Has there been any progress on battery life? I'm rather surprised I can't even find a reliable source of audio-only recording that is as convenient and useful. I had a system with a recorder I ordered off of thinkgeek, but it was rather crappy and lost data. I've tried with my android, but it eats up battery life. There don't even seem to be any good phone conversation recorders, at least for the Nexus.
There is a project on kickstarter that seems to be quite a bit better than the looxcie, called Zion Eyes, but they only have ~3 hours of battery with the note that: 'Aftermarket plug in battery packs are available to extend the battery life.'
Has anyone messed with the fitbit? I know it isn't for video recording, but it sounds pretty good on paper. I've found that the withings scale is a damn good modern way to track weight without having to do your own spreadsheeting.
If there is a more recent conversation about this, I will happily go there. This is just the first thing to turn up material from this year on the subject via the google.
The old idea of lifelogging seems to be a reality now. It has the potential to be quite useful, and not just in distant contrived scenarios like cryonics or being recreated by an AI.
One of the classic objections was that we couldn’t afford to store the many gigabytes - possibly hundreds of gigabytes a year! - such a practice would generate, but right now you can buy 1 terabyte for <$50. And there’s no end in sight to whatever Moore’s law has been governing hard-drives over the past decade or two.
But how is one to record it? That seems to be the rub. All the storage space we could want, all sorts of new formats like WebM or Dirac or x264 to store the videos in - but what camera generates the data in the first place?
We don’t care about sleep time, so we don’t need any more than 16 hours or so of recording a day. We can probably get away with 12. Even 8 might be enough (to record yourself on the job - or off). An encoded compressed video might be 1 megabyte a minute or 60 megabytes an hour, but let’s be generous and assume 15x worse than that, or about 1 gigabyte an hour. So perhaps 16 gigabytes.
16 gigabytes of Flash costs $40 or less. So that’s not an issue either.
And presumably optics and microprocessors are very cheap given the incredible popularity of web cameras, digital cameras, digital camcorders and whatnot over the last decade.
But for all that, I can’t seem to find a mini-camcorder which will record even 8 hours and be a useful lifelogger!
Am I wrong? Are there existing products? It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly possible to take something like the uCorder, slap in $110 of batteries, and get it up to 8 or 12 hours’ life. But I have yet to find such a thing.