Here’s a quick video from Andrew Schaaf. He built an open source app for the Mac that logs attention and usage data, including your mouse position and which app is at the front of the stack on your screen. The data is private and stored on your computer. If you’re interested in raw data on,…
Victor van Doorn describes himself as a nostalgic workaholic. He has tried and failed to keep diaries, so he decided to build an automatic one. His iPhone app Replay My Day (@replaymyday) collects his location and online activities each day, and builds it into a film – so when he’s lying in bed at night…
What if you had a movie of your life that was made from a stream of pictures taken one every thirty seconds? Glenn Wolters and Jeroen Bos have built an iPhone app called Lifelapse to do this. They developed it as a school project. I noticed Joost Plattel using it at the recent QS conference…
Here’s a bit of ancient history in the automated self-tracking world. A biography-generating device called Forget-Me-Not was really a lifelogging app before web development and ubiquitous cell phones came along. Watch the video below for a fascinating peek into the past of self-tracking. Thanks to Mik Lamming for sending this in.
A guest post from Chris Hogg on the value of user-generated data and its ability to reconnect us to our bodies and our health.
Lifelogging – the continuous capture of a large part of one’s life. Some people use paper journals, others sport wearable cameras, post status updates, or tap numbers into their smart phones. If you record your life or make tools to record lives, read on! This post is part of our regular tool roundup for the…
From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell group: Martijn Aslander talks about his PersonalStats.nl project to track all of his personal data. He records everything from travel to the 5 best and worst things he does each day to how many people he addresses at his lectures. He meets 100-200 people every week, and was interested to learn…
From the New York QS Show&Tell group: Brennan Moore, co-founder of Poyozo with Max Van Kleek, talks about his thoughts on using life tracking data to help people manage their lives. His vision is to build an automatic personal assistant that respects your time/attention and reminds, recommends, and filters things for you. Watch a demo…
From the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup: Randal Koene shows his Linux project “dil2al” (detailed item lists to activity lists). Every 20 minutes, Randal gets a prompt asking him to log his activities and recommending possible task changes according to his set priorities. He’s been using this system since 1999, as a memory assist and…
At the last Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup, Gordon Bell gave a candid, engaging talk on his MyLifeBits project. He showed pictures from his SenseCam that takes a picture every 20 seconds while he’s wearing it and contributes to the 1 GB of data he generates every month. Watch the controversy below that emerged when Gordon speculated that if…
It was a standing-room-only, energized gathering at Microsoft on Wednesday evening. Over 140 people came out to listen, connect, and discuss lifelogging at our biggest QS Show&Tell meetup to date!
Many of us are bothered by the conflict between wanting to take advantage of web services for the management of personal data and our desire to have all of this data on a local drive. Poyozo is a new service that scrapes personal data and returns it “home.”
With apologies for the slow pace of getting these videos posted to the web site, today I bring you a video of a mind-blowing presentation by Ben Lipkowitz of his life-logging project at the last QS Show&Tell. As usual, this is a raw documentary record, made on the fly, so don’t be surprised by the…
In an interview for New Scientist, mathematician Stephen Wolfram says: “I’m an information pack rat,” he confesses. Recording our interview is just the tip of his peculiar obsession with documenting every moment of his life. “I have a keystroke logger that has collected my every keystroke for the last 22 years,” he says. “Every day…
“Self-tracker” appeared yesterday on Word Spy, the wonderful word-tracking site by Paul McFedries. McFedries does not track word usage quantitatively; his approach is to keep an eye out for neologisms, capturing them as they appear. It is done out of fascination. We’ve had our eye on medical and psychological aspects of self-tracking recently at QS,…
Here is a great talk by Ryan Grant from the last QS Show&Tell. Things got especially interesting when Ryan talked started talking about how the device he is making would allow you to capture, in sound, stills, and video, moments of your life that had already passed. Below are a few excerpts from the audio…
Review of the LENA Baby Monitor: a voice recorder that tucks into a child’s clothing and evaluates their “language environment” throughout the day.
