Author: admin yep

Imagine popping your head into the attic of your childhood home and finding a box overflowing with recordings, photos, documents, and diaries compiled by relatives who have long passed. Congratulations: you’ve won the family history lottery.

Even if no such stash has been left behind for you, you can easily become the person who starts documenting family stories and events for curious progeny to discover one day. We’ve listed the best tools to capture your family history—from fill-in-the-blank workbooks to decent recording tools for saving audio and video.

Grab a notebook

For starters, you might want a book to record historical facts and connections you discover in your research and conversations.

One simple option is the Genealogy Organizer, a notebook to record facts like vital statistics and family connections with space for photos and notes. It’s a portable size (6×9 inches) with 100 pages for records and additional pages for notes.

For a little more guidance, try the Family Tree Workbook: 30+ Step-by-Step Worksheets to Build Your Family History. It’s the starting point for a heftier research project you can work on with other family members both older and younger than you are.

Record your relatives’ voices

You probably already have the only tool you need to start recording conversations (with proper legal consent, of course): your phone. Congratulations, you are a documentarian.

If you’re recording an in-person conversation, just center the phone between you and your subject(s) and start recording through the Voice Memo app on your iPhone. Android phones have a similar built-in audio recording app called Recorder or Voice Recorder, depending on your phone. To up your audio quality a little more, try a wireless lapel mic like the Maybesta Professional Wireless Lavalier Lapel Microphone.

Recording phone calls is trickier. Because phones can’t record a call in progress (and apps that claim to are unreliable), you probably need one device to make the call and a second device to record. Ethically, it’s nice to inform the person you are talking to that the conversation is being recorded, but it’s not always legally required. Check here to see what’s required by law in your state.

If you find yourself recording a lot of audio, you might want to pick up a separate digital recorder like the Sony ICD-PX370 Mono Digital Voice Recorder. It has space for 59 hours of recorded audio and room for an SD card if you need more. Transfer your recordings with the built-in USB.

Capture video too

If you want to record the look on Dad’s face when he talks about returning to his hometown after hitchhiking across the country, your phone will, again, do the trick. For face-to-face interviews, at least set up a small, flexible tripod so you are not fumbling with the phone.

You may also want to record videos when speaking to family members long-distance. Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet all support recording calls as a basic feature. You can also use these apps to record audio, if your family member doesn’t want video recorded for whatever reason.

Apps for recording memories

StoryCorps (available for Apple and Android)

You may recognize StoryCorps, the NPR staple that has been helping people record and share their stories for 20 years. The free app will help you with interview guidance and recording instructions. You have the option to add photos and keywords to your stories and save to your device or upload recordings to the StoryCorps Archive, which is administered by the Library of Congress.

Storycatcher (available for Apple, $4.99)

Feel like a real filmmaker when you record, edit, and share your work with others. The app comes with story prompts for your interviews and includes access to learning modules that teach you the whole process from interview tips to adding music and captions.

Remento (free for Apple phones)

Remento also includes prompts and recording tools for capturing conversations with family members. The spirit of Remento is to deepen connections with family members in the present by recording their stories and personalities as you discuss memories. Your recordings are stored locally on your device, and you decide who to share with.

More resources for starting conversations

“Tell me your life story” would be an overwhelming prompt at the start of your family history journey. Take advantage of StoryCorps’ experience by choosing some options from their list of great questions. It includes interview questions sorted by topic like raising children, religion, working, love and relationships. Compile your questions in advance and consider giving your interviewee a preview so they can give it some thought.

Even if you’re not interested in DNA tests or going down the rabbit hole of deep family genealogy, consider browsing Ancestry.com with a 14-day trial. Browsing genealogy and DNA records with a family member should elicit some stories. If that doesn’t work, try their conversation prompts to get conversation rolling.

If you do get the itch to look more deeply into your family’s genealogy, check out the National Archives for research tips.

Tips for getting reticent family members to open up

You might get a few strange looks or “no, thanks” when you start asking relatives to share stories. For family members who are hesitant to be recorded or clam up face to face, try these sideways approaches to uncovering family history:

• Ask them to help the kids with a family tree project. Every kid does one eventually. Let that be your opportunity to sneak in some questions about Great Aunt Beulah.
• Give them a guided journal they can respond to in private, at their own pace. There are many versions of this concept, like the Tell Me Your Life Story series. You can even create your own guided journal by taking the questions from resources above and adding them to a blank notebook.
• Try a service like Storyworth. It’s an investment—for $99 you get a year of weekly story prompts emailed to your family member and one printed book that compiles all the stories and photos. You can also buy additional copies of the book. This is ideal if you have a family member who dreams of writing a book, but needs some encouragement. They will receive one email per week and can respond in their own time. Everything is compiled at the end of the year. You get to choose what questions are sent each week.

