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Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 24 Aug 2018, 20:06
by yogi
Being a Power User/Gamer means the game itself is only half the fun. There are plenty complicated games one can play without a maximum state of the art computer. In my case building and configuring the computer hardware would be part of the overall enjoyment. Plus, it's all personal. I don't know anybody in this world who would appreciate my effort other than me. Realizing that concept has a satisfaction level all of it's own. I'm the ONLY one who could do whatever it is I do.

I'm getting to the point of thinking about my legacy and the transition of my estate. My wife isn't there yet which makes the process slightly more difficult. I'm fairly certain you can simplify your insurance. You are right about the company being better off forgetting all about you and your legacy policies. It involves legal paperwork they probably don't have. All those policies have a cash value which you can cash in to buy a single paid up policy. The insurance company would no doubt appreciate your doing that. That way the beneficiaries will not be obfuscated and there will be that much less paperwork for your heirs to figure out. I have a few life insurance policies currently locked up in the safe I recently purchased. All the heirs and beneficiaries have to do is figure out how to get into the safe. LOL

I think the real property can be transitioned fairly easily too. All you need to do is stipulate in your will (or trust) that it all gets donated or sold on your demise with the proceeds being divided per your instructions. Nobody wants your 'stuff' to be sure. But everybody wants cold hard cash. Truly I don't know you very well, but judging by what I can surmise, the executor of your estate is going to have a full time job for many months after your parting. :mrgreen:

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 25 Aug 2018, 16:07
by Kellemora
When I called an auctioneer to auction off everything in my house, he thought he hit a gold mine.
I had more commercial business machines and manufacturing equipment than Carter's has pills.
Plus thousands of dollars worth of electronics inventory. The sad thing about it is, I could have sent it all back to the distributor for a 20% restocking charge fee and came out much further ahead than what it brought at auction.
I also had numerous antiques which did fetch a little more than he thought, which sorta made up for the things that didn't.
I had over 25 wood California Cases with Steel, not Lead, foundry type for my Hot Foil Stamping machine.
An empty California Case usually brings 50 to 150 dollars. My 25 filled cases, the machine and all attachments, and a few thousand dollars in inventory items was won for a 35 dollar bid. Sad.
But then an antique toy I though would only fetch 25 to 50 dollars ended up with a 1000 dollar bid.
In the end, I made enough money that I could pay off all of my bills and be totally debt free for the first time in my life.
Plus I ended up with 3 grand to buy a trailer to move my wife and her son's stuff from storage back to her home state where the stuff came from to start with.

Somehow, since moving here 15 years ago, I've managed to amass a garage and two storage sheds full of stuff, but nothing worth much to anyone. A few keepsakes I kept from back home, but that's about it.

I burned out on doing the eBay thing years ago. But may have to look back into it again, because the local trade groups have not been profitable.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 25 Aug 2018, 18:57
by yogi
e-Bay started out as an auction house but has evolved into something much more over the years. The best part of using e-Bay is that you know what to expect beforehand. You can look up the selling history of your particular item and get an idea of what you will take in. Only one time out of several hundred did an item bring in more than I expected. My wife was liquidating her inventory of St Johns clothing and got a fair price for it all but one item. A red sweater received a very high number of bids and fetched nearly the retail price. We were both amazed and never could figure out why.

You are the champion when it comes to amassing "stuff" LOL I think the name for that is Pack Rat. Half my basement in the last house was filled with things we brought over from our first house. The other half was the collection of nearly useless items we accumulated in that house. I'd guess we only brought 10% of it all to Missouri. The heartbreaking part was that I personally had to decide what to toss into the gondola and what would survive one more move. There were a lot of items with long forgotten memories attached that had to be relegated to a landfill. Much of it could not even be given away. We had to pay a "junk collector" to come and haul away a lot of it. I nearly called off the whole move as I was sorting through it all. So, now I have one cabinet full of tools to represent what I did for 70 years. Oh, and yes, this computer and it's peripherals. :mrgreen:

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 26 Aug 2018, 17:03
by Kellemora
I kept most of the tools I would use in renovating homes when I moved down here, sold some and bought new after the move. The new stuff was junk so went unused for the most part.
Now that I'm unable to do much of anything anymore, I wanted to collect everything by types of items and see about selling them, hopefully locally.
I did the eBay thing years ago, but it's not the same anymore.
I know folks who are making a killing buying things and reselling them on eBay, but they have eBay stores, and many are just selling items they can have drop-shipped for them. Hard to compete with these folks.
Back when I was doing the eBay thing, there were groups of folks buying back and forth from each other to drive prices of certain items up. This more or less prompted me to sell some of the items I had, thinking they would do well. Especially since they had lower serial numbers and/or from short runs of the same item. They did poorly!
This is what prompted me to watch who was winning the bids on some of these items, and it turned out to be the same group of people in a round-robin hoping to snag an unsuspecting buyer to pay those super high prices. It must have worked because they were there the whole time I was selling on eBay.

