Category: Tech

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.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App

Icon for Don't Let the Pigeon Run This AppAnother favourite first-a-book-now-an-app with the small people in this house is Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App! The pigeon is a mischievous little guy who wants to do things a pigeon ought not to and will do his best to cajole, blackmail and bribe the reader into letting him do what he likes. I first heard the book “Don’t Let the Pigeon Ride the Bus” recommended on an American parenting podcast. I got a copy and the boys loved it, so when I discovered there was an app, I was more than happy to give it a go.

The app allows children to: create a story of their own (by filling in specific gaps in the standard story), save favourite stories to “read” again later, and learn to draw the pigeon.

App Home PageDesigned with multiple ages in mind, there are 3 ways to create a story:

  • The Egg way is to shake the heck out of the pigeon (by shaking the iThing) when prompted, which results in random selections at key points in the story.
  • The Chick way is to begin with a quiz where you pick from a list of options for each of the items to be filled in (you choose at the start, without context, and the options vary each time you run the app).
  • The Big Pigeon way is to answer questions into the iThing’s mic (“name your favourite food”, “what’s your favourite game?”), so the possibilities are endless.

You can save your favourite stories generated the Big Pigeon way to read/listen back to over and over.

Boys being boys, my two get a greater kick from saying silly (sometimes rude) things that make no sense and hearing their voices repeat these things back in the middle of the story, than trying to create something that’s genuinely amusing from a narrative point of view. But, ultimately, if that keeps them amused for any length of time, then I think the app is doing its job.

The part the boys spend least time on, but that entertains me a bit, is the “Draw the Pigeon” lesson, where you’re given shapes to trace around at each stage, and your final result is presented to you. There’s no policing of how close you are to the guide lines, so you can augment your pigeon as you like at any stage to amuse yourself. Again, if you like the results of your efforts, you can save the picture to admire again at your leisure.

Overall, because it’s a bit different every time, but the expectation that it’ll be fun is established early, and it’s as easily used and enjoyed by a not-terribly-verbal 2 year old as an overly-verbal 5 year old, this app is a winner for us.

I See Dead Websites

I’m still on my genealogy buzz this week, and may have finally discovered a birth cert for an elusive ancestor, which makes me very happy. However, when I went poking around my bookmarks from a couple of years’ back for other sites that would help me fill in some gaps, I discovered that one of my favourites (that harboured lovingly transcribed lists of births, marriages and burials from my hometown) was no more – disaster! U

But then I reminded myself that there were a couple of ways that the good ol’ internet would allow me to see the ghosts of dead websites, so the hunt was back on.

First off, there’s looking at cached pages in search results on Google. (Other search engines may do this also, but since I usually default to Google, that’s what I’m going to describe.)

Google Search Results with Cached OptionIn this case, enter search terms for your web page as usual, and when you find a result for the dead page you’re after: 1 – click the little chevrons to the right of the result to preview the page (in the case illustrated, the preview shows a “Temporarily Unavailable” message), then, 2 – click the link labelled Cached just above the preview to see what was there the last time Google looked.

Unfortunately, if the cached page you get has links to other pages on the same website, they will be proper links to the live site, and if the site is down, they will fail too, so you’ll either have to somehow get each page to show up in Google’s search results, or move on to my next web-timetravel resource: the Wayback Machine on archive.org!

Wayback Machine Search FieldEnter the URL for the site/page you’re after in the search field, then click Take Me Back.

Search Results for the Wayback MachineThe search results show a timeline of when snapshots were taken of the page/site, and a calendar of specific dates. Navigate to the one you want, click and away you go. All internal links on the pages will work as though you were visiting that website on your chosen date.

Thanks to this wondrous website, I can once again access the precious data that I hope will let me finally figure out who some of my ancestors are.