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]

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!)