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Lifelogging is dead for now

computerworld.com

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Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#51

Post by lordnacho »

raihansaputra wrote: post #39
lordnacho wrote: post #22

One great thing about the current state of technology is you'll have a picture of your kid virtually every week of their life. When I was a kid, the camera would get lugged out for occasions like birthdays. Now I have more pictures of my kids than days in their lives. I think it's great. There's even metadata to tell you where and when the pic was taken.

I think this increase of frequency is interesting too. But sometimes it does dilute the meaning of the pictures, and no one have time to sort out 1000+ pictures from the last year to make into one coherent album telling a story. They resort to 'auto-curate' that's based on their network's reaction to the post (e.g. those 5 top posts of the year on instagram), not the moment or their story itself.

Surely a job for machine learning? There's enough metadata to spin a short narrative:

- We went to Legoland when you turned 4, here's the pics of the day...

vs

- Here's a toad we came across on the way home from school one day...

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#52

Post by swsieber »

mcherm wrote: post #36
severine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look Su Sandstorm.

What is that? I can't (easily) tell what it is that you are trying to suggest looking at.

I think they mean Sandstorm.io

Sandstorm pretty much meets those requirements:

* Your data is exportable

* They focus on security and have a non-privacy-invading business plan

* You can decide exactly who to share data with, and revoke it.

It's like a private hosted cloud - you have to pay for it yourself (once it's out of beta), but you could host it yourself, and it's open source.

https://sandstorm.io

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#53

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think it is important to focus on Bell's motives: he wanted to augment his physical memory with a digital record of his life.

There are other strategies that are manual and thus miss a lot of information, but does it really matter? I use org-mode type shared files for notes, and sometimes use of Google Keep and Evernote for research notes. I also toss all PDF files for interesting conference papers, monthly ACM issues, eBooks I have bought into a folder that is searchable on my laptop and I keep a copy on Google Drive so I can find stuff if I don't have my own laptop with me.

It is a tradeoff: how much time to spend archiving potentially useful stuff vs. the long term benefit of having this stuff available.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#54

Post by mark_l_watson »

My best Life Log is my pictures and videos taken with my phone, available both in chronological order and somewhat organized into topic collections (Google Photos only). I set my phone to wait until I am on wifi and then send copies to Google Photos, Microsoft Onedrive, and Dropbox. (I delete a lot of pictures soon after I take them if I don't want them in my permanent collection). I have the same time ordered collection on one of my laptops and back everything up occasionally to DVRs.

I use this time ordered photo stream a lot. When I am traveling, sitting in an airport and don't feel like working at the moment, I like to jump back to some point in time and look through the pictures for a few month interval. Refreshes my memory and I enjoy remembering time with family and friends, travel, etc.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#55

Post by simplehuman »

kybernetikos wrote: post #12
personjerry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a questionably trustworthy tech startup?

Theoretically yes. Practically I'd be very surprised if such a tech startup would have terms I would trust. Things I'd be looking at: * data ownership - including in the event the startup is bought * data access revocation - I want to be able to revoke access to my data in a meaningful way * business plan - I want to be the customer not the product for something like this * portability - I don't want to feel that I'm…

Cloudron.io fits the bill for all your requirements.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#56

Post by pixl97 »

kybernetikos wrote: post #4

I absolutely would like to record everything but I'm not prepared for all that data to live in the cloud and belong to some untrustworthy tech giant.

What happens when your own security fails and now your data is released to the cloud forever?

Or the data is warranted by a judge in a civil or family case?

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#57

Post by kybernetikos »

kybernetikos wrote: post #12
personjerry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a questionably trustworthy tech startup?

Theoretically yes. Practically I'd be very surprised if such a tech startup would have terms I would trust. Things I'd be looking at: * data ownership - including in the event the startup is bought * data access revocation - I want to be able to revoke access to my data in a meaningful way * business plan - I want to be the customer not the product for something like this * portability - I don't want to feel that I'm…

There are quite a few replies to this talking about interesting directions for applications and platforms, all of which are great and very interesting, but none of which currently seem to offer much of a story for multimedia life logging.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#58

Post by soylentcola »

Jack000 wrote: post #47

Depends on your definition of lifelogging I guess, I would argue that most lifelogging happens on Facebook now. Most people don't want to automatically share every detail about their lives, they want to present a filtered, sanitized version that serves as a personal narrative.

Yeah, definitely depends on definition. If you mean publishing/broadcasting, then sure. That can and should be something you curate and choose what things you want to share about yourself rather than an all-or-nothing situation.

But there's the possibility of using it as a sort of glorified journal as well. As someone already mentioned that Black Mirror episode where this is explored along with the pitfalls of living in the past or constant second-guessing I'll skip that angle.

Still, in a more positive light, using tech to automatically journal some things (places you've been, time spent doing various activities, things you've seen, etc) at least has the potential to benefit. Maybe it's something as simple as trying to remember a place your visited or maybe it's a real eye-opener when you see just how much time you spend sitting in traffic. Either way, there are definitely some potential uses that go beyond the "liveblog/broadcast every second of your life" thing.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#59

Post by bitJericho »

fsiefken wrote: post #24
bitJericho wrote: post #13

Hard drives are so cheap why not DIY? The article implies TB of data but I find that dubious.

Every 30s would amount to 2880 times * x Mbyte per day. Which would mean 2 Gbyte per day. If you have a movie at 12 FPS you could get it down to 12 Gbyte per day.

I have a feeling 8 hours of pitch black video compresses to even less. So at the lowest resolutions and framerates maybe you have 1gb of video per day. That's around 2 and a half years per tb. You can buy 5 tb drives for under 300 dollars. That means you can do video for 14 years. With backups and all the hardware, this entire project could cost less than 1000usd.

Re: Lifelogging is dead for now

#60

Post by raihansaputra »

lordnacho wrote: post #51
raihansaputra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this increase of frequency is interesting too. But sometimes it does dilute the meaning of the pictures, and no one have time to sort out 1000+ pictures from the last year to make into one coherent album telling a story. They resort to 'auto-curate' that's based on their network's reaction to the post (e.g. those 5 top posts of the year on instagram), not the moment or their story itself.

Surely a job for machine learning? There's enough metadata to spin a short narrative: - We went to Legoland when you turned 4, here's the pics of the day... vs - Here's a toad we came across on the way home from school one day...

sure it's probably easier for vacation/location based narrative (picks ones that are far away from home). But maybe it can learn to pick more interesting data too (first picture of your child standing up/first video of them walking). Or last pictures of someone with you.. After thinking about it, yeah it might be a job for machine learning.
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