Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and I’ve been playing with it ever since.

So far I’m just installing the software I need and downloading and installing updates, and the battery has lasted very well. The keyboard feels solid and the major keys are much the same size as on my standalone keyboard, although of course all the other keys are in different places – another keyboard to get used to. The touch pad is much the same size as on my 15in laptop.

It works well and quickly, even though I wasn’t able to upgrade the RAM to 2GB as the salesperson advised me. I’ve seen forums where a lot of people have upgraded theirs successfully, and I might consider that later when I really start using it.

I am expecting to use it when I go into the city or out to the archives, and for my birthday last year I got a mobile broadband … thingy (whatever the thing is called). My old mini is a HP 2133. The battery lasts less than 2 hours, and with Vista it’s very slow to get going – both reasons to leave it at home. If I use it on the train on the way into the city I have to take the power cable to charge it again for the ride home, especially if I actually use it while I’m in the city. I bought it too soon – at the time there was very little around, and what there was was small and made from flimsy-looking plastic.

It’s so small and convenient that I’ll probably use it around the house as well. The fate of the HP is yet to be decided.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...
• Growing need for powerboards
  I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I've run out of power points. Again. How is this possible? Let's count them. My office at the moment has...

I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part:

You must read and follow all set-up and usage instructions in the provided manuals and Instruction Manual for Safety and Comfort. If you fail to do so, this product will not function properly and you may lose data or suffer other damage. EVEN IF YOU DO SO, TOSHIBA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OR WARRANTY THAT THIS PRODUCT WILL FUNCTION PROPERLY IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. [Upper case in original]

Thanks, Toshiba, that’s very comforting.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...
• Growing need for powerboards
  I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I've run out of power points. Again. How is this possible? Let's count them. My office at the moment has...

I manage three Twitter accounts:

@CaroleRiley is my personal account

@NSWGenealogy is my business account

@SocAustGen is the account I manage on behalf of my genealogy society

I often wonder whether I should just post to one account because all the same people follow all three accounts. I found a way to find out if this is true.

FollowerWonk allows you to compare two, or optionally three, accounts, and compares them by followers or followees. I compared all three accounts and the results looks like this:

This screen shows the followers of all three accounts. I can see who is following all three, or combinations of two, or just the one. The Venn diagram graphically illustrates the overlap and the relative size of each following. I can do the same for the accounts that these accounts follow. Brilliant!

What I’ve discovered is how little overlap there is. So I can post to all three without fear, and I can retweet between them without too much risk of repeating myself.

• No Related Post

I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and …

Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understanding is that is is well built at the back end but you need coding skills to design the front end. I may end up going that way, because the alternatives all have problems.

I found Elegant Themes, which look very nice. It’s US$19.95 per year to use all of them, and you keep them if you don’t renew. I’ve been experimenting with one now – StudioBlue – it’s on the right. Ih shows featured posts and lists of posts by category and is very configurable. It allows ads in the top right corner, but I’ve realised that I have to insert code to put them in there, instead of just in a widget editor, so that’s out.

I also tried one called eNews which showed pictures, but it required a thumbnail to be generated for each post, as well as the code-insertion drama mentioned.

It’s not that I am unable to learn to code, I was a programmer for many years. I just don’t want to spend my time doing that. If writing a post is an extra hassle I’ll do it less often. I would be prepared to spend more to get something more user-friendly but I want to try it out before I buy it, and not find out that I have to mess with code when I’ve already paid for it.

Of course, the real reason for all this mucking around is not for this blog but for my business blog and website.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...
• Productivity update 14 March
  Very productive day today. My blog comes up on my blog reader, so I read it this morning to see what I'd said I was going to do today, and I was further inspired. Or perhaps determined is a better wor...

Every home office should have a cat, and here’s why:

• The occasional need for attention allows you to get away from your desk for 5 minutes so you can let the cat out, or put food out, or whatever
• When the cat requires more personal attention, the distraction of giving the cat a rub can help your productivity when you return to duty
• Cats are good to have around, as long as they don’t want to sleep on your lap

My cats prefer to sleep on my lap, but a few minutes of having me type over their heads is enough to drive them off to find a more peaceful spot.

Cats can also be entertaining, which provides further short-term distraction. My cat Chloe has always been fascinated by printers. If she hears it going from another room she will still, after all these years, go off to watch it. She especially enjoys the new one in the picture with the document feeder. She’s only tried once to climb on top of it, which disconnected the document feeder and was too disturbing for her to try again.

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I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task.

The applications:

Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 – this is an upgrade from PaintShop Pro 7, which I bought when I was looking for photo editing software and it looked easier to learn than Adobe Elements. I had another look at Elements before I upgraded, and it’s so big and still not as easy to learn. PaintShop Pro is just more intuitive.

• copy and paste from the web to create an image.
• cropping

Adobe Photoshop 7 – an old version I had for work some years ago. I can’t afford to upgrade it.

• resize to precise number of pixels for websites
• crop to precise size
• add text (citations of document images).

Picasa 3.5 – free software

• culling of new batch from the camera
• best for levelling a crooked photo
• face recognition (haven’t tried this yet)
• creating web albums (although I seem to put them in Facebook these days)

Faststone Image Viewer – free software. I know others swear by Irfan (?), but I liked this one better.

• batch renaming, resizing, compressing for the web.

Windows Photo Gallery – the one that comes with Vista.

• culling of new batch from camera
• simple fixes – crop to standard size, red-eye, brighten and auto-contrast. Has taken over from Picasa because it is the one that the photo automatically opens in.

I know there are other applications out there, but I’m happy with the ones I have, although it would be fantastic if I could just use one or two.