On another group I belong to, we have a guy on there who I don't usually read his posts, because he posts every day what he sold on eBay, and where he got it from. He goes around the local stores by him and buys up items they have on clearance, if he can get them for 10 cents on the dollar. Then he adds them to his eBay store. The reason I was watching him in the first place is the bulk of his sales are books, sometimes he sells books in bulk too. I had talked to him once about adding one of my books in the batch lots he sells. He said no, he only sells certain books, but never told me what type and I never went to his eBay store to look. I think the type books he sells have to do with college textbooks, discontinued by one college but still used in others, so he buys out the new book inventory from book sellers around that particular college.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 26 Aug 2018, 23:57
by yogi
I've cleaned out my closet of electronics a few times using e-Bay. I came to the point where I request a minimum bid and will sell at a "buy it now" price if somebody is willing to pay. Doing it any other way is almost a guaranteed low bid or no bid at all. I've not been to e-Bay in a long time, but that is where I picked up my Toshiba laptop. Toshiba got a lot of bad reviews, but this one was new and I took a chance. It's the only one that had a 17" screen. It's still going strong, but that isn't saying much. It works fine for the Linux and the Windows beta testing. Perhaps I've just been lucky, but I never ran into a problem buying electronics off e-Bay. The best part of the deal was the awesome carrying case the seller tossed in free. It has room for tons of gadgets. LOL

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 27 Aug 2018, 16:13
by Kellemora
Sounds like you made a steal on the Toshiba.

Considering I used to do chip level repairs on gaming machine circuit boards, it's a shame I lost everything I learned.
I have four computers here that need something fixed. Two have the video section out, so perhaps a video card could be used to fix those two, and I have two more with the power supplies burned out. This often means it fries the mobo too.
I kept numerous power supplies from computers, but they never matched what I needed to replace. Either under powered or didn't have the right kind of plugs on them, and I know nothing about what to do when I hit that problem. I know about pig-tails and Y-connectors for those that have the same size plugs.

I've brought my old computers to the shop a few times when ordering a new computer built, and most of the time, they can get me a new cabinet with power supply cheaper than replacing the power supply in the cabinet I brought in. They just move the mobo from the old box to the new, along with the DVD and HD, and I'm good to go.
Of course they want to sell me a new mobo and CPU, which I sometimes take them up on the offer.
This is how I ended up getting new computers for 300 to 375 bucks a few years ago.
Now they are 400 to 450 bucks, unless I decide to go with a higher grade for another 50 to 100 bucks.
They've never done me wrong yet. Not like the off the shelf units I bought for the frau from places like WalMart.
The Acer I bought her is so stripped down it's pitiful. It ran slower than molasses in the dead of winter too.

Now that she has a ten year old gaming computer with Win7 she's a happy camper once again, and I now have the cheap Acer boat anchor up here. I'm going to try putting Linux Mint on it to see if it will run faster.

Oh, an afterthought. One of the reasons I usually don't get a new mobo if the old one is OK and runs plenty fast, is because the old Memory Sticks never seem to be the right size or kind for the new mobo's.
This is where they can start running up the cost, along with the cost of the new CPU.
And now, thanks to you, I know to check the Bus Speed before I buy. Shame I didn't know this before I bought the Acer, hi hi. I never did find out what the bus speed on it is supposed to be. Not on the box it came in, and the mobo doesn't match the normal Acer production of that machine, which is why I think it was made stripped down just for Walmart.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 27 Aug 2018, 19:02
by yogi
I worked as an electronics technician in what they called a test lab at Motorola. The purpose of the lab was to assemble, maintain, and calibrate test equipment for the factory production lines. My personal project was microphones, but I worked there long enough to touch on quite a few technologies. Engineers typically would design the test equipment but us technicians were often assigned the task of specking out the components. That is were I learned the importance of researching the electronics for compatibility. We bought computers when we needed them and did not design them. Thus I never built a computer during all the 36 years I worked at Motorola - but I knew how look up each chip for it's specifications. When it came time for me to build my home computer, it was a very familiar task. I did the research and paperwork first. The computer worked the first time I turned it on except for a few ASUS custom drivers that had to be installed to update Windows 7. I could not believe that nothing went wrong given the horror stories I've heard beforehand.

