Archives

A virtual notebook

Apr9

I have been trying to find an application that, in a nutshell, acts as a virtual spiral notebook on my desktop that I can use to take notes and jot down my findings as I do my genealogy research. It must:

  • be very simple to type text into
  • add cut ‘n paste snippets from online sites
  • allow images as I fnd them
  • BE FREE
  • reside on my desktop- no internet access required
  • no storage limits (except by my hard drive size)
  • searchable

In a perfect world…APPARENTLY!

I have spent the last 2 days Googling, downloading, trying, rejecting.

TiddlyWiki seems to be the closest, but what a pain in the backside! Very confusing, not very image-friendly. I have tried it in the past and upgraded to the latest version yesterday, which had fixed several of the problems I had run into, but still not easy to add images to.

Zim is similar to TiddlyWiki, but not nearly as versatile. Very little in the way of documentation avaiable- not user-friendly!

Several other wiki-type apps, none were what I’m looking for.

Online possibilites include Ubernote and Springnote. Both work ok, but I want SOMETHING ON MY DESKTOP! Neither has unlimited storage. I don’t want to suddenly find myself up against a wall!

A third option is to set up a WordPress blog as a notebook. Easy to add images to, at least.

Looks like I’ll go with SpringNote- but I still want something DESKTOP!

A Dovie Summary

Mar28

This is the individual summary for Dovie from RootsMagic 4. In order to limit this to 1 page, I did not include sources, notes  or her photo. But those can be included if preferred. I exported this report to .pdf, then to .jpg in order to add it to this post.

I found a really neat free program, PDF-XChange Viewer, that exports .pdf files to image files, which is really handy for working with newspaper clippings from GenealogyBank, as well as RootsMagic reports.

RootsMagic To-Go!

Mar26

This is so cooooollllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stopped at Walmart this afternoon and picked up a SanDisk 4GB flash drive to download RootsMagic to. At $14.99, that’s quite a bargain! Flash drives have gotten so cheap. The first one I ever owned was just 256 K and I think I paid $20 for it (a long time ago!).

When I got home, I opened my laptop and navigated to All Programs>RootsMagic 4>RootsMagic To-Go. I opened the program and it instructed me to insert the flash drive. I then clicked on the prompt to download RootsMagic 4 to the flash drive, which took less than a minute. The program required only 0.16 GB of memory! When that was complete, it prompted me to select the folder containing my RootsMagic database and transfer that to the flash drive. All done and in less than 5 minutes, I have a functioning RootsMagic 4 complete with my data on my 4 GB flash drive.

Just remember, you gotta have your Registration Key for RootsMagic 4 to activate the program on the flash drive. Otherwise, it just allows use as a trial version of the program.

P. S. I was wrong about the images files. All of my media files in RootsMagic are present on the flash drive!