any others talking about an increase WordPress login attempts so I just kept any eye on things and let the cat roam the server room.
I still don’t see any chatter out in the world at large, but this morning I received a message from one of the hosting companies I deal with: Read More | Comments
A quick update to this post: I am not sure how new this news is, but I just noticed that Mapy.cz now has street view imaging built right into their own interface!
It also appears that they are using their own imaging, as opposed to the Google Maps street view, since there is a “Panorama Beta” watermark at the bottom of the screen. Also, when I compared the two street views of the house of my 2nd great-grandparents in Defurovy Lažany, the current resident had put out the trash in Google’s image and not in Mapy.cz.
I’ll leave this post as is, since the technique can still be useful – there may be locations that are not full imaged in one service and not the other, for example. Happy Hledání!
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Last summer in my blog post Then and Now: Simanek Family Home I described a nice find when I looked up my grandmother’s home in the Czech Republic using Google Street View and then found a matching photo in our family albums.
Aaand, we’re back in The Republic again!
First, thanks to a distant cousin, Pavel Vanac who sends me all sorts of links and information on our shared Vanac lines. He has been looking for all the Vanacs and descendants and is hoping to have a reunion one day in Prague and I really hope I can attend.
For this year he has scaled back the idea to an online reunion – which may be difficult since I have only a tiny bit of the Czech language in my brain. (We normally communicate using Google Translate between us – which has sparked some fun confusion on both sides.) But I am still looking forward to that!
Back to the story here – Pavel sent me a small photo over the weekend with the message: Read More | Comments
At lunch today I spent some time getting research resources ready for a reading binge if time presents itself over the weekend. (One can hope.) Here’s a couple of really quick tips in case you have been in the same boat as me:
Oddly, some books on Google cannot be added to your online library – some are only downloadable as an eBook. Between those books and ones from Gutenberg, I thought it would be nice to add them to the Kindle app on my iPad. Read More | Comments
As I have discovered more evidence of my family’s immigrations and documentation of their lives, I have become entranced by the idea that while we live in different times we often travel similar paths. Read More