Your strategy of re-purposing and recycling old computer components is excellent. I would look at what you did as buying a new cabinet/PS and not getting a new computer. LOL When I go for new, I go for new. That is why I don't do it very often. It costs a lot to buy new. However, I feel it is worth the premium price because I seldom have compatibility problems. Software is a whole different story.

I used a friendly Chinese owned computer shop for parts and service when I lived up north. I learned long ago never to buy off the shelf at Best Buy. I made an exception once when my wife spotted a "cute" computer made by HP sitting out in the open at WalMart. It was one of their Pavilion models and had flowers painted on the case. It came with matching mouse and carrying case, all of which she fell in love with. So, I got that for her and have had good service from it for many years. She still uses it when the batteries on her tablet run down. When I learned that laptops could be had with 17" monitors I went to my favorite mom and pop shop, but they could not accommodate me with something new. I did my homework and found a few from suspect manufacturers. Toshiba did not have a good reputation at the time but all I could find for criticism was complaints about their keyboards. I figured this was going to be a temporary purchase anyway, so I bought the one on e-Bay. It's a little under powered for Windows 10, but Linux runs fine on it. The damned thing refuses to fail so it looks like my temporary purchase will be lasting a lot longer than anticipated.

Whenever I see a new Linux distro that I like, I install it as a virtual machine on my Windows 7 box. The latest LTS (18.04) of Ubuntu refuses to work well inside the 10GB hard drive I make for it. They say it needs 25GB to work flawlessly. I discovered that it can be installed as a "mini" version where all the bells and whistles are not installed; just the browser and a few necessary utilities. It does work better but the Firefox browser bogs down. I switched to a knock off of Firefox, Waterfox (go figure), which is supposed to be a streamlined version of what Mozilla is pushing. The response is a lot better and that is my default on this computer. However, it too lags in the virtual box. The latest discovery of a new perversion of Ubuntu is something called Bodhi Linux. The UI doesn't resemble Ubuntu by any stretch of the imagination, but I guess that's the underlying engine behind it all. There are some strange sounding apps to go with it, such as the Moksha Desktop and the Midori Browser. It reminds me of a KDE environment, but it's not. I mention all this because it is light weight and very responsive inside my virtual box. It probably would be worth a try in one of your slow computer boxes.

Good luck, and may The Force be with you.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 28 Aug 2018, 17:32
by Kellemora
One of the reasons I run Debian as my main OS is because it doesn't have all the bloat found in Linux Mint or Ubuntu.
However, that being said, I find Linux Mint to be more reliable and in some cases self-healing, hi hi.

My LAN works fine for months on end, then for no reason, the Debian machines cannot connect to the other computers, although it connects to the Internet through the same LAN connections.
In fact, the local LAN is down on Debian right now. It was down for an hour or so on all the computers, and Linux Mint corrected itself without any involvement from me, and works just great.

I can only assume my Router is what now acts as the DNS server. It used to be I had to boot up my wife's XP machine first, then all the rest, to keep the LAN working. Now, if I just reboot the Router, the LAN usually comes up and works right, even without rebooting the computers themselves, except for the Debian machine. I always have to reboot it after the Router was rebooted, or after an electrical outage caused a reboot of everything.

Speaking of Windows 7 here. I placed some files on the NAS in order to copy them from the NAS to Debi's current machine.
Windows 7 would not let me do this. I could not copy and paste from the NAS to a file on her machine. I did figure out I could create a zip file from the NAS to her desktop then move it into the folder and expand the file.
HOWEVER: I can come up here to my office, and on a Linux machine, Open the NAS, Open the Shared Folder on Debi's computer, and copy the file from the NAS to the folder on her Win7 computer, no problems.
On her Win10 computer, where I obtained the files from in the first place, it too would not let me move things from the NAS to her shared folder. But it did let me download from the NAS to the desktop, then from the desktop to her computer.

