What to do with recordings of your entire day?

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

Thomas Pederson's question about the best way to record an entire day's 
affairs made me realize that the technology is readily available today 
to do this quite cost-effectively.

Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2, $150 (direct)
Viosport Adventure Cam II, $200 (direct)
8GB Seagate CF Microdrive, $210 (amazon)

For under $600 you have nearly everything you need.  Add a battery pack 
for the Recorder 2, add a GPS tracker to log your position throughout 
the day, and you're still under a thousand dollars (US).

At the end of the day you have 14 hours of 1mbps 640x480 30fps MPEG-4 
video and audio, plus GPS tracks.  8GB is little enough data you can fit 
it on one dual-layer or double-sided writable DVD, one disc per day.

For better quality (2mbps) video, get two Microdrives and swap midday, 
but you'll need two DVDs per day for all that data.

Don't want to risk your day to rotational media?  Get a pair of 4GB 
CompactFlash cards and an external photo storage HD (HD + cardreader in 
on unit) like the Vosonic or Mediagear units, swap the 4GB cards after 
three or four hours each, and dump it to the HD while the other one is 
recording live.  4GB CF are ~$200 each, and the HD will be another $200. 
  Or, just get four 4GB CF cards for 16 hours on solid state media.

A GPS device to log your position and orientation throughout the day is 
nice to put your video in spatial context, and software like GPVlite 
(Hoyt Technologies bundles it with their cameras) lets you integrate 
your GPS tracks with your video:

http://www.gpvsystems.com/pages/gpvlite.htm

Some sort of way to "bookmark" time, either on the GPS unit or something 
else, a way to flag an event would be useful.  You could then look at 
those sections of video to remember why it was important, and use 
now-generally-available superresolution software to make high-resolution 
still images:

http://www.qelabs.com/sr/index.asp
http://www.photoacute.com/studio/index.html
http://www.topazlabs.com/topazmoment.html

But the question is now, to what end?  Hypothesizing about the day when 
we'll be able to do this is old hat: I can do this tomorrow.  Why should 
I?  Apart from feeding a photography fetish, what can I do with a 
recording of my entire life?  How do I process that into something 
useful?  What is useful from it at all?  I don't mean for specialized 
scenarios like law enforcement or legal observing, I mean for recording 
ones everyday travails, going to school, going to work, commuting, 
reading, getting online, talking to friends, etc.

Discussion welcome.

Thanks,
Vitorio Miliano

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