In Part 1, I explored how I scanned in my family’s old photos. After doing this, my "Preserve Family History" initiative languished for awhile. Then two things happened. First of all, I started watching "Who Do You Think You Are?" For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a wonderful show that takes a celebrity and traces their family’s history. It’s amazing to see Sarah Jessica Parker anguish over the fate of an ancestor charged with being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials. Or marveling with Emmit Smith over the cold calculations that went into the slave trade. While there are parts of the show I could do without (the "coming up next" clips that give away major surprises and the musical segment at the end), overall I really like the show.

The other thing that happened was that B’s grandmother had a fall about a month ago. I realized that her grandmother’s not going to live forever. I’ve already lost a huge family history resource on my side. With my grandmother’s passing last year, all of my grandparents are dead. On B’s side, her grandmother is the last one still living. I wanted to preserve as much family history as possible.

I began looking into programs to help me organize my geneological pursuits. I came upon a nice piece of free (and open source) software called GRAMPS. The interface took a little getting used to. I’ll admit that I came pretty close to deleting the whole deal a few times. Once I worked out how to operate it, though, I was amazed by how much information I could input into it. What really sealed the deal, though, was the portable version. Pop that onto a USB drive and you can tote your entire family tree around and work on it on any computer.

The fun doesn’t stop at inputting data, however. You can add plugins for GRAMPS that allow it to easily output the data to web pages, family trees, etc. Pretty much anything you want to do with your family history, you can do with GRAMPS. This is definitely a tool I’d recommend for people who want to keep a local family history.

Next week, I’ll expand my search beyond your PC to the World Wide Web and the various resources that are available there.

Computers are very important to me.  After all, I work as a webmaster so I’m around computers all day.  When I heard that NHL’s school wasn’t *really* teaching him about computers, but only letting them go online to visit some kid-oriented websites, I decided that *someone* had to teach him about computers.  After all, computers are important in today’s society.  A computer-literate child has more opportunities than a computer-illiterate one.  I quickly decided that I should have semi-regular computer lessons with NHL. Read more of this article »

I’ll admit that, as much as I love blogging, part of me hated writing blog posts. It was filled with annoyances. First I had to go into WordPress’ admin panel. For some reason, I’d always wind up logged out, so I’d have to load up PasswordSafe to retrieve my password and log in. Once in, I’d have to navigate to the New Post page. When I was there, I’d need to type in my post, remembering to hit Save every so often lest my browser crash and I lose it all. (Somehow, auto-save never works when you need it to.) When I wanted to put images in my post, I had to upload them then add them to my blog using a variety of tactics.

All of these little annoyances meant that it was hard to write a blog post. At least harder than it should have been. All I wanted was a local version of WordPress’ admin panel (so I wouldn’t need to log in) with more of an application’s feel to it. After some Google searching, I found Zoundry Raven. Zoundry Raven gives you a local copy of your blog to work on. It uploads changes (posts, photos, etc) via XML-RPC. What this means is that you load up Raven, select a blog post (or create a new one), add images via dragging and dropping and then hit Publish to send it all to your blog. No messing around with a separate FTP tool. No stopping writing to upload some files.

Read more of this article »

B likes putting photos together into collages for her blog. They help save space when she wants to display a series of related photos. However, her usual tools for making collages weren’t working out well so I went hunting for a new one. Something that can arrange a series of photos in a layout and allow her to decide how (or if) the photos are cropped. Unfortunately, I didn’t find such a tool. (If you know of one like this, tell me about it in the comments section below.)

What I did find was Shape Collage 2.5. Shape Collage will take a set of photos that you specify and toss them together into a shaped photo collage. It comes with 3 preset shapes: Rectangle, Heart, and Circle. You can also enter some text to use as the shape. The real strength of the program, however, is the “More” category. Here, you get to draw your own shape or load one from a file. The photos will take on the shape of whatever you draw.