At least I managed to get everything from her old computers over to the one she's using now, so she's happy.
She doesn't like what it takes to get to her folders on the Win7 machine.
You open File Explorer and it does not show all the folders. She has to go into another folder to find things.
Apparently, File Explorer opens the root directory instead of the user directory? I've not had time to study it yet.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 28 Aug 2018, 21:30
by yogi
DHCP can be set up on any computer running the right software. However, in my situation it makes sense to use the router for the IP address pool. The router is the hub of the network in this house and is extremely reliable. It could be a problem if you have two DHPC servers on the same LAN. You can easily find out what is what by sending an ipconfig command (or the Linux equivilant) to query your computer's network connection. Do this for all the computers on the LAN to be sure they are all on the same page, or same DHCP server in this case. :mrgreen:

I know very little about Samba, but it seems to be frequently criticized when network problems arise. I think Windows uses NetBIOS a lot to be backward compatible, but I never had to tamper with it when I had problems. Sharing has always been a challenge for Windows, but it is doable if you know what has to be configured and how. I guess the same can be said for Samba. There is a "network and sharing" setting in Windows 10 (and other versions of Windows) in the Control Panel app. Set your network for 'private' and avoid using any HomeGroup if possible. Also, use the default WORKGROUP for a domain name on all your network computers. In this state you should be able to access any Linux based NAS Windows Share directly. The only complexity might be a need to log into the NAS before seeing the files there.

I like the look and feel of Linux Mint, but I must confess that I do not use it enough to know how it performs under stress. I boot into it only occasionally to make sure it is still alive and to update. It does appear to be a minimal system as does Bodhi Linux, although I've not used Mint in a virtual machine to see how minimal it really is.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 29 Aug 2018, 17:25
by Kellemora
I do use a domain name on my LAN, more for security reasons, and because at one time, I did have two DNS servers (DHCP?)
I kept my business computers LAN separate from the home computers LAN.
When Debi first got the Win10 computer, that thing called Homegroup became a nightmare for us. You probably remember all the problems it caused us. Now Homegroup is totally ignored. Plus, you have to know the password to even access the LAN now. Actually, more than one password. If you connect to the NAS, you have to know the password to connect first. Then the main row of folders each has it's own password. Had to do this because the NAS is automatically shared, and if you knew the password to get into the NAS, you could get into anyone's folder on the NAS if you were an administrator on your computer.
As far as connecting to other computers, the only thing you can find is the Shared Folders on those computers, which is just how I like it. I do have a couple of shared folders that are password protected, in hopes this will keep something like Ransomware from getting into them and changing the files. They are also set to Read Only, except by me.

As an aside: My master photo folder I would like to make available (before I die) to certain people is over 150gigs huge.
Most of the photo's were scanned at the highest resolution possible to make them editable for cleanup purposes.

At one time I made CD sized folders, converting the images to JPG and reducing their file sizes down to printable as 5x7 images and already small images as 3x5 images. I do not remember how I did this in bulk like I did before.
I used to have a program that would batch convert any file type to a pre-selected file type. Don't remember what that was either anymore. Too many years have passed since I did it the last time.

Doesn't really matter though, as I want my son and my wife's son to have the original entire file system.
This particular file has everyone in their own folder, and shows their spouses name and their birth year.
Inside each persons folder are sub-folders for Individual, Group, Face, and Misc. The Misc. folder also has sub-folders for things like Houses, Pets, Cars, Tombstones, etc. Added only when required to keep things sorted.

My thought was to buy External Hard Drives, since this would work on any computer.
Trouble is, I really can't afford to do that for each person I wanted to have a whole file.
Debi says I should just take my old external hard drives and mark a persons name on each, and place the files on those.

I have tons of big hard drives from the pre-sata days. But to make them external drives requires the guts from existing externals. You can buy these without the case, but then again, money, which I'm really lean on right now.
I thought about Cloud Storage, but besides being expensive, if I die and don't pay, it will all be deleted. So this doesn't seem like the way to go either. I want each person to have a physical copy of these pictures. They are our Ancestors up to present day for several families.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 29 Aug 2018, 19:34
by yogi
When working inside the Windows environment, and sharing folders, it is good practice, and almost a requirement, to use a single domain name for all branches of the network. I don't think Linux cares, but if you want to interact with the Windows network it's a good idea to keep it all under one domain name. WORKGROUP is the default and works pretty well. If you need to have more than one domain in the Windows environment, then you might need a domain controller. It gets pretty hairy managing such a cluster of networks, but there is software to make it easier. The easiest thing for us common folk would be to simply use a single name and not confuse the Windows OS. Or, of course, not use Windows in the first place. Also, one of the ways to share memory space would be to attach said memory to your router, assuming it supports such a thing. In that case anyone connected to the router can get at the memory.