Finally, when you go in search of family stories, don’t leave out your own generation. Cousins and siblings may have different recollections of events you consider canon, and they can be great co-conspirators for getting parents and grandparents to open up.

Apple has added a view to Reminders which shows you tasks in the Kanban column style. Here’s how to use it on the Mac, and also the iPad, plus why not to bother on the iPhone.

How to setup a Kanban list in Reminders on macOS Sonoma

Using the Kanban list

Where Reminders scores and falls short

Internet access is essential, but you may wonder which Linux processes use your connection the most on your computer. Fortunately, with some common Linux utilities, monitoring which processes use your bandwidth is easy. Here are some of them:

1. nethogs

nethogs is a program that does for internet connections what htop or top does for CPU and memory usage. It shows you a snapshot of which processes are accessing the network.

Like top, htop, or atop, nethogs is a full-screen program that updates after a few seconds to show you the current network connections by processes.

Installing nethogs is simple. You just go through your package manager.

For example, on Debian and Ubuntu:

 sudo apt install nethogs 

And on Arch Linux:

 sudo pacman -S nethogs 

On the Red Hat family:

 sudo dnf install nethogs 

To run nethogs, you’ll need to be root:

 sudo nethogs 

It’s possible to set it so that you can run nethogs as a regular user using this command:

 sudo setcap "cap_net_admin,cap_net_raw+pe" /path/to/nethogs 

You should replace “/path/to/nethogs” with the absolute pathname of nethogs. You can find this with the which command:

 which nethogs 

2. lsof

While lsof is a utility for listing open files, it can also list open network connections. The -i option lists internet connections attached to running processes on the system. On Linux, everything is a file, after all.

To see current internet connections, use this command:

 lsof -i 

lsof will show you the name of any commands with open internet connections, the PID, the file descriptor, the type of internet connection, the size, the protocol, and the formal file name of the connection.

Using the -i4 and -i6 options allows you to view connections using IPv4 or IPv6.

There’s a good chance you have lsof installed already. It’s also easy to install on major Linux distros if it isn’t.

On Debian and Ubuntu, type:

 sudo apt install lsof 

And on Arch:

 sudo pacman -S lsof 

On the Red Hat family of distros:

 sudo dnf install lsof 

3. netstat

netstat is a powerful program on its own, letting you see network connections on your system. It doesn’t show you which processes the network connections are attached to. As with lsof, you can see this with a command-line option.

netstat is part of the net-tools package. You can install it on most Linux distros using the default package manager.

For example, on Debian or Ubuntu:

 sudo apt install net-tools
 

On Arch Linux:

 sudo pacman -S net-tools 

To install netstat on Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL, run:

 sudo dnf install net-tools 

You can run netstat at the command line. By default, it will show you information such as the protocol, the address, and the state of the connection, but the -p option adds a column that shows the process ID and the command name.

 netstat -p 

When you run it, netstat will just list all the network connections and then exit. With the -c option, you can see a continually updated list of connections:

 netstat -pc 

This would be similar to using a screen-oriented program like nethogs, but the advantage of doing it this way is that you can pipe the output into another program like grep or a pager to examine it:

 netstat -p | grep 'systemd' 

To see all of the processes with network connections on your system, you may have to run netstat as root:

 sudo netstat  

Now You Can See Which Linux Apps Are Gobbling Up Your Bandwidth

Linux, like many modern OSes, is intimately connected to the internet. It can be difficult at times to track down which processes are using your bandwidth. With tools like nethogs, lsof, and netstat, you can track down processes that have open connections.

Processes sometimes go haywire, even with connections. On Linux, you can easily terminate any rogue processes.

MongoDB is one of the most desired and admired NoSQL databases for professional development. Its flexibility, scalability, and ability to handle large volumes of data make it a top choice for modern applications. If you want to master MongoDB’s regular queries and operations, you’re in the right place.

Whether you’re looking to efficiently retrieve and manipulate data, implement robust data models, or build responsive applications, acquiring a deep understanding of common MongoDB queries and operations will undoubtedly enhance your skills.

1. Create or Switch Databases

Creating a database locally via the MongoDB Shell is straightforward, especially if you’ve set up a remote cluster. You can create a new database in MongoDB with the use command:

 use db_name 

While the above command creates a new database, you can use it to switch to an existing database without creating a new one from scratch.

2. Drop Database

First, switch to the database you want to drop using the use command as done previously. Then drop the database using the dropDatabase() command:

 use db_name
db.dropDatabase()
 

3. Create a Collection

To create a collection, switch to the target database. Use the createCollection() keyword to make a new MongoDB collection:

 db.createCollection("collection_name")
 

Replace collection_name with your chosen collection name.

