Jack Schofield from the Guardian Online reports on the latest trend the media has glommed on to, called ‘life caching’. I’ve been seeing a bunch of references to the whole Life Caching ‘trend’ (and been interviewed) since an article from Trendwatching.com pegged it and made it a buzz name (though it is not a new concept).
Schofield says, “Nokia’s Christian Lindholm has captured this trend perfectly with Lifeblog software.” The article is pretty good. Read it here.
A lady named Nancy saw a picture of mine of a lighthouse on Suomenlinna. She asked if I knew its name. I said that I didn’t and neither of us were able to Google anything.
So I was bent on finding out and today dragged the family on a quest to find out the name of the damned lighthouse. The weather was grand, we explored our favorite haunts on the island, and made our way towards the mystery lighthouse.
Well, at the museum shop we found out that the lighthouse had no name. Also, none of the island maps gave it a name. So we took a bunch of photos to send Nancy and made the best of it.
What was really cool was that the lighthouse was on the outside of the battlements. They had placed a ladder so that folks could climb through a window in the battlement onto the open rocks at the sea’s edge to go be with the lighthouse. The wind was blowing right on us at something like Beaufort 7 or 8, something like 30 knots with whitecaps spewing froth and all. The rocks were dry fortunately, but it wouldn’t be hard to tumble down them and into the water with that wind.
Excitement for all.
“Truly cool stuff! The timeline navigation bar feels really nice. Good work!”
One of the key items in Lifeblog is the synchronization – both the tracking and transferring of new objects and the synchronization of the Favorites. While Lifeblog might seem simple, we spend a lot of time discussing and working on the synchronization. It might be just a line on the feature list, or a single button or menu item, but it’s hard work to do synch.
I remember years ago I had two mobile devices and one computer. It was a disaster trying to keep everything in synch. If two-way synch is hard, imaging more than two – it’s not worth it.
I think that’s why whenever I talk about multiple phones per Lifeblog, the R&D guys flex their hands and look like they want to wring my neck.
Pretty flowers and their keepers
Today we’re at a tournament. The boys were weak in the first game but came on strong for the second. Waiting for the third in about 45 mins.
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| Moblog with PicoBlogger. |
At one our buildings in Finland
Just as Lifeblog isn’t meant to work with two databases, it’s not meant to work with two phones. I’ve tried it. The items all transfer well to the PC, but then it gets hairy with the Favorites.
I think the model used to design the Favorites didn’t expect more than one phone or item database at a time dedicated to Lifeblog. Makes sense, since Lifeblog is not meant to do these things. 😉
But, it would be cool if a family, or say, and event could have a single Lifeblog to which all the items were transferred and each person had their own Favorites. I don’t know.
I realized when I installed the Lifeblogger hack that it expects there to be only one Lifeblog database per user account on a PC. Well, I have two. And yes, it’s a little hack.
And yes, here’s the little hack.
This hack allows you to make the Lifeblog app on your PC use another folder other than the default folder. I use this to have more than one Lifeblog on my PC, for example a Demo Data Lifeblog and my Personal Lifeblog.
Remember: Lifeblog wasn’t meant to really work with more than one database. Therefore, the main warnings are that there is some confusion with the Favorites that I haven’t figured out yet, the Lifeblog data that is open is the one that will synch and is a pain to move data from one Lifeblog to the other if you mess up, and, of course, you risk really screwing up everything (it’s not my fault, but yours). Back up back up back up before messing around.
How to do it:
Basically, you make a shortcut of the NokiaLifeblogMain.exe app and set it for another target.
Here are two shortcuts I have.
One is my personal Lifeblog, the other the demo Lifeblog. To be able to have them on one machine, this is what I did.Locate NokiaLifeblogMain.exe (NOT NokiaLifeblog.exe).
Copy the file and then paste it as a shortcut wherever you want it. I pasted my shortcut on the desktop.Open up the properties for the new shortcut. In the target field, spell out the path for the folder that will contain the Lifeblog Data folder.
I have a folder called LifeblogDemoDataFolder.
Notice the original NokiaLifeblogData folder. That’s for my personal Lifeblog.The new target folder will contain the folder with all your Lifeblog data.
I hope this makes sense. 😉 Try it with a network folder. I don’t know what would happen if the network is offline when opening Lifeblog. I’d be curious to know.
