Just note it!

Notoriously yours

Tired of those scraps of paper around the house? Collect all your notes together so that they are easy to find and search.Your tablet or phone usually has a note or memo app installed. On iPads and iPhones it is just called Notes. On Samsung devices SNote is installed and on other Android devices you may have Google Keep or one of a dozen other note-taking apps.

My favourite note-taking app is Evernote and I use this on my phone, my laptop and my ipad. At a glance I can see and search for any notes I've made no matter which device I am using. By adding titles and tags to my notes that makes it even easier to locate my information. All good note apps have search built in so that any word within a note can be found.

Here's some ideas for things you may like to keep notes for, so that you always have them handy.

Household

• Shopping lists - with favourite brand names
• Names, models and serial numbers of electrical appliances
• Car/cat/dog or any other registration number
• Size of room, space or cupboard
• Recipes or lists of ingredients

Personal

• Clothing and shoe sizes and brands for self and others
• Optometrist
• Dental
• Medical
• Names of any prescription drugs you take

Out and about

• Meeting notes
• Titles of books to read
• Music to acquire
• Films to see
• Places to go
• Price comparisons of intended purchases
• Travel notes

Some notes will be permanent and others ephemeral. Notes can be edited, altered, deleted to suit. Experiment with the note-taking app on your device to find the best way to use it to suit your needs.

Trove's tools

Lists in Trove

In preparation for a session about Trove for Family History Month, #NFHM2014 I've been reviewing my activities, lists and more on Trove. Currently I have 10 lists related to different South Australian families who are of interest to me in the realm of family history. Some of these lists are public and some private. Lists are a great way of keeping track of the articles found. They can be sorted into date order providing a quick timeline overview of family events.

You can learn about creating and using lists via the very useful Help Centre on Trove.

1865 'MORTUARY RETURNS.',
South Australian Register
 (Adelaide, SA : 1839 - 1900), 26 May, p. 8,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article39122782

Another list Mortuary Returns South Australia covers South Australian deaths from 1850 that came to the notice of the Police Department. They were Persons who died, or were found dead, in any Public Place in the Province of South Australia from 1850 onwards. This also covers deaths in the Adelaide Hospital, Lunatic and Destitute Asylum, and other Public Institutions and hospitals. Usually these persons had no known relatives within South Australia.
I add to this list as I correct the text in these notices in Trove. These returns often detail occupation as well as date and circumstances of deaths so could be very useful for genealogists and family historians.

Trove bots

I've also been having even more fun than usual with some of Trove's less well known treasures built by Tim Sherratt. I've been following  @TroveBot and @TroveNewsBot on Twitter and often text correct the articles that are tweeted by the news bot. For some time I've wondered what it would find for me. If you tweet @TroveNewsBot with a keyword, it will respond with its most relevant find. The Galvin vs Galvin court case does not refer to my husband's ancestors as far as I can determine, but given the double occurrence of my keyword, this was news bot's return tweet five minutes after my enquiry - see below.

The other bot @TroveBot is listed as: Tweeting the riches of Trove Australia. These bots are both powered by the Trove API. Thank you Tim and the Trove team.

Have fun during Family History month exploring all that Trove has to offer.

YouTube for beginners

YouTube

Whether your interest is gardening, motor racing, family history, cooking or watching TV shows; YouTube has a wealth of material for everyone once you know how to use it effectively and best of all it is free.
You might like to learn how to fix something around the house, how to use a computer program, how to upholster a chair or anything else you can think of; it is likely there will be a video on YouTube to help you.

Here's some quick statistics to give you some idea of how big the video collections are:

• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth
• 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html)

The YouTube Help Centre has all the written instructions to help you get started. There are also some short video tutorials on the YouTube Help channel. This one shows you how to sign in and navigate to YouTube http://youtu.be/bP7vggHJLVM

Once you have found some videos you like, you may want to share them with friends. YouTube makes it easy to share, simply click on the share button below the video you are viewing at the time. You'll have a choice whether to share it via email, on Twitter or Facebook or you can simply copy the link and save it to your favourites or bookmarks.

Channels

Channels are collections of videos that are usually about the same topic. You can find  Classical music, Gardening, Travel, Windows and Apple channels to mention just a few. You'll find a channel on just about any other topic you can imagine.
You need a Google account to subscribe to your favourite channels, this way you will see when new videos are added. If you have a gmail account you already have a Google account.Simply use that same address and password to log in to YouTube. Now you can keep track of all those favourites.
Once you start making videos on that phone or tablet, you can upload them to your own channel to share with friends and family.

Here's my introduction to YouTube made with the Adobe Voice app on my iPad. Have fun exploring YouTube!