It wasn't all that long ago that engineers, astronauts, mathematicians, and students proudly carried the original pocket calculator. I had one and thought I was proficient at it. Sadly, I misplaced it years ago.

The slide rule was a simple device with one sliding part that could do complex mathematical calculations in moments. Multiplication, division, roots, logarithms, and even trigonometry could be performed with ease. But as technology marched forward with sophisticated computers and graphing pocket calculators, the lowly slide rule was forgotten.

Much of the engineering of the world we live in was designed with the use of slide rules, and yet they are almost forgotten today. Do you have a teen-aged child or grandchild? If so, ask him or her what a slide rule is. I suspect he or she won't know.

Wikipedia states that William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century, based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. The online encyclopedia then goes on at length to describe the history, use of, and eventual obsolescence of the slide rule. You can read the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule.

Want to amaze your grandchildren? Buy a slide rule to show them. You can also keep it for nostalgia reasons. Slide rules can still be purchased from a number of vendors for about $20 or so if you start at https://bit.ly/3AHPZRb.

No batteries required.

Looking for a reliable online service where you can back up, store, and share your photos? Amazon Photos is one option worth considering, especially if you’re an Amazon Prime (Opens in a new window) subscriber, or you're looking for a good Google Photos alternative.

With Amazon Photos, you can back up and share your photos in the cloud, view photos by people and places, create albums, and play slideshows. Access it on the web, through a desktop app, or from the mobile app. Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage for free.

Amazon Photos makes the most sense for Prime members, but non-subscribers can tap into the service as well, with 5 gigabytes of free photo storage. Storage plans (Opens in a new window) then start at $1.99 per month for 100 gigabytes ($19.99 per year), move to $6.99 per month for 1 terabyte ($59.99 annually), and continue on up from there. You can pay for storage as you go and cancel your plan at any time.

You can read more in an article written by by Lance Whitney and published in the PCMAG web site at https://bit.ly/3O4mjAL

As a longtime public servant in Thurston County, Heather Hirotaka is used to preserving history, not making it. But that’s what Hirotaka did earlier this month, when Secretary of State Steve Hobbs appointed her as the next Washington state archivist, the first woman to ever hold the position.

In that role, Hirotaka will oversee the Washington State Archives, which collects and preserves the state’s historical records and makes them available to the public. The archives have branches in Bellevue, Bellingham, Ellensburg, Olympia and Cheney, which is the first state archives branch in the country dedicated to the preservation of electronic records.

Hirotaka said she is honored to be the first woman in the role, and that it’s incredible to think that it’s taken this long to have a female state archivist.

“I think that as a female, sometimes there are opportunities to see things a little bit differently, and to see things from maybe a different perspective,” Hirotaka said.

You can read more in an article written by Nick Gibson and published in The Spokesman-Review web site at: https://bit.ly/3P04TGA.

The following announcement was written by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG):

Organizers of the 27th annual Glasgow Lands Scottish Festival coming to Look Memorial Park in Northampton on Saturday, July 16, are hoping for a bonnie day.

But the event — and the fun — will take place rain or shine.

The Scottish festival will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with music continuing in the Celtic Pub until 9:30 p.m.

New this year will be whiskey tasting.

As the second largest Scottish Festival in New England and the only one in Massachusetts, the event offers a wealth of world-class Celtic music, piping and drumming competitions, Highland and Irish demonstrations, Scottish heavy athletics, Scottish gifts and foods, more than 30 Scottish clans and genealogy.

Featured on the Main Stage will be Albannach, Enter the Haggis, Sarah the Fiddler and Charlie Zahm.

The family-friendly event includes children’s games and a water spray park.

You can read more in an article by Cori Urban published in the MassLive web site at: https://bit.ly/3O00S3M.

As you may recall, NBC cancelled Who Do You Think You Are? in 2012, after three seasons on the air. The show was picked up by TLC and aired on the cable channel for seven seasons. It’s now back on the peacock network but, for how long? Will Who Do You Think You Are? be cancelled or renewed for season 12? Stay tuned.

A documentary series from executive producers Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, the Who Do You Think You Are? TV show returns to the network after 10 years. Each week, a different celebrity guest goes on a poignant search to trace their family tree with the help of genealogists, historians, and experts. Together, they unlock past mysteries and unbelievable real-life stories across the world and through time. Cutting-edge research tools and billions of digitized records provide remarkable insights into the star’s background and illustrate the cultural mosaic that connects us all together. This season features Allison Janney, Zachary Levi, Nick Offerman, Billy Porter, Zachary Quinto, and Bradley Whitford.

The tools and technology used to map our world are improving all the time, and we take it for granted that we can see any part of the globe in great detail through our phone or laptop screen.

You may be used to checking out addresses and locations via Google Street View, but did you know that you can use it to go back in time? Obviously you’re limited by the dates that Google actually has Street View imagery for, but this now goes back decades in some areas. What’s more, you can now access historical photos on both the web and Google Maps mobile apps.

To find them on Google Maps on the web, drag the peg man from the bottom right corner of the map interface to any location on the map (the roads that have Street View pictures will be highlighted in blue as you drag). When you drop the peg man, you’ll be shown the latest street-level imagery for that location.

You can read more at https://bit.ly/3c7MHMQ.

The following announcement was written by the American Society of Genealogists (ASG):

The fourth and final $2500 grant for 2022 has been awarded to Holly MacCammon of Philmont, New York, for her project to index New York surrogate court guardianship records 1802 to 1866 abstracted and serialized in The Columbia newspaper between 1985 and 1992 as a first step to establishing intellectual and physical arrangement of disorganized records haphazardly arranged in several microfilm collections – 1890-1899 digitized and indexed on Ancestry.com, 1881-1889, not digitized, 1802-1880 digitized by not indexed on FamilySearch.org.

