What I Do

Thomas at Geneabloggers has suggested that we post some info about the power under the hood, the technology that we use to support our genealogy activities. So, just this once, I'll play along with the rest of the meme-rs. I can't help it, it's the tech geek in me coming out, although I'll cut it short as I'm under orders to locate some dinner....

* Hardware: The desktop computer's pretty elderly now but it runs an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core processor at 3.02GHz, 4Gb RAM, with Vista Ultimate 64-bit. The baby computer is an Acer Aspire One netbook.

* External storage: Seagate 500Gb external desktop drive for backups (lives offsite, under my desk at work).

* Online storage: don't use. Those with NZ broadband costs/speeds/datacaps will understand why.

* Backup: GFI Backup 2009 Home Edition (freeware!)

* Virus protection: AVG (freeware!)

* Mobile media: iPod Nano (blue - if I'd bought it myself it would have been a (Product) Red - you did need to know the colour, right?) on which I can listen to the various genealogy podcasts

* eBook Reader: Kobo (I'll be blogging regularly about my genealogy/history finds for this)

* Browser: Firefox. There is no other.

* Blog: Blogger.

* RSS: I read blog feeds using the Blogger Dashboard, and other RSS feeds direct in Firefox

* FTP: FireFTP (extension for Firefox) gets my website updates where they need to be

* Accounting: you don't really want to go there with an accountant, do you?

* PDF generator: doPDF

* Genealogy database: PAF - yes, I know. The only full genealogy program I've seen that I liked is Family Historian, but it just doesn't work at all on a netbook screen so I haven't been able to justify the price (refer: Accounting).

* Genealogy tools: key tools off the top of my head are Transcript, Genopro, and Parloc