4. Insert Document Into a Collection

While sending data to a collection, you can insert a single document or an array of documents.

To insert a single document:

 db.collection_name.insertOne({"Name":"Idowu", "Likes":"Chess"})
 

You can also use the above method to insert an array of documents with one ID:

 db.collection_name.insertOne([{"Name":"Idowu", "Likes":"Chess"}, {"Language": "Mongo", "is_admin": true}])
 

To insert many documents at once, with each having separate IDs, use the insertMany keyword:

 db.collection_name.insertMany([{"Name":"Idowu", "Likes":"Chess"}, {"Name": "Paul", "Likes": "Wordle"}])
 

5. Get All Documents From a Collection

You can query all documents from a collection using the find() keyword:

 db.collection_name.find()
 

The above returns all the documents inside the specified collection:

You can also limit the returned data to a specific number. For instance, you can use the following command to get only the first two documents:

 db.collection_name.find().limit(2)
 

6. Filter Documents in a Collection

There are many ways to filter documents in MongoDB. Consider the following data, for instance:

If querying only a specific field in a document, use the find method:

 db.collection_name.find({"Likes":"Wordle"}, {"_id":0, "Name":1})
 

The above returns all documents where the value of Likes is Wordle. It only outputs the names and ignores the document ID.

You can also filter a collection by a numerical factor. Say you want to get the names of all users older than 21, use the $gt operator:

 db.collection_name.find({"Likes":"Chess", "Age":{"$gt":21}}, {"_id":0, "Name":1})
 

The output looks like so:

Try replacing find with findOne to see what happens. However, there are many other filtering keywords:

• $lt: All values less than the specified one.
• $gte: Values equal to or greater than the specified one.
• $lte: Values that are less than or equal to the defined one.
• $eq: Gets all values equal to the specified one.
• $ne: All values not equal to the specified one.
• $in: Use this when querying based on an array. It gets all values matching any of the items in the array. The $nin keyword does the opposite.

7. Sort Queries

Sorting helps arrange the query in a specific order. You can sort in descending or ascending order. Keep in mind that sorting requires a numerical reference.

For instance, to sort in ascending order:

 db.collection_name.find({"Likes":"Chess"}).sort({"Age":1})
 

To sort out the above query in descending order, replace “1” with “-1.”

 db.collection_name.find({"Likes":"Chess"}).sort({"Age":-1})
 

8. Update a Document

MongoDB updates require atomic operators to specify how you want the update done. Here is a list of commonly used atomic operators you can pair with an update query:

• $set: Add a new field or change an existing field.
• $push: Insert a new item into an array. Pair it with the $each operator to insert many items at once.
• $pull: Remove an item from an array. Use it with $in to remove many items at one go.
• $unset: Remove a field from a document.

To update a document and add a new field, for example:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Sandy"}, {"$set":{"Name":"James", "email":"example@gmail.com"}})
 

The above updates the specified document as shown:

Removing the email field is straightforward with the $unset operator:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Sandy"}, {"$unset":{"email":"example@gmail.com"}})
 

Consider the following sample data:

You can insert an item into the existing items array field using the $push operator:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Pete"}, {"$push":{"items":"Plantain"}})
 

Here’s the output:

Use the $each operator to insert many items at once:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Pete"}, {"$push":{"items": {"$each":["Almond", "Melon"]}}})
 

Here’s the output:

As mentioned, the $pull operator removes an item from an array:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Pete"}, {"$pull":{"items":"Plantain"}})
 

The updated data looks like so:

Include the $in keyword to remove many items in an array at one go:

 db.collection_name.updateOne({"Name":"Pete"}, {"$pull":{"items": {"$in":["Almond", "Melon"]} }}) 

9. Delete a Document or a Field

The deleteOne or deleteMany keyword trashes a document from a collection. Use deleteOne to remove a document based on a specified field:

 db.collection_name.deleteOne({"Name":"IDNoble"})
 

If you want to delete many documents with keys in common, use deleteMany instead. The query below deletes all documents containing Chess as their Likes.

 db.collection.deleteMany({"Likes":"Chess"})
 

10. Indexing Operation

Indexing improves query performance by streamlining the number of documents MongoDB needs to scan. It’s often best to create an index on fields you query more frequently.

MongoDB indexing is similar to how you use indexes to optimize SQL queries. For instance, to create an ascending index on the Name field:

 db.collection.createIndex({"Name":1})
 

To list your indexes:

 db.collection.getIndexes()
 

The above is only a preamble. There are several other methods for creating an index in MongoDB.