The NAS I sent you has the ability to assign groups to the different shares. Only the members of that group can have access to the share to which they are assigned. Above and beyond groups is the administrator account for the NAS. This is not the same administrator built into your client computers. The NAS administrator(s) can also be broken down into access for only certain shares. The Super-Admin, of course, would be able to get into all of them. I'd guess that you are giving everybody super-user admin access which is why everyone can see everything on your NAS.

150 GB of photos is A LOT of photographs. You must have a very large family. I don't think the problem of passing it on is any more difficult than uploading the files to separate hard drives for each family member you want to bequeath. Look HERE! That's $85 for 4 TB of external USB hard drive. I just did a random search, but I know you can get a 1 TB drive for a more reasonable price. I doubt they come in less than 1 TB these days, but who knows what you could find if you do a search. Load your family history on each drive and give it to anyone with a USB port on their computer. Can't be easier.

There is such a thing as free cloud storage, but I doubt that it comes in the size you need. Aside from paying for said storage while you are alive, you would have to somehow convince your beneficiaries to keep it up when you are gone. That might work, but giving them a hard drive that only needs to be plugged into a USB port to work is way easier all around.

I'm guessing you used something like IrfranView to batch process your photographs. That's a neat little program that I used back in my Windows 98 days. I'm paying an arm and a leg for an image processor now and it cannot do the same things that IrfranView did, i.e., batch processing.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 30 Aug 2018, 19:32
by Kellemora
I had a lot of neat programs back in the Win98 days that handled file conversions perfectly, and could go through all the image folders and look for a certain type and convert it to another type without altering the original.
The good old days eh! Slow, but efficient!

I have over 160,000 individuals in my genealogy database all linked together.
Since it is my database, and now on Ancestry. On Ancestry it will show how a person is connected to me and show the entire path from me to them in a printout. This does not mean we are related by blood, but shows how and why they are linked to me. Some of these are a marriage through a marriage through a cousin to another marriage, etc.
In other words, on a normal genealogy program we are not related but could be a 4th cousin 3 times removed, hi hi.
Or it could be the spouse of a cousins grandfather on his mothers side.
If we could go back as far as Adam, we are all related, hi hi.

I just bought a 4 terrabyte external drive for 99 bucks a few months ago. I wanted to buy two so I could back one up to the other. But the way I'm using it, is to copy the files from all the other external hard drive pairs I had. This would free up each of the paired drives. Unfortunately, four of them are only 100 gig drives, and two are 150 gig drives, all IDE inside the case but still USB. The two 150 gig drives I've used to copy old internal IDE drive stuff to, and have never got around to removing duplicate files.

And speaking of the NAS I got from you, I'm ashamed to say I've never had time to study or make use of it's features, other than to use it as an on-line storage device for easy access between all the computers. It is most handy for moving files I want to compare with other files. But you have to be careful when comparing files. Some have the same name, and just happen to be the same size, but contain different data or images. So when it says it finds a match, you have to stop and open each to see if they really are different. All that takes a lot of time.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 31 Aug 2018, 00:45
by yogi
I suppose there are different theories about our human origins. We are all related, but perhaps not to Adam. I'm leaning in the direction that there may have been a few Adams in different parts of the world. In other words there may be more than one origin. Still, I understand how it would be magnificent to be able to trace your roots back that far. For me, I know all four of my grandparents came from Poland, or what was considered Poland when they were born. That's it for what I know about my ancestors. :mrgreen:

No need to apologize for not learning about all the intimate details of that NAS. I never looked into them further than what I needed immediately. I happen to know about permissions and security because that's basically what I did when I was in the IT group at Motorola. A lot of what applied there is still valid in today's systems. I am certain things are changing now due to the higher risks out in the wild, but that NAS server would have worked just as well as it does today some twenty years ago.

I suggested two solid state drives because you mentioned you would like to hand over copies of your database to individuals. The USB drives would be the simplest method and most likely to work on everybody's computer.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 31 Aug 2018, 17:53
by Kellemora
I did look into those. Found several 128gb solid state external USB3.0 for around 40 bucks each.
I experimented with zipping a few folders and found they did not really get any smaller in file size.
Since I doubt anyone will go to the editing work of restoring some of the old photo's I've not already done.
I'm thinking about converting those huge files down to a more normal size, this would save tons of space.