Which ones do you use? Have I left anything out, tasks or software?

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Growing need for powerboards
  I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I've run out of power points. Again. How is this possible? Let's count them. My office at the moment has...

I have been trying to find somewhere accessible to plug in my mini-notebook in my office and I’ve run out of power points. Again. How is this possible?

Let’s count them. My office at the moment has two power points in the wall, on opposite sides of the room. One has a single, 6-point power board, into which is plugged in:

1. a desk lamp
2. old camera battery charger (the batteries are never the same, are they!)
3. cordless phone charger No 2. (No. 1 is in the other office)
4. phone connection for the cable TV (so we can order pay-per-view movies)
5. empty at the moment, but the old laptop is usually plugged in here.

I seem to remember removing a phone that needed power when I decided against the job where I’d need to wear a headset.

The power point nearest my desk has a 4-point power board with surge protector, into which is plugged:

1. Bose Wave Radio
2. desk lamp
3. new camera battery charger
4. 5-point power board with surge protector

This second power board has:

1. laptop
2. external hard drive
3. laptop stand
4. MP3-player charger
5. empty at the moment but likely to get the floor lamp back now that it is no longer needed for a guest bedroom

Fortunately I don’t have to accommodate the printers, cable modem and the old desktop computer, which are in the other office with their own spiderweb of cables and power boards.

Finding enough power points is a constant struggle. Why do we have so many electrical appliances?

Phones didn’t used to need electricity, and now they do. The cordless phone has 4 handsets, and we can usually find one when we need it, but they all have their own chargers that need power.

Speaking of the other office, it has a single 4-point powerboard on the wall. Into that we have:

1. an 8-point powerboard with surge protection
2. a 4-point powerboard
3. cordless phone base unit with answering machine
4. kept empty for visiting laptops

These two powerboards have in no particluar order:

1. the old black-and-white laser printer
2. the more recent multi-function-printer that also scans, copies and faxes
3. the flatbed scanner
4. the slide-and-negative scanner
5. charger for the husband’s PDA
6. desktop computer
7. the monitor for the desktop computer
8. wireless router
9. cable modem
10. desk lamp
11. empty

Our phone chargers, one for each phone because they change over time, are downstairs in the bedroom where we are more likely to remember the phone when leaving the house. The bedroom, of course, also requires two desk lamps, clock radio, mozzie zapper and air filter.

Never mind the mess of cables and power boards behind the TV, catering for the cable TV receiver, DVD player, and home theatre system! We got rid of the record player, cassette deck and the VCR.

No wonder we use so much more electricity than we used to! It makes me wonder how many of these appliances are on standby, drawing power when they’re not being used. The desktop computer certainly does, it’s on all the time because the laser printer is plugged into it. The cable modem and wireless router are always on. The cable TV receiver is always on, even when it’s off. Clock radios, phone chargers, battery chargers… how much power do they draw just to keep that little light turned on?

Probably a lot more than we think.

Do we really need all this stuff?

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...

I am in the midst of a website crisis. I run my blogs, including this one, and my business website using WordPress. They are all easy to back up, and all are easy to upgrade WordPress except for the business one, which requires a manual upgrade. I won’t go into the reasons for this, but I moved it a couple of times and the server can’t find it to upgrade it any more.

I’ve done this upgrade before and it works fine. The last one appears to have been in September. When I tried it yesterday i followed the instructions: I backed up the files using FTP, I checked that some of the folders could be opened in the backup, I deleted the files off the server, I copied the new files onto the server, I went to run the upgrade program, and it couldn’t find it. My website wouldn’t display, I couldn’t get into the admin. It was stuffed.

You have probably spotted the problem by now. I went to replace the files with my backup and a great deal of it wasn’t there. Horrors. I’d checked that the folders had been created but I didn’t check enough of them to see that many of them were empty. No backup. This is what they mean when they say “my heart sank”. You can feel it hit bottom.

This was yesterday, at about 7pm, when I realised that my website was completely stuffed. It’s now nearly 4pm the next day and I have only just got the pages back, but not all the plugins – contact forms, e-commerce and all that stuff. I’ve tried all sorts of things, not helped by my imperfect knowledge of how the thing works.

I don’t know what I did wrong with the original upgrade. Maybe it was too big a jump between the version I was on and the current version. But I do know that if I’d been able to restore everything from my backup I wouldn’t have had the heart-hit-the-floor experience and I wouldn’t have been up til midnight trying to find out how to fix it.

The lesson here is:

Don’t just run the backup – check it.

Check it properly.

Check that everything you need is there in case you need to use it.

• 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy – Week 23 – Find a Challenge
  The challenge this week is: Come up with a personal genealogy challenge of your own. Each person has different research goals and experiences. Use this week to come up with your own challenge, and th...
• I love my new Toshiba mini notebook!
  Well, I was brave enough to take the risk! My new mini notebook is a Toshiba NB200, which arrived by courier yesterday. I broke the seal warning me that my new purchase may not function correctly and ...
• Thanks for buying, but your new mini notebook may not work
  I bought a new mini-notebook, to replace the piece of junk I bought a year and a half ago. It has just arrived, and the label stuck across the opening to the box states, in part: You must read and fo...
• Wordpress Themes – sometimes not as easy as they look
  I have been trying to find a theme for my blog. I want one that displays the writing in a clear and clean manner, and ... Nearly everywhere I have read recommends the Thesis theme, but my understan...
• Photo editing software
  I currently use 5 different photo editing applications for different tasks. Here is my attempt to document which one is best for which task. The applications: Corel PaintShop Pro Photo X2 - this...