Getting started with Life Logging

Choosing an application for automatic life logging

There are one or two applications that you can use for your iOS or Android devices that will give you automatic life logging capabilities. Basically all you need to do is to start the application and it will record the places that you have been to. Some of these applications have better facilities than others and maybe it’s best to try out a couple of these apps to see which one works best for you. The other thing that you have to consider with these applications is that some of them, in fact most of them will kill the battery due to the increased use of the GPS of your mobile device. It may well be that some of these applications will be unusable because of how long it takes for them to kill the battery on your iPhone or your Android phone. Then again you could find it much more useful to have this automatic logging happening and to be able to get round the battery problems with the use of an extra large battery that you can use to keep it going for longer. The only problem with that is that it does tend to make the phone much bigger and a fair bit heavier. On my Android phone I have a ZeroLemon battery which more than doubles the size of the original Samsung battery. With normal use of the phone I can get two half days of battery life instead of having to charge the phone up whenever possible during the day in order to get a full day out of it.

What does the life logging application do?

Really all that the application will do is to take note of where you are with GPS and give you an option of naming those places. Once you have named it then when you go back there again you don’t have to do it again. You can add a picture or a note in some apps. I have been looking at an application called Saga and in my first few days of using it I haven’t been terribly impressed. It doesn’t seem to have taken note of exactly what I’ve been doing and where I have been, unless I have opened up the application and tapped on some buttons or take some photos. I have also been looking at the iOS version to see if it does a better job. Still more testing needed.
Chronos find your time

Sleeping with Chronos

The other application that I have recently installed is one called Chronos and it will also take note of when you are sleeping. What you have to do is to put the phone face down when you get into bed so that it knows that you are going to sleep. When you have to get up in the middle of the night, as I do sometimes, then you need to pick up the phone so that it knows that you have woken up. Then all you have to do is to put the phone back face down again and start snoring once more. The other possibility if you want to log in the amount of sleep that you’re getting, is to get one of those fitbit devices.

Connecting to other services

FitbitThere are a number of different options for using these life logging applications and some will also connect into other services like Foursquare and Facebook. In fact with some of them you that can buy, you will be able to funnel information in from Fitbit and various other applications into one life logging application. It can be very useful indeed to have all of your data collected in one place. It is also important to consider about how you want to share out any of the information. When I’m using Day One journalling app I can publish information out to Facebook and Twitter quite easily. Day One is able to record your GPS information, you can add a photograph, and weather information. If you are capturing some motion type activity then it will know if you are stationary, walking, running biking or eating. I’m not quite sure how it works out if you are eating? You must have to tell it some how. To help you find specific posts to work with later what you can do is, to tag the post. If you are familiar with tagging then you will find that easy and quite helpful.