Author: smurphy

Writer, mother, gardener, geek...

Recycling Toner Cartridges

We’re currently running 2 Samsung laser printers in our home office: one is just a printer, the other is an all-in-one. They are fabulous – I love them to bits. Quiet, efficient, fast, reliable. Everything any inkjet I’ve ever owned wasn’t.

To top it all, when I had to replace toner recently, I spotted a notice on the box that Samsung now run a recycling program for toner cartridges: once you’ve installed your new toner, you pack the old one back into the box the new one came in, then go to http://www.samsung.com/printer/recycle/ to register your and your printer’s details, and print out a postage-paid return label to send it home. Brilliant!

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Hearst Magazines Summer Sale for iThings

I love Newsstand on iThings, mainly on the iPad, though content is surprisingly accessible on the iPhone too. I love that I can decide over breakfast that I’d like to read a magazine, then download one without leaving the house; I love that I can access some obscure titles without placing a special order with my newsagent; I love that the magazines cost less than they do in the newsagent’s (there’s a shocking markup on magazines here in Ireland); I love that I don’t wind up with stacks of paper creating clutter and needing to be recycled, and that even if I’ve deleted an issue I can download it again for free any time; I love that I can bring a stack of magazines with me in my pocket when I leave the house; I love that I can zoom in on content if it’s not clear enough at standard size. There’s a lot to love.

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Requesting Read Receipts from Particular Mail Recipients Automatically

I send a lot of mail. Some of it is social, keeping in touch, fluff… No big deal if it gets eaten by a spam filter, or the recipient doesn’t read it till their afternoon coffee break, or whatever. But a good bit of it is also important work-related stuff, and if the recipient doesn’t get/read it, processes break down, schedules are thrown out, and it’s just not good.

Outlook allows you to request delivery and read receipts on your messages. You can do this for all messages (File | Options | Mail and scroll to the Tracking section), or you can do it on a case-by-case basis (create your message, and select required receipts on the Options ribbon). The first doesn’t suit, because I don’t need read receipts on all of my mail, and the second doesn’t suit, because I usually click Send too quickly to remember to manually turn on receipt requests.

So, today, a situation arose that prompted me to investigate whether or not I could automatically request delivery/read receipts on all messages to a particular person – and do you know something? You can! My email life is officially transformed!

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Researching your Irish Family Tree – Part 3

Another quick, timely post, on Irish genealogical resources.

Recently, the good people at FamilySearch.org, in conjunction with the other good people at findmypast.ie, have made the Irish Prison Registers, 1790-1924 available online.

The FamilySearch site, which has had a mention here before, is a free resource. Under this category, they provide a summary of any matching prison record on their website – and you can visit one of their centres to see an image of the original record.

A sample record for some poor sod who went to prison for stealing apples in 1854 is shown below (name obscured to protect the guilty) – what a thing to go to prison for!

Sample Prison Record from FamilySearch.org

Details recorded include the individual’s name, aliases and age, and the offence, event date and place.

Interestingly, when I searched for the same individual on findmypast.ie, a paid resource, it didn’t show up any matches under prison registers, but it did return a bundle of other records involving possibly the same individual as both a defendant and witness in court records.

Anyway – I’m off now to have a bit of fun finding out whether any of my ancestors got up to any interesting naughtiness. If you find anything exciting in your own family history, do share in the comments! 🙂

Researching your Irish Family Tree – Part 2

I gave a mention to a number of useful free resources for people researching their Irish family trees in an earlier post.

This morning, I’d like to give a quick mention to a paid resource I’ve found useful: RootsIreland.ie. They have a special offer on for the month of July, 2012, which is worth taking advantage of – more below.

RootsIreland.ie has over 19 million Irish records in the following categories:

Records on this site span the period 1700-1920, and include births, deaths and marriages from parish records. Since Irish civil registration only goes back to 1864 (or 1845 for non-Catholic marriages), once you’ve got a few names back that far, this will help you get back a bit further. Not all areas are covered, but most of the country is. (See this map on their website for an indication of coverage.) Do check whether you can actually expect to find anything for the county/ies you’re interested in before spending any money.

I haven’t really looked at the gravestone inscriptions or passenger lists so far, so can’t comment on their usefulness. The other two record types (census records and Griffith’s valuation records) are available for free elsewhere, as noted above, so I’d recommend concentrating on early births, deaths and marriages on this site.

When you register with RootsIreland, you buy credits, and credits can be exchanged to view pages of search results, or individual records. Usually, a page of results (10 results per page) costs one credit, but for the month of July, you get one free page of search results for each credit you’ve purchased. In addition, all new users get 10 pages of search results for free when they register. The cost of viewing an individual record varies depending on the record type, but for births, deaths and marriages, it’s 25 credits.

Pricing details from their website:

Purchase Amount Amount of Credit Cost per Credit
€5.00 35 credits 0.14
€10.00 73 credits 0.13
€18.00 150 credits 0.12
€32.00 320 credits 0.10
€60.00 750 credits 0.08

 

So in July, if you buy 35 credits for €5, you get to view 35 pages of search results for free (plus an extra 10 if it’s your first time registering with the site), and only use your purchased credits to view individual records if you find results that look like they’re what you’re after.

This page on their site illustrates the type of information you can expect to see for each record type, though the amount of data recorded does vary from record to record.

I found this site invaluable in moving back a generation or two with my family tree – I hope you find it useful too.