Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [73]
You may wish to embark on your e-memory project in a more focused way. But the overall system of recording, storing, and using will remain essentially the same. You may consider, as a friend of mine did, putting together a multigenerational list of all the recipes your family made and/or recorded. My friend found some as far back as five generations. She scanned and/or retyped the recipes—if you go back five generations you can expect a thousand or more—and she included any comments from the recipe’s creator. So there you have a specific set of data recorded and digitally stored. Now. How do you access it? How do you use it? How about a cookbook of recipes with eggs? Or given my health concerns, one without eggs? In fact, that friend made a cookbook that was such a success with her family members that she has begun a second Total Recall project to create a family Web site that will contain the cookbook, all family photos, handwritten letters, blogs, full ge nealogies, birth and death records, health problems, and so forth. No doubt for many people, family is a forum in which Total Recall technologies meet their warmest welcome.
When my son-in-law, Bob, embarked on his Total Recall project, he decided to focus only on photographs. After his old pictures are all scanned, he will be tackling his music. His approach is to break down the entire project into manageable sections by data type: first photos, then music, then videos, then paper, and so forth.
Maybe you want to limit your e-memory at first only to family, or food, or music. Maybe you want to limit it to your health, or your work, or your romantic life.
THE BASIC EQUIPMENT
If you don’t already have the tools of this sort of digital enterprise, you will need to buy them. Most are now fairly familiar in American households. If you think this is just buying more clutter, keep in mind that these tools will easily fit in the space you make in your life by reducing the paper and memorabilia that surrounds you. Moreover, the Total Recall revolution is being built on the strength of a few key fundamental devices and they are all fairly small.
A smartphone
Your cell phone should be a smart one, that is, one that also performs the functions of a personal digital assistant or PDA. At a minimum, it should support: phone, text messaging, instant messaging, camera, Web browsing, e-mail, reminders, and synchronization of your contacts and calendar from wherever in the cloud you keep them. If you can, get one that supports GPS. Music playback is nice too.
Many will let you connect to local Wi-Fi network hotspots when you are in range, giving you a faster connection (and sometimes avoiding airtime fees). The major platforms (Symbian, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and so on) have all kinds of applications that you can install to help you with things like: diaries, health records, lists, time cards, financial records, customer relationship management, expense tracking, and banking.
The smartphone is an absolutely critical tool for lifelogging because you tend to carry it everywhere all the time. It takes pictures, records audio comments, and allows you to type notes and to-do items. It tracks time and place.
A GPS unit
A GPS built into your smartphone might be all you need—as long as you have the software to retrieve the GPS data out of your phone. Many phones ship without such software and it can sometimes be hard to find, even if it exists for your phone. If you can’t get GPS data from your phone, then buy a GPS unit even if you have it built into your camera. After all, you want to know where you have been even when you weren’t taking pictures. If your camera does not have GPS built in, then a separate GPS unit is essential for supplementing your pictures with location information.
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