This is another great idea for keeping your personal history. Gmail has tons of space... and it's free. The search options can't be beat!

Blogger Rafe Needleman uses Gmail to record memories of his young son's life. With the hefty storage, easy accessibility and robust filter and search tools, it's a neat way to be able to quickly pull up that time when your little one met Santa Claus—or yanked your laptop off the table. Of course, with stuff this precious, it's always a good idea to back it up.  

So I have long been in search of a program to mark up the web. I love to read online and have even gone as far as creating my own copy of the scriptures in a wiki form, but it never seems to get it all there for me. Well, Diigo get’s pretty close for me, and it has nice social features as well…

Scripture Study

Diigo allows has four basic functions that I think are useful in scripture study.

• Bookmarking
• Highlighting
• Commenting
• Tagging (for organizing your bookmarks and comments)

Social Features

Diigo also allows you to make your highlights/comments public. If you do, then anyone that goes to this page with the Diigo Toolbar installed will see your annotations and be able to comment on them.

In addition to this, you can also create public and private groups where you can collaborate on resources. This could be fun for a family to collaborate on a talk someone is preparing, or a class to work on a lesson. Because it is different some students (think seminary/institute) will be more apt to play with it. You could do a class project annotating resources from the church’s amazing resources! Here is a clip from this month’s First Presidency Message from President Monson:

In addition to this there is a nice dashboard that allows you to see new annotations in a group.

LDS Groups

I was suprised this morning when I couldn’t find any LDS groups to join… so I created one: LDS Study and Resources Group. Upon further analysis… it appears the search engine is broken. I still can’t find my group in search, or any other LDS groups… hmmm… Any other Diigo users out there? Come and join… perhaps we could make a LDS Tech group for technologies that we are working on. Good for commenting online with stuff… What do you think?

I am just touching on some of the functionality of Diigo… there is a lot of extra tools and widget’s. Good Web 2.0 technology! What other uses can you forsee?

So our Lindon Utah based friends at Footnote have been getting a lot of press this week for their work in putting the Vietnam memorial online and indexing all of the names. It is a fantastic project. Check out this video:

I read about Footnote a while ago and even checked it out, but haven’t been back. They really are doing some good work there. I got back on and decided to do a search for my surname. I figure if they have anything with van Drimmelen in there… they are good… well, they have two entries… both from some immigration office in New York from the early part of the 20th century… one for a John and one for a Jasper… awesome!

Unfortunately these images are considered premium content so to see the whole thing I have to pay… but still… awesome! Maybe the footnote guys would hook a blogger up with a free membership if he wrote about them every once in a while…

Just read about a new Google Chat option that I think is pretty sweet.  You can now embed a widget on a blog that will allow ANYONE, even those without Google accounts to chat with you.  I have embedded one on my blog, so feel free to chat with me.

Uses for church?  Could be used by missionaries as another communication method.  Mostly I just think it is cool. 

So I just came across a great new startup called Cookthink.  It allows you to find GREAT recipe’s based off of ingredients, dishes, cuisine, or even mood.  

One problem I have had in the past with online recipe databases it that you never know what you are getting, but with Cookthink, they have a review process and only allow good recipe’s to get through.  

For the more techy folks out there, I created our own family recipe database using this free PHP program and a sql server.  It’s not great, but it is our’s… we just need to add stuff to it!

What other recipe options have you found out there?

I have been very impressed with Google Translate for a while.  The ability to translate chat’s, and pretty much anything is changing the way I can do research at work and especially for my family history.

I recently started getting more into family history, but my family roots come from Holland.  I speak German, but that is only good to a small extent.  A distant relative in France sent me several books, but some of them are written in Dutch.  I tried reading them, but could only get the basics.  I pasted the words in google translate and was able to easily follow the story.  Granted, it’s not the best translation, but you certainly can follow it!  Awesome!  

Today I read about a new Firefox extension today called gTranslate.  It allows you to select text on any page and translate it to any of the languages that GoogleTranslate supports.  That could be useful… :) 

Several months ago I got a computer for my kids.  I am techie and I want them to have the skills they need for the future, but protect them from some of the terrible stuff out there.  After much research I came across this GREAT firefox extension called Glubble.  At the time I liked the idea, but it was still in beta and was difficult to navigate… well, today they released a new version and it is AWESOME!  (Note, I am writing from the perspective of father of small children).

