Just another nerd.
Notification History Pro is an application for Android that will keep a record of all notifications and allow the user to share or save them.
The main use for this app seems to be tracking down which app is generating bazillions of annoying notifications so they can kill that app.
I use it to simply keep a record of all the notifications, archiving them on a monthly basis.
TapLog is customizable logging application for Android that makes it easy for the user to log whatever it is they want to log.
First, you decided what you want to log. I track sleep and wake times, food, daily weight, television and reading habits and a few other things. TapLog then makes it easy to set up buttons that will quickly create a time stamped log of the event/item you’re tracking. For example, here’s the sample logging screen from the Android Market (love the rabbit sighting option):
Click the button and it creates a time stamped log. TapLog also lets you update the quantity, record location, and add notes. So I can hit my Weight button and input my weight. Or I can hit the reading button and input how many pages I read as well as add a text note summary of what I was reading, what I thought of it, etc.
The key here is that, unlike many other logging applications, TapLog really makes it easy for the users to set up the application to log what they want, how they want. It also supports having a button open a sub-menu. So a user could create a “Food” button which would then open a second screen of buttons labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner.”
The log can be exported as a CSV file and either shared to the SD card or emailed. The app also supports emailing a non-CSV log of events. An export to Google Docs would be nice.
Other than that, TapLog does an excellent job and is easily the best logging app available for Android at the moment.
In February 2011, the Internet Archive sponsored a two-day conference on Personal Digital Archiving,
The combination of new capture devices (more than 1 billion camera phones will be sold in 2010) and new types of media are reshaping both our personal and collective memories. Personal collections are growing in size and complexity. As these collections spread across different media (including film and paper!), we are redrawing the lines between personal and professional data, and between published and unpublished information.
This being the Internet Archive, they’ve uploaded video of all the presentations in several different formats. The presentations range from looking at issues of costs, ethics, and technical issues to vendor presentations on specific tools in this area.
I’ve been using Zealogs.com to do a lot of self-tracking (seriously — I track several dozen different daily variables from weight to blood pressure, etc), but recently decided for a number of reasons it would be better to do my tracking locally on my Android.
So, off I went to the Marketplace and after installing and uninstalling a number of apps settled on two to handle my tracking needs.
First I added Sleep Bot Tracker Log which, as the name suggests, only tracks one thing — how much sleep I’m getting every night. It is a really well-done app, especially considering its free. Press a widget when you go to sleep, and then again when you wake up, and it tracks and graphs how much sleep you’re getting. Noting when I go to sleep and wake up has always been something I thought was a pain, and this makes it trivially easy (plus I hate having to do the math on how much time I slept if I went to bed at 10:17 p.m. and woke up at 6:03 a.m.)
Second, for everything else, I settled on Zagalaga’s KeepTrack. KeepTrack lets me do almost everything I was doing on Zealogs. It lets me create what it calls a “Watch” which is anything I want to keep track of, and then gives me the option of tracking it as a number, a yes/no flag, or as a text field. It can then chart the values I enter over time and export as a text file or XML.
The only thing I wish KeepTrack had was the ability to add text notes to numerical and yes/no types. For example, if I enter 22,000 as the value in my Steps tracker, I’d like to be able to note what I did that day that resulted in me walking so far above my normal average.
Otherwise, KeepTrack does exactly what I wanted and, like Sleep Bot, is free.
David Gelernter has an interesting take on the future of the Internet, Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously, over at Edge.org. Gelernter argues the future of the way we manage information and our own activities will be through mixing and matching streams of information,
14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.
15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.
16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including “cross network” information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.
17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.
While I’m not so certain I want this information in the “cloud” (depending on what you Gelernter means by the “cloud” — I’d be happy to have it all on a hosted machine that I control, but I already have too much information residing on computers of companies who do not necessarily have my own best interests at heart).
Back in September 2008, I installed Sweetcron on this server to accomplish some of this. Sweetcron is basically a tool for taking syndication feeds and combining them together in a single lifestream in much the way Gelernter describes. At the moment, my lifestream app checks 43 separate RSS feeds every 15 minutes and imports any new items it finds. Over the past year and half, it has imported an average of 58 items each day.
And that, of course is, is just the tip of the iceberg as there is a lot of information I can’t import there because it is not easily available in feed form, and information I won’t include due to privacy/security concerns.
Just a couple of thoughts on what a really robust lifestream application is going to need:
1. Lots of storage. If I included all of the information I’ve logged offline, including audio/video/photographs/screenshots, that would easily approach 20TB of data. That could probably be cut down to 5-6 TB using lossy compression, but that’s still a lot of data.
2. A robust database. Moreover there are probably 5 to 6 million data points in that collection rather than the approximately 35,000 points in my online lifestream. In order to be useful, I’d need to be able to do sophisticated searching to quickly include and exclude data by stream, keywords, text, date, etc.
3. Very strong security/privacy considerations. If someone has access to all my email, that’s a problem. If someone has access to all my photographs, that’s also a problem. Once someone has access to all my email, photographs, receipts, documents, call history, SMS/IM messages, calendar records, etc…that’s increases the problem far more than access to one or two additional accounts. After maintaining a lifestream like that for awhile, you begin to think of all the black hat ways it could be used by someone who wishes you ill.
The BBC reports on a new fiber created at MIT that can “detect the wavelength and direction of light falling on it.” The real point of the research was to coordinate the activities of different nano-scale devices. In this case, they were able to reconstruct a crude image sent by a small patch of these photosensitive fibers.
Clothes that could automatically photograph and store the surrounding area. That would be like the pimped out version of the little camera Gordon Bell wears around his neck. I need that like three years ago.