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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Read the current CompuSchmooze column here.


Any commercial use of these articles or podcasts requires purchase of use rights from the copyright owner. For information on reprint rights to these articles, please send me an email message.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #3 Available - ShasPod, an Ipod for students of the Talmud

CompuSchmooze Podcast #3, 4-13-2005, Interview with Yehuda Schmidman, creator of the ShasPod, an Apple Ipod delivered fully loaded with the Daf Yomi Talmud study lectures (shiurim) recorded by Rabbi Dovid Grossman of Los Angeles. Podcast includes a short sample of Rabbi Grossman's lecture.


Tuesday, April 12, 2005

 

CompuSchmooze March 2005 (Column 2): GenSmarts Organizes Genealogy Research Tasks

Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Those of us who have been bitten by the genealogy bug are often discouraged from doing detailed research on our ancestors because we’re not sure how to create a research strategy that will help us figure out what documents to look for and where they might be located. GenSmarts, a software add-on program that works in collaboration with your existing genealogy software, could be a great help in moving your research forward in an organized way.

GenSmarts is the brainchild of Aaron Underwood of Long Grove, Illinois. When he was younger, Aaron assisted his father’s genealogy research by manually creating “to-do” lists organized by location and document type, for his dad to use when his business trips took him near repositories where he needed to look up family information.

Later on, Underwood realized that he could leverage his software development skills to create a program that would evaluate genealogy records and prepare the to-do list automatically.

“It goes through your [genealogy] file, and builds a profile of each person, where they existed, where they lived, over time,” said Underwood, “and compares that to a set of known records to produce a set of predictions or research suggestions,” regarding documents that should have existed for that individual.

Then GenSmarts prioritizes the records based on data that’s missing from your database. It will give higher priority, for example, to a research task related to a missing marriage date, rather than trying to find documentation for a date of death that’s already in the database, Underwood said.

GenSmarts integrates seamlessly with popular genealogy software like the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software available free from the LDS Church; Family Tree Maker; Legacy Family Tree; RootsMagic; The Master Genealogist and several other programs.

GenSmarts opens as a dialogue box with tabs for several functions. The tab marked “My Genealogy File” displays an alphabetical list of every individual in the database you are analyzing. When you click on an individual’s name, GenSmarts displays “People Facts” about the person from the database, and it makes an educated guess called a GenSmarts Estimate (GSEST) based on other facts known about the individual.

For example, in my family tree, GenSmarts estimated a marriage for one family member as having taken place in 1891 because he had a child born in 1893 and one of his children got married in 1915. You can tag individuals as direct ancestors to give them greater priority in GenSmarts analysis. You can also generate an email message containing the “People Facts” by clicking an Email button on this tab.

The second tab, “To-Do List,” gives specific recommendations for places to search for information.You can sort the list by research priority, surname, date, or geography, and filter it to show specific subsets of records like direct ancestors, records available online, or tasks related to missing data in your collection.

You can configure GenSmarts to recognize your subscriptions to online genealogy services like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. If a particular record is available online, simply click a button labeled “Available Online” and GenSmarts initiates the search sequence to find that record within the online service.

The Research Locations Tab lists various research websites and document repositories. GenSmarts shows all your records that could be updated with information from that repository. This can help you make the most of your time if you are planning to visit a library or archive.
The Data Cleanup tab identifies and corrects records with missing or inaccurate place names, and the Query tab provides advanced search capabilities based on names, dates, and family relationships.

GenSmarts offers a trial version for download on its website. The trial program will analyze a limited number of records and offer some samples of its research suggestions. The program sells for $24.95, and this is a small price to pay for the program’s ability to make your genealogy research more efficient.

To hear more about GenSmarts, you can listen to our first podcast, an interview with Aaron Underwood.

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CompuSchmooze March 2005 #1: Podcasting Makes Everyone A DJ

CompuSchmooze March 2005 #1: Podcasting Makes Everyone A DJ
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2005 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.
WORD COUNT: 582

When I was a kid, I had a multiband radio in my room with a cassette recorder hooked up to it. If I heard a song that I liked, I rushed to turn on the cassette recorder to capture the tune. Then, when I filled up a cassette, I transferred the music to reel-to-reel tape, and the reels became the soundtrack of my youth, my very own personal radio station.
Once Apple’s Ipod became the standard device for carrying around personalized audio programs, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that you could program Ipods and other digital music players with all kinds of audio programs besides music.

According to the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, podcasting is “much like an audio magazine subscription: a subscriber receives regular audio programs delivered via the internet, and she or he can listen to them at her or his leisure.”

Adam Curry, one of the earliest of the MTV vee-jays, is credited with bringing the idea of podcasting to reality with a software program called Ipodder that enabled people to download MP3 audio files onto Apple’s Ipod. The fact is that anyone who owns a PC equipped with sound editing software can create audio programs by recording and editing interviews together. But Curry’s groundbreaking software also figured out how to use the new Internet technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a way of delivering news and other information automatically to subscribers through special RSS Newsreaders. By attaching audio files to RSS news stories, Curry and his devotees were able to create a broad audience for these programs.

Today, there are literally thousands of podcasts available on the Web, most of them for free, and you can actually hear some interesting programs at your leisure. Any PC capable of playing sound files can play podcasts, and if the programs are recorded in the standard Windows Media Audio (WMA), MP3, or Apple’s AAC file format, you can download them to a wide range of portable devices to listen while you are mobile.

To find podcasts, check out some of the podcast directory sites. Podcast.net is a sort of Yahoo! for podcasting, with programs categorized by topics. Podcast.net lists 347 programs in the Entertainment category. In the Religion category, while there were 20 Christian podcasts, as of February 21, there were no Jewish podcasts listed.

For Jewish podcasts, you have to look a little harder, and there are very few of any quality right now. You might look at UnionAvenue.net, a site that offers 10 chapters of audio lessons on Maimonides. However, the recordings appear to have been created with a computer program designed to read text in a synthesized voice for the visually impaired, and the voice is difficult to understand.

Podcast Alley offers The Marty Roberts Show on Israel News Radio, with titles like “Psalms: What’s in it for us today?”, Roberts, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, was born in New York and lived in Paramus before making aliyah. His show is updated daily.

Another important resource site, especially for Ipod owners, is http://www.Ipodder.org, maintained by Adam Curry and others, which provides extensive resources about the history of podcasting and a catalog of current podcast programs. And take a look at “The freshest podcasts in the known universe” , which automatically lists all new podcasts as soon as they are broadcast to the web.


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