Lifelogging

[brin_bellway]

My audio-recorder necklace came in the mail yesterday. Works pretty well so far, though its voice activation is getting some false positives from the rustling of the necklace chain. (Might switch to string once I find some nice string for it, see if that helps.)

Leaving it on all afternoon and evening produced 97.4 MB of raw output (192kbps WAV), but after conversion to 32kbps MP3 and 7-zipping on "ultra" compression mode, the final size is 13.1 MB.

That's...less than five gigs a year. Even if this turns out to be an unusually small day and the average size is two or three times that, it would be totally feasible to leave it on all the time and keep everything it produces. I hear the field of AI transcription is making a lot of progress lately: someday, perhaps not so long from now, I might be able to have a machine sift through it all for me.

(edit: part 2)

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Neat! That does sound surprisingly viable!

[brin_bellway]

Yesterday's batch is a lot bigger, since I had a work shift and the sound activation pretty much stayed on the whole time I was there: even after deleting the 23-minute clip of me just making and eating popcorn with no speech†, it's 73.3 MB post-compression.

Still, the current average now extrapolates to ~15.8 GB/year. And the size of the archive increases ~linearly (give or take changes in lifestyle), while storage space increases exponentially.

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†It's not going to be practical to go through and manually remove false-positive segments from *within* a clip, but it might be practical to start a new clip before and after time periods that I suspect will contain 100% false positives. (It's not like I need the audio to tell me I ate popcorn that night: I have a food diary.)