Overview from their webpage:

Glubble is a free tool for the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser. It
permits each member of the family to have their own custom environment,
so that when kids use it they only see the very best parts of the
Internet based on selections made by their parents or supplied by
Glubble’s editorial staff.

Glubble enhances Firefox to
make sure kids can’t see the whole World Wild Web instead they can only
see family friendly parts of the web, its like their own little world
on the web. We call it their Glubble World.

Cool things for kids:

• Interface - Easy to navigate (even for kids that can’t read)
• Glubble’s - Preapproved content that is awesome - There are a lot of great sites out there, and Glubble has done the hard work in finding it for you.
• Favorites - Kids can easily add small picture thumbnails.
• New Content - If kids want to see something that is not on there, they can request it with a click of a button and a parent/helper will be notified and decide if they want to allow them to see it.
• Personalized Homepage
• Lots of pictures to find things… very nice.

Cool things for Parents/Helpers:

• Reporting on where the kids have last been… on any browser.  I can be signed in at work and see where my kids are have been last on the home computer.  Nice!
• Easily add new webpages.
• Create your own Family Glubbles - I created one for all of our extended family’s blogs.
• A Family Wall - This is a place to post notes to the kids that they will see when they sign in.
• Normal Browser in admin mode. 

I’m sure you can tell, but I am excited about this new browser.  It is so much better now and fast.  What do you think? 

Came across this list this morning via A Soft Answer.  Had some good ones on there like Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Rookie, and Return to Me that are part of our personal collection.  But it also had a bunch of PG-13 and R-rated movies. 

My wife and I decided long ago that if we didn’t want our kids watching it we wouldn’t watch it… it has been hard to stick to that over the years (Star Wars III, Harry Potter IV) but we have done our best to find edited versions of the movies to watch.

We also saw an AWESOME movie just a couple of days ago… Facing the Giants.  It is definitely not a Mormon movie, but I cried… then again… I cry a lot lately.  :)  5 Stars.

Below is a clip from the movie I saw before we bought it.  I can think of a million classes to use this in seminary with.  Enjoy!

TechCrunch published an article yesterday morning about a new technology that allows you to install multiple camera’s and other monitoring equipment in your home to keep an eye on your aging parents.  When I first saw this technology I thought of my Grandma Van.  My family and I moved to Las Vegas in 1992 and left her by herself in Salt Lake.  We came and visited often, and even made some efforts to get her on e-mail (to no avail) so we could keep in contact, but it was very hard.  In the end (1997) she had a heart attack.  No one else was around, and it took a couple of days for a neighbor to find her.

Who knows if we would have been able to do anything had we known, and she had lived a full and wonderful life, but it would have been nice to have had the option.  With out transient society, it is not possible to be near our loved ones like we used to be.  This technology could enable that.

An interesting quote from TechCrunch though:

I can’t decide whether this represents a step forward or backwards for civilization. On the one hand, there is no doubt that something like this could definitely help improve healthcare for the elderly. Many live at home alone and an early warning system (Is Grandma eating regularly? Is she taking her pills? Has she been in bed all day?) could be a true life saver.

So what do you think?  Is this ethical?  Would you do something like this? 

This morning I came across an article about an internet fridge.  The idea of a computer in your fridge is cool but the authors point out a nice little startup called Cozi.  Cozi’s main purpose is to simplify your family life.  The theme for our Relief Society this year is “Simplify.”  It seems that is a big problem in our lives.  All this technology is great, but it just makes our lives so much the crazier!  :)  Why not use some of that technology to simplify your life. 

Cozi has a couple of nice features:

• Shared Family Calendar (We personally use Google Calendar, but one place for all this might be nice too).
• Shopping Lists
• Messages & Mobile Access
• Photo Collage Screensaver
• Family Journal

I can for see a day that will require us to contact our kids via the technology mediums that they are using.  Sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to e-mail my kids already… but alas, they can not read yet.

What other programs have you found that are similar?  How do you manage your family and keep you all on the same page?