Lifelogging, part 2

[brin_bellway]

[mild cw: venting, apocalypse]


(edit: part 1)

The sound activation wasn't just getting false *positives*, but also some false *negatives*: some conversations were choppy, the recorder constantly cutting in and out. And there's no option for continuous recording, so if the sound activation doesn't work right you're screwed.

I'm trying this one next. It's a lot [less pretty]/[more obvious-looking], but if I wear it under my shirt that'll probably be okay.

First-day results:

• The audio quality is not as good at baseline (mild static, slightly less recognisable voices) *and* loses more in lossy compression. I might have to keep these at 64kbps rather than 32, doubling the archive size. Which feels wasteful, but intellectually I am aware that that level and type of wastefulness is probably not *actually* significant, especially not with Moore's Law on my side. At this rate, we're still talking 35 years per terabyte, and barring a major apocalypse, three terabytes of space 35 years from now will be cheaper than dirt.


• (I mean, hell, for that matter scavenged tech from a post-apocalyptic wasteland is probably *also* cheaper than dirt. Good soil is all the more valuable for a subsistence farmer!)


• Recording seems to have cut out around dinnertime? But it turns out the charging instructions are backwards: in reality, *red* light means partially charged and *blue* light means fully charged. So my guess is that the battery simply died.


• I left it on continuous mode all the time, but between the static and the small noises like typing, it's not that easy to locate and clip the long portions of silence. I'm thinking I'll try a policy of "sound-activation mode when I'm not actively expecting a conversation soon, continuous when I predict the next while will be worth recording".

Overall verdict thus far: why does everything have to have tradeoffs, this is not a goddamn strategy game, why can't things just *work*

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Going to try it at work later today. I guess we'll see (hear) how that goes.

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(edit: part 3)

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

>>why does everything have to have tradeoffs, this is not a goddamn strategy game, why can't things just *work*

This is a terrible truth isn't it. It's fascinating to me, the implied development that subtly exists or fails to exist in all these little technologies.

(I'm thinking, here, of all the little distinctions between here and home, the way that clearly [someone in] Norway has put some different thought into what ought to be standard for a dozen little implements of life. Often they're improvements! Which makes me sad more than anything, that such things are not universal, despite the smallness of the things at hand. I'm talking about, like - Norwegian showers (Or at least, the one at my hotel and the one at my apartment both) are set up to have one knob for temperature and one for intensity, rather than one for hot water and one for cold. It's very useful!)

[brin_bellway]

>>Norwegian showers (Or at least, the one at my hotel and the one at my apartment both) are set up to have one knob for temperature and one for intensity, rather than one for hot water and one for cold. It's very useful!)<<

In my own experience "one knob for hot and one for cold" is mostly for at-home handwashing sinks. Most other water taps, especially for showers, have a lever-like control system in which one rotates the lever to set temperature and pulls the lever outward (or upward, in the case of sinks) to add intensity. They look something like...*pokes Google Images*...this. (Although that temperature guide is a bit misleading in its current location: you rotate the *bottom* of the lever left for hot and right for cold, not the top.)

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The recorder can hear reasonably well from underneath my shirt, but the necklace chain is hitting me right in a keloid†, which is uncomfortable almost all the time and sometimes outright painful. I will have to try sewing an upper panel onto my bra, so that the chain is resting on cloth. (I think I'd overheat in a full undershirt, especially at work with all the ovens and fryers and whatnot.)

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†the spot on my chin seems to be fine now, BTW, I don't think I ever mentioned that

[contrarianarchon]

Ironically that design is pretty common in both norway and australia, but only for sinks.

(I'm glad you're getting better and/or finding ways to work around things!)