Wifi scale from Withings

Withings makes scale that will wirelessly record your weight onto your account at their website, where you can view it with a web browser or their iPhone apllication. In addition to weight, they use electrodes to estimate your BMI, fat mass, and lean mass. Up to eight users are supported with automatic user recognition.

NY Times: For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point --TMI

I couldn't help noticiing the New York Times article on 4/22/10 that described Mark Brooks desire to make sure the whole Web knows he spent $41 on an iPad case at an Apple store, $24 eating at an Applebee’s, and $6,450 at a Florida plastic surgery clinic for nose work. This flies exactly against what we believe and describe in Total Recall--lifelogging is great; blogging aka blabbing to the world about trivial details about your own life is kind of stupid.

The belief is that by being able to mine this data something good will come of it--most likely that the cybertown dump will hold stuff of value if properly processed and recycled. Ideally marketers will come to these dumps, process the bits, and turn them into gold. The only gold here is for the dump operators who will try to offload the properties to Google. The big losers will be the exhibitionists who deposit their refuge in hopes of getting a notice in the New York Times or a $0.10 return on each receipt deposited.

Ironically the LA Times reported on 4/24/10 featured the article: Blippy says it has fixed glitch that exposed users' credit card numbers. The article went on to describe the upside for Blippy and the Venture companies that valued the company's few weeks work at $46 Million.  

Nikon Coolpix P6000 digital camera supports GPS

Here is another digital camera option if you want your pictures to include the location they were taken at: the Nikon Coolpix P6000. Glancing at a few reviews, it sounds like some owners are complaining that the GPS is tough on the battery and that the camera is slow to get the GPS location fixed. However, there are a lot of positive comments about the camera overall, and geo-tagging photos may be worth paying the price in battery life.

(Previous post on a GPS camera: The Samsung ST1000)

First Camera, Then Fork. NY Times article by Kate Murphy

Ms. Murphy describes the fact that people are photographing their food as a growing trend. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

She opens with a story about a neuroscientist who has 9000 photographs of everything he has eaten in the last five years--after he lost 80 pounds, as a method of self motivation. She states that Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Flickr has 300K food photos from 19,000 of its members.  Other motivators include match making. voyeurism, just plain showing off, or whatever as a way of filling your facebook page while filling your face, or in general documenting another part of your life just like we advocate.

I was able to resonate with this trend and then went back to look at trips in France beginning in the late 70s when memorable meals were photographed and logged in terms of price performance-- correlating taste with the Michelin food tasters.  Since then, I tend to photograph all meals eaten at restaurants including the check, and especially memorable "restaurant quality" home cooking. Just a month ago, faced with the first course of a potentially memorable 7-course degustation menu meal at our favorite Japanese restaurant. I had no option but to run home (across the street), get the camera, and arrive back to photograph and enjoy.

SenseCam also greps these photos too. Wearing it while dining allows you to see a plate of food disappear. If only it would analyze the calories.  In a way, I get this by estimating my calories burned and adjusting it by the weight gain when I step on the scales!

I have little urge to do anything other than to savor the screen saver recollection. Like virtually all of MyLifeBits, these photos are for me. However, if you saw the photos, you would conclude like the people in the article-we all like to eat. I just wish my body and heart wouldn't mind so much.

SenseCam Browser released

Whenever I talk about Total Recall, people ask: "won't you get swamped by all that data?" It’s a great question. If it takes automatic capture to get close to logging everything, it will also take automatic organization, and, even more importantly, automatic summarization to deal with the scale of one's lifelog. So, my Total Recall presentation isn't complete without showing off the great work by Aiden Doherty, Alan Smeaton and others from Dublin City University (DCU).

The DCU SenseCam browser takes the several thousand pictures that a SenseCam can generate in a day, and produces a daily diary. The idea is to look for novelty as a proxy for interestingness. Faces and clothing patches are recognized, and they ask: are these the same old faces, or new ones? Looking accelerometer values, and taking location from a separate GPS into account, they can also distinguish movements that are out of the ordinary. The end result shows snapshots of your day, with the pictures of more interesting events taking up more space. When you put your mouse over an event’s picture, a time-lapse style video plays of all the pictures from that event.

Now the DCU SenseCam browser is being made public. Check out the SenseCam browser site for source code and links to more information about the project. This first public release doesn’t include the image comparison, but they have actually found they can get within a few percent of the same answers without it. But this release is just the start as they’ve got the capability to add in much more functionality, such as event importance or visual event search ... stay tuned for more!