The first use I thought of for it was making a poster of our nearly 3,000 Disney World photos. I loaded the directory with the photos and decided on a shape. After a quick experiment drawing a “Mickey Ears” shape (turned out well enough, but my drawing skills are lacking), I decided to take it to the next level. First, I found a PNG image of Mickey online. (Shape collage uses PNG and I figured this would be the best format to modify into a shape.)

I tossed this into a photo editor (Paint.NET), gave it a white background (instead of transparent) and turned Mickey completely black so that the image turned into this shape:

I loaded this shape into Shape Collage, changed a few settings around (e.g. I told it to only use 1,000 photos) and clicked Preview. After a short processing screen, I was treated to a sequence of photos appearing and rearranging. They quickly formed the Mickey Mouse shape. Once this was done, I clicked Create and got my image:

Trust me, the original photo is huge. Almost 100 megapixels huge! That would be big enough to make into a poster (which isn’t a bad idea for displaying your vacation photos). Here’s a crop from the original:

The only caveat is that it puts a “ShapeCollage.com” watermark on the resulting image. You can pay $25 for the Pro version which doesn’t add watermarks and adds a few other features like exporting the image into Photoshop/GIMP formats (complete with each photo on its own layer).

Even if you stick with the freeware version, I’d highly recommend this piece of software. I know I’ll be having fun putting together some shaped photo collages in the near future!

If you’ve checked out any of the (many) photos I’ve posted, you might have noticed that I watermark my photos. It’s subtle, but in the bottom right hand corner of every photo it says “www.TechyDad.com”.

Why do I do this? Well, as much as I’d like to assume that people are good, there are a lot of unscrupulous people out there that will grab photos off the Internet for their own use. By watermarking the photo, I’m decreasing its value to these people. (Yes, the watermark could be removed, but it’d take time and effort to do so. The photo thieves are more likely to just head elsewhere to grab some photos.)

In addition to the watermarking, I also rotate some photos (depending on which way they were taken) and resize them for the web. Unfortunately, when I have a lot of photos to process, this can be a time-consuming pain. Initially, my process looked like this:

1. Load one photo in Irfanview
2. Open up Irfanview’s Thumbnail mode
3. Select all images to process
4. Use Irfanview’s lossless-JPEG rotate function to auto-rotate all photos
5. Open up Irfanview’s Batch Conversion mode
6. Select all photos to process and conversion settings (e.g. new height/width)
7. Wait until Batch Conversion is done.
8. Open up Picture Shark.
9. Select All Photos
10. Select Watermark
11. Wait until watermark is applied to all photos
12. Post photos

You can see how this would make photo posting a pain, but each step was necessary. I couldn’t post sideways photos and couldn’t post full-res pictures either. There’s the download time issue as well as the aforementioned picture thieves.

That’s when I remembered about ImageMagick. ImageMagick is a freeware photo manipulation program that is often used on servers to, well, manipulate images. My server, for example, uses it to make thumbnails out of the photos I upload. The only problem is that ImageMagick doesn’t have an graphical interface. It is run by a series of command line statements. This is perfectly fine for a script running on a server, but not as good for a human user.

Since all I wanted to do was run the same commands over and over, and since I know how to program, I wrote a Photo Processor script. It would let me specify the directory that the photos were in, whether I wanted them resized/rotated/watermarked and even allowed me to select which watermark. This way, B could use the same script for TheAngelForever.com. My new photo processing process was:

1. Run Script
2. Copy/Paste name of directory with photos
3. Answer dialogs for resizing/rotating/watermarking photos.
4. Wait until script finishes
5. Post photos

Much easier, right?

When Monkey was born to Tarzan and Jane over at HisBoysCanSwim, I noticed that their photos of Monkey merely had some text at the bottom of them. This would be easily stripped out by a picture thief so I offered my Photo Processor script. And while I was working on it, I figured I’d post a version for everyone else out there.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install a copy of ImageMagick on your PC. In the configuration screen during setup (the one with all of the checkboxes), make sure that you check the box for “Install ImageMagickObject OLE Control for VBScript, Visual Basic, and WSH.” (See image below.)

