Friday, July 30, 2004

Well I gotta tell you that it was pretty darn cool to discover that someone I didn't even know had entered family tree info on this site. I knew my tree for my surname grandfather's side but I didn't know it for my grandmother (married to surname). Now I know who my Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather was on her side. Coooooool. And this comes a day before our family reunion. Won't I impress. :-) Check it out - you can sign up for a free 14 day trial. Ancestry.com - Search Birth Records, Death Records, Marriage Records and US Census Records

Can't find the picture searching Google Images. Well then try another image search site. Neat front page of this site tells you the most popular image searches. Search away! Picsearch - the search engine for pictures and images

Thursday, July 29, 2004

OK, not sure about how this is completely useful but it is quite interesting. Ever wondered how popular a word was in the English language based on current usage? Well, now you can find out. Neat way to find out what names are most popular as well when looking for a baby name. WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Well, this was certainly a cool concept when we first ran into it at the office. Visually see branches of a word and click on the branches to explode the branches for that word. This link will give you a trial of about 6 searches. (you can go back to the main page to reset it continuously though). Not sure in the long run if it might drive a person to drink. Check it out. The Visual Thesaurus

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Finally, a way to transfer your tapes to CD. And it's simple. I went to Radio Shack and picked up a 8mm to 8mm audio cable (same connectors you see on the end of a mic and on the end of your headphones). Now take your tape player and plug one end in the headphones jack connection and the other end in your microphone jack connection on the back of your PC. Viola. Use a program like Freecorder to record from the tape player. And if you want to make your MP3 a WAV file to make a true Audio CD try the freeware program Mp3Decode. Yup, I couldn't believe how simple it was in the end - why didn't I think of this before. Enjoy.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Ahhh, you can't say enough about the wonders of free open source programs. Want to create PDF's but don't want to buy Adobe PDF Creator. Welllll, download PDFCreator instead, does the same thing only it's, yup you know what's coming, FREE!!!!! PDFCreator

OK, so you really love the power of Photoshop - heck who wouldn't. Buuuuuuut, you just can't afford a second job to pay for it. Enter "The Gimp", a near duplicate of Photoshop but only FREE, because it's open source. There are so many features I don't know if I'll ever use them all. Check it out. You will need to download three different files, the Gimp setup, the GTK open source environment and the Gimp help file (unless you like to live on the edge). Enjoy! GIMP - for Windows

I'm lovin' the Freecorder. Have the ability to encode sound on your computer but no software to do it with. Wait no longer - Freecorder is here. First, don't forget to double click on the speaker icon in your system tray. Go to options and select recording options. Here you can select which inputs you want to use for recording. After clicking ok you'll see the slidebars for each. Don't forget to click the boxes below to activate the slide bars for recording. This whole exercise is a bit much to activate recording in Windows but it is what it is. You can use freecorder to record your old tapes to MP3 for instance (keep aware of licensing issues please). Don't forget to select the right input you set up when initializing Freecorder. Have fun.!! Free Download Freecorder 2.1

Wow, now that's fast!!! Tired of waiting for Outlook to churn away looking for that darn email you know you sent but don't know when. Lookout, the "google of email" will change all that in a flash. This Outlook plug in indexes all of your emails so you can search in under a second. You'll be amazed. Lookout for Outlook Download