Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [80]
For a quick typed note, there are several options. Sending yourself an e-mail works well. You can leave the e-mail in your in-box as a reminder, or put it in a folder of notes on different topics if that was your intent. I use Outlook, which has both notes and tasks; other productivity tools should have similar features. Tasks differ from notes by have properties such as due dates.
For spoken notes, I used to use the record audio note feature on my smartphone. These days, I prefer using reQall. With reQall, I dial a certain phone number, and am prompted, “What would you like to do?” I say, “Add,” and then, after a beep, say my note. That audio recording gets delivered to my e-mail as an audio attachment, and a transcription is made of what I said in the text of the e-mail. I find this especially handy when I’m driving: I just hit a speed dial button, talk to reQall, and then I know I will have the note in my in-box to deal with later. I used to forget more ideas than I remembered, but now it’s easy to save them. There’s more to reQall than I have space to cover here. It understands reminders and shopping lists. You can send it messages from instant messenger, and it can send you reminders in SMS text messages. It really is a fantastic tool for e-memory.
Evernote is another powerful e-memory tool. It covers a lot of ground, from clipping Web pages on the PC to audio recordings on its cell phone software. What I think is particularly interesting about it is how it does OCR when you take snapshots. It does a great job of detecting text in a picture, allowing you to take pictures of stuff from wine labels to whiteboards, and then searching for the text in them.
At a dinner party recently, a guest demonstrated his latest find: a digital pen called a Pulse Pen from Livescribe that both records the lecture and allows you to take notes that can be uploaded to your PC. I know when I sit through lectures, many times the speaker is faster than my pen. The Pulse pen solves this problem because if you miss a word, the pen captures it. The only negative is that it requires special paper.
Other electronic pens are made by IOgear, whose Mobile Digital Scribe pen doesn’t require special paper, but also doesn’t record the audio. It also requires an extra pager-size device to upload the information to your PC. The ZPen from Dane-Elec is like IOgear’s device and doubles as a one-gigabyte flash drive.
TELL STORIES
Advancing from raw media to stories doesn’t have to be as time consuming as it is for novelists and filmmakers. We are all storytellers, it is just that we can’t all be Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison, or Steven Spielberg.
Begin making dear-diary e-memories, just like you take notes. Send yourself an e-mail recounting the humorous quip your nephew just made. On your way home from the ball game, call reQall and talk about what happened. Point your camera at yourself and record a short video clip telling about someone you just met. Knowing that you keep an e-copy of everything also means that any stories you send to others become part of your story. So send more e-mails to family and friends telling stories.
Some cameras let you add audio comments to the pictures you take. Take advantage of the feature so that the picture comes with you telling the story behind it. Even if you don’t have such a camera, you can always add your voice later. Photo Story is a nice application that lets you create a voice-over story with pictures that zoom and pan, giving you that “history channel” feel. VizzVox is a Web-based application that lets you upload photos and talk about them. You can continue annotating each time you watch, adding more information, improving the voice record incrementally as you think of new things to say. Others can chime in if the event involves