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The Management.

In any case, even with her unknown identity, it is one of my favorite family photos.

Before I link to those resources, I’ll just add a couple of points below. (I know there are a few negative ones here, but don’t let them scare you off.)

1. First, Being a fan of Evernote, I tried using their Penultimate app which is billed as a “handwriting app.” While it has some very nice features and is free, the lack of any ability to type is a deal breaker for me when it comes to note-taking.

I have a fairly neat handwriting in real life, but on a tablet there is a point when handwriting sloppiness kicks in and typing wins. Notability’s ability to include typewritten text means win.

2. In the Notability app, I find selecting objects is sometimes hard to do and takes me many finger mashes. Also, even though I have the long slender fingers of an artistic 19th century consumptive, for the life of me I cannot get the Page Up/Down to work most of the time – especially since my iPad is usually in a Tactical iPad Cover.

3. Following on that – for any note taking app I would strongly recommend getting a tablet stylus to use for screen drawing. I find using an index finger to draw on an iPad both tiring and cumbersome in general. When it comes to annotation of documents and drawings, a pen is even more useful for clarity and accuracy  in selection.

The jury is out on my finding one that I love, but I CAN tell you that Slim Jim jerky snacks are not the answer.

4. Various types of media can be added to any note, including photos (from your library or take one on the fly), web clips, sticky notes, and figures. I tend to use figures most often when taking notes. My work usually has me identifying things by type and I like to use various colors and shapes to do so.

However, I find the figure creation and editing features a bit annoying. When you create a figure it is done in a separate page from the active note page and then is inserted when you press Done. I find that disconcerting, and adds another step to the process since you then have to move the figure to where you want it and often resize it. Also, creating even a small figure means a giant rectangle of whitespace is inserted along with the figure. I am not sure what the value is in that.

5. Audio notes: Nice in the field when you are walking through a location.

Q. Postings online have various prices listed – as of this writing, the app is a steal for $1.99.

So, now: On to two video recommendations that each do a nice job of going through Notability features:

For a more genealogical slant on the app, check out Using an iPad for Genealogy Conferences – Notability, posted by Jennifer Patterson Dondero. (Visit her site at http://www.jpgenealogy.com)

While there is some overlap, I also recommend Notability on the iPad from EdTechTeacher on Vimeo. They have a TON of useful videos out there, so be sure to click on their username and shop around.

Notability on the iPad from EdTechTeacher on Vimeo.

One book I have been reading through is The Čechs (Bohemians) in America, A Study of Their National, Cultural Political, Social, Economic and Religious Life, By Thomas Čapek.

While the style of this circa 1920 writing is a bit dated and the perspective could be argued as slanted in Czech favor, there is quite a bit of dimension to be had on the experiences of Czech immigrants, their reasons for leaving home, and how they fit in after arriving in the United States.

Čapek had written several books that can also be found on Google Books, including another that appeals to my family history in particular: The Čech Bohemian Community of New York.

For extra credit, I happened to find a contemporary review of the first of books I mentioned. The extract at left is from The Sun and the New York Herald’s February 15, 1920, Section 6 – Books and the Book World. (Page 5, Image 75 at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site.)

“The people of the United States are known all over the world as a Nation of dyspeptics….” (Uneeda Biscuit ad, 1912)

Nothing could be truer, even today.

For more on my grandmother’s work at National Biscuit, more specifically, knitting clothing for WWI Submariners, see Comforts Committee of the Navy League.)

I believe the two-towered building back behind them is the San Remo building, which you can read more about on this Flickr page if you are so inclined.

So, I’d guess they are probably standing somewhere in line with 65th Street or so.

I’ll have to check out that spot next time I am in the neighborhood and see if I can find that hill.

Just like the first book (“George Washington’s Socks, which came out almost 20 years earlier!), the author has done a wonderful job of incorporating an interesting and well-paced story along with historical perspective.

While I believe aimed at children in the 8+ range (give or take), both books include partial story lines that are decidedly emotionally and intellectually difficult regarding the reality of war and ethics.

However, each also does a very nice job of providing enough information and grounding for the young reader to both feel for the character and understand the gray lines that are drawn in difficult times.

My son is 9 and the difficult passage in “Spy” did affect him – he was very concerned for what happened. But, we took time to discuss the events and the factors involved, which is the point of reading together, isn’t it?

I appreciate the thought and craft the author put into these books and highly recommend both.

View all my reviews

(I am, perhaps naively, assuming I didn’t black out, fly to Romania, Turkey, the Phillipines, and Guam and try to login from each location.)

Usually when I see these fun activities I look around the Googles and see if some new vulnerability has reared its head or just if others are reporting similar things in their logs. Until today, I have not really seen any others talking about an increase WordPress login attempts so I just kept any eye on things and let the cat roam the server room.

I still don’t see any chatter out in the world at large, but this morning I received a message from one of the hosting companies I deal with:

In an ongoing effort to make you aware of security and performance
concerns, we wanted to inform you of an ongoing event.