Once that is done, download my Photo Processor script. When you run the script, first you’ll need to enter the directory of the photos to be processed (e.g. C:\Photos\My Trip To The Beach\). Don’t worry if they’re your originals, the altered versions will be saved in newly created subdirectories. After you enter the directory, simply answer a few Yes/No questions to set whether the photos are rotated and/or resized and sit back and wait for the script to do its job. To add a watermark, put a PNG image in the same directory as the script and name it “Watermark.png.”

If you have any questions about this script, feel free to post them in the comments below.

Security is important in today’s online world.  A big part of that security is what password you use for the various websites you frequent.  It is not uncommon for a person to have dozens of different sites, each with their own username and password.  But how to you manage them all?  Setting all of your passwords to be the same (e.g. "12345") isn’t safe.  (I have the same combination on my luggage!)  After all, if someone guesses *one* of your passwords, *all* of your accounts will be compromised.  Writing them on paper and sticking it to your monitor isn’t very safe either.  Anyone passing by your office/cubicle could see the list and gain access to your accounts.  So what should the security conscious web surfer do?  Why, put them in a safe of course!  No, not a fire-proof safe (though that might be a good hard-copy backup method), but inside an application called (appropriately enough) Password Safe.

Using Password Safe is quite easy.  First, you set up a master password.  Make sure you remember this.  It’s very important.  Next, you add passwords to your list in Password Safe.  You can even group them together to make them easy to find.  When you’re done and you save the list, Password Safe encrypts it.  The only way to decrypt it and to get at the passwords again is to enter in your master password.  It is much easier to remember *one* password than it is to remember *one hundred* passwords.

In addition, Password Safe can help you come up with secure passwords.  In the Add Entry screen is a button labeled "Generate."  Click that button and you get a password like "3mGrsgfXEN" (an actual generated password).  This is much more secure than "fluffy7".  You can even store notes about the website in the (where else) Notes section.

There’s even a Portable version of Password Safe.  Stick this on a USB key along with your encrypted password list and you can view your passwords on any computer, no further software required.  I recently used this on a trip to Long Island to see my parents so I wouldn’t need to remember the passwords to my various accounts.  It worked beautifully and now I carry the USB key along with me every day.  You never know when you’ll need to check on someone online and will need to retrieve that password that you just can’t remember at the moment.

Password Safe has become a must-have application on any PC that I use.  I can’t recall how I kept track of all of my passwords before I discovered it.

I’m going to start a new feature here on Techydad:  Freeware Friday.  Every Friday, I’ll post a short review of a piece of freeware I’ve found that I think is useful to have.  I’ll try to avoid the obvious ones that nearly everyone knows about like OpenOffice.org and FireFox (at least for now) in favor of applications that might be lesser known.

This week, I’d like to highlight KIDO’Z.  KIDO’Z is a web browser aimed towards kids.  Why do kids need a special web browser, you might ask?  Well, young children, just being introduced to computers, might not know that they can go to the address bar and type in (for example) Noggin.com to get to games and activities on Noggin’s website.  Even if they do, they might misspell it as Noginn.com and wind up at a completely different site.  KIDO’Z, in contrast, is extremely easy.  Children merely select Games, Web Sites, or Videos and then select what they want to see.  Except for any Games/Websites that require keyboard input, all controls are handled by the mouse.  Nice, large, easy-to-understand icons are used for controls (with text for kids who know how to read).

The KIDO’Z team is constantly striving to improve the program.  They’ve recently added Parental Controls so parents can better control what their child sees.  You can block sites that KIDO’Z would normally show to the children (useful if, like me, you have a philisophical opposition to all things Barney) and can add your own sites (like a webpage of family photos).

It’s not perfect, mind you.  Due to the limitations of the platform it was designed on (Adobe AIR), it can’t block kids from CONTROL+TABing to another program.  It can’t keep kids from closing KIDO’Z, firing up Internet Explorer, and browsing to a site you’d rather they didn’t go to.  However, it is very good at giving children an easy to use first browser that puts fun and informative content a few clicks away.  I would definitely recommend this for any computer that a child would use.

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