Ms. MacCammon is Sole Proprietor of HollyGenealogy, LLC, specializing in New England and New York State research. Previously she has worked as Senior Project Manager for World Monuments Fund, New York, NY, and as a New York City Regional Archivist, Documentary Heritage Program, for the New York State Archives and Records Administration, Albany, NY. She has a Professional Learning Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University.

The Society will make its decision on grant opportunities for 2023 at the annual meeting in October, with announcements to be distributed shortly thereafter. If you may be interested in an ASG Continuing Genealogical Research Project grant for 2023, e-mail acwcrane@aol.com.

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman. 

Genealogists and millions of others have saved hundreds of millions of digital photographs on their hard drives as well as on CD-ROM disks. Perhaps the most popular file format for digital photographs is JPG (or JPEG), a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10 to 1 compression with little perceivable loss in image quality.

JPEG is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices, such as scanners. It is also the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web.

NOTE #1: The abbreviation "JPEG" stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the name of the committee that created the standard. The group was organized in 1986 and issued a standard in 1992, which was approved in 1994 as ISO 10918-1. The JPEG standard specifies both the codec, which defines how an image is compressed into a stream of bytes and decompressed back into an image, and the file format used to contain that stream.

NOTE #2: Several compression methods have been developed for graphics images, including JPEG, GIF, and PNG. However, JPG remains the most popular for storage of photographs. I will focus only on JPG. Most of the statements in this article apply equally to all the other compressed formats.

Note #3: Lossless JPEG was developed in 1993, using a completely different technique from the lossy JPEG standard. Even though both are called JPEG (or JPG), the two are completely different standards. Lossless JPEG has some popularity in medical imaging and is used in DNG and some high-end digital cameras to compress raw images, but otherwise has never been widely adopted. You will rarely encounter lossless JPG images on the World Wide Web or in consumer-grade digital cameras or scanners. You can read more about lossless JPEG at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG. For the remainder of this article, I will focus on normal JPEG compression.

JPG has become very popular in the past years and for very good reasons. Storing images in JPG format consumes much less disk space than many other file formats. That was very important some years ago. However, as disk prices have plunged, the requirements for squeezing as much out of each kilobyte as possible have decreased.

As good as JPG is, we do need to keep in mind that it also has significant drawbacks.

The remainder of this article is reserved for Plus Edition subscribers only. If you have a Plus Edition subscription, you may read the full article at: https://eogn.com/(*)-Plus-Edition-News-Articles/12842733.

If you are not yet a Plus Edition subscriber, you can learn more about such subscriptions and even upgrade to a Plus Edition subscription immediately at https://eogn.com/page-18077.

If you have information you want to pass on after your death, a dead man's switch could be what you need.

The concept behind a dead man's switch is fairly simple. It's a trigger or a switch designed to activate when its human creator becomes incapacitated, usually designed to be triggered in the event of it's creator's death. While originally used for switches in machines, the term has become more popular in computer software.

A dead man's switch serves as a failsafe, ensuring the release of information in case the person dies. One common use might be an email message sent to one's relatives after the creator's death stating, "Here's where to find the insurance papers, my last will-and-testament, my list of passwords for all the online services I gave been using, here's where to access my crypto currencies, and other documents you may need."

Originally, dead man's switches were primarily used on machines, including railroad locomotives, outboard motors, and even snowmobiles. If the user became incapacitated, they would simply bring the machine into a safe state by reducing the throttle or applying the brakes. However, today most dead man's switches apparently are created for computer use.

One of the most notorious deaths in the past few years was that of John McAfee, the man behind McAfee antivirus software. During his lifetime, John made a lot of atrocious claims. He claimed to have a dead man's switch, stating that he had files on corruption in several governments. He stated that he would release more than 31 terabytes of incriminating information if he were arrested. He even stated that the information would be released the moment he disappeared.

The result? After John McAfee died, only one image was posted on his Instagram channel. Lots of people have since searched for the "31 terabytes of incriminating information" but apparently no one has yet found it.

Generally, a dead man's switch can be set up and used by anyone with a little technical knowledge.

The software requires you to encrypt data and create a set of triggers that automatically activate if there's no timely human intervention. For instance, if you fail to log into your email account or some other piece of software for a specific number of days, it may trigger a series of events. For instance, it might send the email I mentioned earlier about "Here's where to find the insurance papers" and similar information.

You can create your own dead man's switch if you have just a little technical expertise. Otherwise, there are now ready-made tools that you can use, such as Dead Man's Switch at https://www.deadmansswitch.net/.

Although basic, Google's Inactive Account Manager (at https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en) is easy to set up. It works as a dead man's switch too although it does not have all the capabilities of the Dead Man's Switch web site or of most home made "switches."

The Dead Man's Switch web site at https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ lets you write a series of emails and decide who to send them to. The emails are encrypted and stored on the company's servers. After every few days, you'll receive an email asking you to confirm if you're fine.

As long as you keep clicking on the link, it won't trigger. These notifications are sent via email, Telegram, or through your browser. You can easily define the interval and set the time for activation.

If you fail to respond to the notification, the service will automatically send the emails to your recipients. At the moment, the FREE service lets you create two emails for two different recipients. They also have a paid option that lets you create more emails for different recipients.

How much technical expertise must you have to create a dead-man's switch? If you use the web site at https://www.deadmansswitch.net/, the answer is "almost none." You don't need to have John McAfee's technical skills. If you know how to answer questions, you can use the online web site (FREE for up to two different email recipients, fees charged for more email messages).

Now, go create your own "dead man's switches" and here's hoping they don't get triggered for many more years.