There is a brute-force login attack targeted at websites with
WordPress. Due to the nature of the attack, memory consumption on
targeted servers has increased. …

Good to see the hosting company being proactive and notifying – but still not a terrifically big whoop if you’ve taken some precautions with your self-hosted WordPress blog. If you use WordPress.com’s service, you might want to read this article on their 2-factor authentication feature.

For you self-hosted people, here are 3 WordPress plugins you might want to add to your arsenal, plus a more technical method of limiting who can get to your admin page:

Google Authenticator for WordPress “gives you multifactor authentication using the Google Authenticator app… The multifactor authentication requirement can be enabled on a per user basis, You could enable it for your administrator account, but login as usual with less privileged accounts.”

In short: To login, in addition to your user password you will need to enter a temporary passcode supplied an app on your phone. Neat, sweet, and simple.

Limit Login Attempts

“By default WordPress allows unlimited login attempts either through the login page or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords (or hashes) to be brute-force cracked with relative ease.

Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.”

ecSTATic WordPress Plugin “facilitates tracking visitors, monitoring the multitudes of bots and spiders, and helps block annoying comment and trackback spammers.” This plugin is a nice in-WordPress way of seeing who is visiting what and blocking by IP quickly and easily for non-technical folks.

Finally, for those on hosting plans (or rolling your own server) and are not afraid of editing a file or three, there is a very good way to limit your exposure on various pages of your site: .htaccess rules.

.htaccess files can be used in various ways that are beyond the scope of this post. However, you can find a nice simple Tutorial here. In the context of this post, I use an .htaccess file in my WordPress admin folder to specify which IP addresses can even access my admin pages. A good set of instructions can be found in the article Protect Your Admin folder in WordPress by Limiting Access in .htaccess.

The short version, assuming you have access to graphical tools on your web hosting provider:

1. Determine the IP Addresses of the places you’ll most likely access your WordPress admin pages from. Home, work, mobile, all the Paneras with free Wifi in your town. (NO. no. That last one was a joke. Do not.) I like to use utrace to look up IP addresses. I also like birds.

2. Login to your Cpanel (or other) admin page on your hosting provider. (Not the same as your WordPress admin. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this last tip is not for you. Sorry.)

2. Using the Cpanel File Manager go to your WordPress install’s wp-admin folder. Edit .htaccess (or add one if it doesn’t exist) to include something like this:

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist Home IP address for WordPress Admin Page
allow from xx.xx.xx.xxx
# whitelist Work IP address for WordPress Admin Page
allow from xx.xx.xx.xxx

For more detail on .htaccess syntax, see the linked tutorial above.

The “deny all” line denies access to admin pages by default. So, unless an IP address is specifically allowed using an “allow from…” line,  they can’t even see those pages. Once you’ve done this, you’ll have cut all the pesky anklebiters off from having an easier chance of gaining admin access. Unless the anklebiter lives in your house, then you’ve got other issues to deal with.

If you go on vacation – just look up the IP address of the place you are in and add that to the .htaccess temporarily if you need to.

Always remember to use secure connections, folks. and to pack an extra pair of socks.

Syd Liberman’s talk during the Thursday Keynote (See his own site here.)

Kim Weitkamp’s Tell It Again (Visit her site here.)

I was going to embed the video for both in this post, but couldn’t stop them from autoplaying so have linked to the Rootstech site instead.

Also, there does not seem to be a direct link to Syd Liberman’s place in the Keynote lineup, so you’ll have to scroll it to some time after the 35 minute mark in the video to catch him. (I had quite a bit of trouble getting that player to get to the exact location I wanted, but the effort was worth it.)

My experience while visiting Holy Cross church in Manhattan where my grandparents married 90 years before opened my perspective to the often hidden importance of place and detail to the long story.

In that post I also pointed to an interesting episode of the How Sound podcast, that discussed “intimate journalism” and introduced me to the writing of Will Durant. (See Life on the Banks for more on that.)

Well, for you writers and hopeful storytellers, I have another interesting and useful episode of that podcast to link to – My Kingdom For Some Structure goes over the various methods of storytelling used by well-known radio programs.  I especially love the very simple napkin drawings that depict the structures.

The night after I listened to this episode, I sat down with my 9 year old son to talk about how me might tell some family stories together using both writing and media. Showing him the How Sound post and the napkin drawings gave him a clearer picture of what I was trying to explain to him. (I think. Who really knows what is going on in a 9 year old’s head? I’m sure there’s some Willy Wonka in there. and Minifig Lego men. and lasagna.)

If you are trying to learn more about how you might bring your family’s story to life, I suggest you check out those two How Sound podcasts – and follow the feed in general for many excellent tips and tools to help you along.

Then use those tools to help your stories to the surface – and perhaps even find some hidden behind the ones that are more obvious.