I just hope I can get everything I want done to pass on to the next generation before I croak.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 31 Aug 2018, 19:51
by yogi
I think you can do it using a program similar to IrfranView. Since you have a few (dozen?) spare computers laying around the office, you can install the software into each one of them and batch process the files. You know, like hackers do with DDoS attacks, only in your case you would be doing something useful. If you can string up, say, ten computers to run nonstop, I'd guess you can get all your picture files converted in less than a year. :mrgreen:

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 01 Sep 2018, 17:10
by Kellemora
Maybe I should dig out my old Win98 computer and see if I can find the program I used with it for file conversions.
Seems it only took like 15 minutes to convert 500 pcx or bmp files to tiff, or tiff to jpg.

All of my photo's both sorted and unsorted, the originals are saved in dated folders as they should be.
Trouble with that system is you cannot find a particular picture very fast.
I also have thousands of scanned photo's, most have been named and organized.

In my case, all of my organized photo's are done so by the persons name and birth year.
In the case of women, their maiden name, aka birth name, is used.

A typical file folder normally reads like this SmithJohnDavid(+SAJones)-1923
Then a corresponding folder is created JonesSusanAgnes(+JDSmith)-1925
If I don't have a photo of Susan, then her folder remains empty. However, I may have a Tombstone to place in there.

Most folders with a persons name have sub-folders inside named; Face, Individual, Group, and Misc.

In my original files I have folders named Pets, Houses, Cars, etc. Which gives the Pets names, Owner, and Dates, besides being placed in the persons Misc. file under Pets. I've not contributed too much to these older folders.

The hard part was handling group pictures where I didn't know everyone's name in the photo.
I used to have a program that made a white box under each photo, and made it part of the photo for a single saved image. Must have died with an older Win98 computer, hi hi. Now I just put the names in the margins.

At one time, I used to use the Coloring Book option to make outlines around people in heavy group pictures. This way I could have the Coloring book image with a number inside each head. I would then Type their names on another blank page, and then put them all together as a single image. I learned to do that because using separate pages means they get mixed up or lost. So, combining all three pages into a single image worked best for me, back when I had the time and programs to do that.

About the only file my family and other relatives would be interested in is the sorted and organized file. This is the big one. The other folder organized by date with no names or anything associated with the pictures would be meaningless to anyone other than myself or the frau.
This is why I began sorting them by who they were, and what was in the picture and keeping it with the person of interest. Like Uncle Bob's house is in Uncle Bob's folder under Houses.
And I'm rambling again!

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 02 Sep 2018, 01:02
by yogi
I like to think I am methodical and organized, but you have me beat by a country mile. I'd guess that is due to you having infinitely more patience than I do. I keep files and important papers organized, but nowhere near to the extend which you have your family documented. I can see how the bulk of your historical research would be meaningless to most people in your family. However, the end result is something they can relate to. It's discouraging to think that few people appreciate what you have done, but, my friend, all that work and the resultant tree is your legacy.

My approach to a project like yours would be digital and in the form of a database. All those photos could populate relevant tables, and just about anything you would want to know about the ancestry could be extracted with a simple SQL query. Even the photos themselves. The beauty of the database is that you could input information without having the photos in hand. You would simply match the data with the photos and output it all on demand. It would be similar to a Google search result, but not nearly as fast nor comprised of as many records. :mrgreen:

I learn a lot from your ramblings by the way. Feel free to continue.

Re: Managed Desktop

Posted: 02 Sep 2018, 17:17
by Kellemora
I've tried to set up the things that would be of interest to other family members in such a way they could access them with little to no knowledge about computers. Basically Plug n Pray, hi hi.

I wish all of my stuff was as organized as the few things I felt important enough to keep together in an easy to use format.
It's also the reason my external drives are all formatted NTFS so they can plug into any Windows computer and be accessible to the user.

I used to publish like a family telephone and address directory, but as the aunts and uncles died off, most of the kids were not interested in it anymore. There were a couple, but that was about it.

While they were here, I asked my grandson if he was familiar with the towns his dad was raised in.
Sadly, he didn't even know what town my son was born in or what high school he went to.
Maybe when hes a little older, perhaps in his 20s he might be more interested.
In the meantime, I just keep putting things down about the family in small files about each one.