11. Aggregation

The aggregation pipeline, an improved version of MapReduce, allows you to run and store complex calculations from inside MongoDB. Unlike MapReduce, which requires writing the map and the reduce functions in separate JavaScript functions, aggregation is straightforward and only uses built-in MongoDB methods.

Consider the following sales data, for example:

Using MongoDB’s aggregation, you can calculate and store the total number of products sold for each category as follows:

 db.sales.aggregate([{$group:{"_id":"$Section", "totalSold":{$sum:"$Sold"}}}, {$project:{"_id":0, "totalSold":1, "Section":"$_id"}}])
 

The above query returns the following:

Master MongoDB Queries

MongoDB offers many querying methods, including features to improve query performance. Regardless of your programming language, the above query structures are rudimentary for interacting with a MongoDB database.

There may be some discrepancies in base syntaxes, though. For example, while some programming languages like Python recognize snake cases, others, including JavaScript, use the camel case. Ensure you research what works for your chosen technology.

Next: The filter() function returns a new DataFrame that shares the data with the original DataFrame. So, any modifications to the new DataFrame will not affect the original DataFrame.

The white tiles in the living area of my home are an abomination: I track in dirt from the garden constantly, my dog is forever bursting through the doggie door with muddy glee, and I seem to cook with the spirit of Ratatouille, absentmindedly splashing food all about. I find myself in constant pursuit of cleaning tools that will make my home seem like less of a disaster, and as a result, I’ve bought an embarrassing number of devices that promised to truly scrub my floor clean.

Among them, I’ve tried the Hoover SpinScrub (a precursor to this model), various steam cleaners, many tonics and potions, and even your plain old handheld scrub brush, because it finally seemed that every product that promised to really scrub away serious dirt on your tiles paled in comparison to just getting down and scrubbing the floor yourself. But one night while perusing a Home Depot ad, I saw it: It gleamed bright yellow, and it promised to answer all my problems. And it actually lived up to that promise.

This is the best floor scrubber

The best floor scrubber is the Ryobi Telescoping Power Scrubber. Just look at it. It is quite literally a cordless powerhouse. Although it comes with a medium hard brush, you can also buy soft and hard brush heads for it. Ostensibly, it’s for scrubbing your car or boat exterior, perhaps your roof or house siding.

But if you’re looking for clean tile, there is nothing on the market like this tool.

How a non-expert (me) uses a power scrubber on floors

I use the medium hardness brush, and I work the floor in sections, with a spray bottle of water in one hand, a container of Bar Keepers Friend, and a towel. (The only advantage that more traditional floor scrubbers have is their onboard water source. The Ryobi power scrubber has none of that, but to me, that’s a non-issue given the way it performs.)

The towel is on the floor, and I stand on it. You spray the floor in front of you, sprinkle it with Bar Keepers Friend, and then go to town with your scrubber. As you move forward, keep the towel under your feet, using it to mop up any water as you go. When you get to the end of the hall or room, you may need to give the wall trim a quick wipe for any splatter, but it’s pretty minimal.

The upside of this is incredibly satisfyingly clean tile. Every groove, every niche is clean. The downside is that you’ve likely taken off any sealer on the tile, so that might be worth refreshing with a sealer, which is easy enough. (You can even do so with the scrubber by swapping the head for one of the soft heads like the microfiber cloth.) In between serious cleanings, you can skip the Bar Keepers Friend and use water alone or a mopping solution, but really, the scrubber is doing the majority of the work.

Maintaining the Ryobi Power Scrubber

To wash the scrubber, you disconnect the head and throw it in the dishwasher. Disconnect the battery and recharge it. I can even use one of my smaller 1.5 volt batteries with the scrubber and get a full house clean at once.

People tend to be loyalists when they get into a line of tools. If they start with Makita, they’ll stick with it, and DeWalt folks are die-hards. Like a lot of people, I started with Ryobi because of the price point and its absurdly wide selection of tools in the cordless series. I’ve stuck with the line because I genuinely have a lot of success with it as I’ve grown my collection. I find the batteries stay well charged (and I haven’t had one die yet). I recommend buying bare tools (without battery packs) as soon as you’ve acquired a few chargers, and only getting the higher-end batteries. I have two 4-volt batteries and I almost never find myself needing another. Ryobi has really expanded the line into a lot of consumer-friendly pieces like fans and air compressors, and it has invested in their brushless cordless line—a series of tools with less likelihood of burning out your motor, while also being more powerful. All this to say, I wasn’t surprised Ryobi had a great tool solution here.

For what its worth, they also have a handheld scrubber, and if I hadn’t previously picked up some brush heads that I can just throw on my Ryobi brushless hammer drill for scrubbing smaller surfaces like sinks and bathtubs, I’d have picked it up as well.