


LifeLogging: 22 Tools for Storing Your Life Online
| 2009-10-26 |
| Table of Contents: |
The fitness and health care industries make numerous devices for recording various body characteristics. The Tanita BC-590BT Bluetooth Wireless Body Composition Scale ($250 at the Competitive Edge) tracks weight, body fat, body water, daily caloric intake, bone mass, muscle mass and more and then sends the data to your computer. The Zeo ($349 on Amazon) monitors your brainwaves and charts the patterns and quality of each night's sleep. Bodybugg ($199 at 24hourfitness) is a calorie-counting system (above) on an armband. It estimates energy burned, but users have to record the food consumed.
Tracking my body water or brainwaves has minor interest to me, but what I think any knowledge worker would like is the ability to improve their note taking and paper flow. Livescribe ($170 on Amazon) combines a digital pen and microdot, paper-filled notebook to correlate notes and drawings with any audio going on at that time (left). So take notes in class or draw a diagram, and if you miss something, tap on your notes or drawing and hear what was being said at the time.
Alternatively, if you want to keep track of documents, the Planon Systems Handheld Portable Scanner DocuPen RC-800 ($231 on Amazon) might be your thing. The DocuPen lets you take scanning anywhere. It is a pen-sized scanner that copies legal-sized papers. With just 8MB of memory, the DocuPen won’t hold much, but you can also use a 2GB microSD card for good measure.
In terms of gathering your computing usage habits, there are many good and innovative tools to explore. Infoax makes a Firefox add-on that automatically stores personal browsing history online. Every site you visit get’s logged and indexed here for retrieval. A great idea and one I’ve found very helpful, but be warned it can be buggy. Slife 1.0 is an activity logger that logs your Web activity as well as phone conversations, documents, Web pages and meeting information. If there’s information that’s not passively recorded and you’d like to track, DailyDiary will help. The site will periodically remind you to record your statistics through e-mail updates. Alternatively, consider YourFlowingData, which merges LifeLogging with Twitter and lets you tweet your life one moment at a time.

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