Lifeblog – How to …

Just imagine you are in a party. You are taking pictures with your Nseries device like crazy. And you are running out of memory. What do you do?

You can run to the next electronics shop and buy a new memory card.

Or you fire up Lifeblog.

In Lifeblog, you select “Options” -> “Manual cleanup”.  Two more clicks with the left soft key (“Yes”->”Ok”) gets the job done: all non-Favourite Lifeblog items will be removed from the device. But only such items, that already have been transferred to PC Lifeblog before. I.e. items that are safe.

Let me stress this: this single operation looks through all Lifeblog data types: images, videos, SMSs, MMSs, notes, sound, and also blog posts. Everything that is already backed up on the PC can go. Lifeblog does the cleaning for you. And you don’t have to fiddle with various applications in order to do the same manually which would take you at least until the party is over. Maybe even until the next party is over as well. 😉

Consider the following use case: by coincidence -or due to hardware failure- you have lost some of your Lifeblog data on the PC. But you still have it on the Mobile. Now you would like to restore the “lost” items on the PC from the Mobile.

This case is not so uncommon since items are not deleted automatically from mobile Lifeblog after synchronization anymore.

A normal synchronization between mobile Lifeblog and PC Lifeblog does not help in such a case, because Lifeblog 2.X only considers mobile items for synchronization that are either new or changed. And latter characteristic is the one that we can use for this small “hack”:

In the Timeline in mobile Lifeblog, select “Options” -> “Mark/Unmark” -> “Mark all”.

Afterwards, select “Options” -> “Make favourite”. Then start the synchronization. You might grab a cup of coffee now. 😉

With or without coffee, afterwards all your mobile Lifeblog items should be on the PC again. In the Favourites, you have to do a bit of clean-up now: you have to un-Favouritize the ones that received the Favourite status due to the “hack”.

I have to admit that this post was inspired by Jonathan’s comment on Ivan Kuznetsov’s blog:

http://www.ivankuznetsov.com/2006/11/gmail_mobile_cl.html#comment-27369134.

Ok, Lifeblog is not about blogging. It’s definitely not about turning my whole life into a public event.

Instead, it’s about lifelogging: it’s about creating and keeping a multimedia log of my life.

But from this personal log I can share all the stuff that I have. Therefore, if I want to blog, I can do so. And even better:
when combining PC application and mobile application into one neat system, I get the best of both worlds: I can share instantaneously from my mobile Lifeblog. And I can review and share more consciously from my PC Lifeblog.

Cut the crap, how do I set up a blog? Ok, ok, here it comes: a very much biased listing of blog services that work with Lifeblog 2.x.

* TypePad (http://www.typepad.com)

TypePad by Six Apart is the default blogging service for Lifeblog and it is also the easiest to set up with Lifeblog. As the main advantage of TypePad I see:

•  Lifeblog comes with predefined settings and help environments for TypePad. That means, TypePad is the blogging service that is the easiest to set up in Lifeblog

Against that I would name as the main disadvantage of TypePad:

•  It costs money – starting at a basic level which currently costs $ 4.95 per month / $ 49.50 per year

For TypePad, the Lifeblog help describes how to set up a blog, but in order to be repetitive, here are the steps:

1.  Get a TypePad account:
   • In mobile Lifeblog, “Options” -> “Settings” -> “Blog” will take you to your blogging accounts and from there “Options” -> “Sign up online” will take you via the Lifeblog web page to the TypePad site from where you can sign up.
   • PC Lifeblog, click on “Tools” -> “Blog Account Manager” -> “Add New” and you will find a link to the Typepad page.
   • Select your favourite web browser, type in http://www.typepad.com/ and take it from there
2. Enter your TypePad credentials into Lifeblog
   • In mobile Lifeblog, open “Options” -> “Settings” -> “Blog” and create a new blog account via “Options” -> “New account”
     Chose an Account name of your liking and enter the Username and Password which you selected when signing up for TypePad. The Server address you should leave exactly as is (http://www.typepad.com/t/atom/weblog/); no need to fiddle around with it! As an Internet access point, chose the one that you like :-). Also, whether you set “Optimise images” to “Yes” or “No” is a matter of taste; chose “yes” if you want to save time and money when uploading and if you want to enjoy a bit more reliable setup; chose “no” if you have a good data plan or enough money 😉 or if you fancy high resolution images.
   • In PC Lifeblog, same steps as before apply: click on “Tools” -> “Blog Account Manager” -> “Add New”. In the dialog, just add the User name and Password that you used when registering for TypePad. Again, leave the Blog server address exactly as it is! Obviously, the Lifeblog do not think that money is an issue anymore in today’s Internet data plan world; hence, there is no way to adjust whether you want to downsize images when blogging
3. Select one or several items in Lifeblog and start blogging

* Vox (http://www.vox.com/)

According to its web page, Vox is free and fun. And just like TypePad, it’s run by Six Apart. And even better, it supports upload from Lifeblog. I love Six Apart for having done that! 🙂 That brings me to the main advantage of Vox:

• It’s free!

The (really) tiny disadvantage is

• The server address has to be entered into Lifeblog manually.

Not surprisingly, the steps for taking Vox into use are quite similar to setting up TypePad:

1.  Get a Vox account:
   • Select your favourite web browser, type in http://www.vox.com/ and start registering
2. Enter your Vox credentials into Lifeblog
   • In mobile Lifeblog, open “Options” -> “Settings” -> “Blog” and create a new blog account via “Options” -> “New account”
     Chose an Account name of your liking. As Username, you should enter the email address that you have registered for Vox. As Password use the password that you have chosen for your Vox account.
     Now comes the biggest difference: You have to change the Server address to http://www.vox.com/atom/)! Again, Internet access point selection and “Optimise images” are up to your personal preferences
   • In PC Lifeblog, again the same basic procedure applies: click on “Tools” -> “Blog Account Manager” -> “Add New”. In the dialog, change the Blog server address to http://www.vox.com/atom/. Then, insert the email address under which you have registered for Vox into the field User name and your Vox password into the Password field.
3. Select one or several items in Lifeblog and start blogging

* Flickr (http://www.flickr.com)

Is there anyone who doesn’t know Flickr? If you are one of those, where have you been hiding during the last two years? Just for you, Flickr is THE photo-sharing slash photo-blogging web service. It became the ice-breaker 2.0 in the frozen sea of internet monetization, when it was sold to Yahoo in March 2005 for what is now to be considered an insanely small amount of money.

But back to the topic, what advantages does Flickr offer to you as a Lifeblog user?

• Even though it comes in two different flavours, the basic account is free. The pro account adds $24.95 to your list of yearly expenses.
• It enables you to share your images as part of the currently largest image-sharing community.

The main drawback, you’ll ask?

• The main drawback from a Lifeblog user’s perspective is Flickr’s clear focus on images. No other Lifeblog data types can be shared through Flickr.

And the procedure to take Flickr into use with Lifeblog is:

1. Get a Flickr account (in case you are the last one on earth who doesn’t have one)
2. Log into Flickr with your Flickr credentials and go to http://www.flickr.com/tools/lifeblog
3. Create a Flickr account in Lifeblog
   • In mobile Lifeblog, open “Options” -> “Settings” -> “Blog” and create a new blog account via “Options” -> “New account”
     Chose Account name of your liking. As well, Internet access point selection and “Optimise images” are up to your personal preferences. The rest of the settings, you should take directly from http://www.flickr.com/tools/lifeblog. Pay special attention to the Server address (which you have to set to http://www.flickr.com/services/atom/) and the Password. The Password is different from your usual Flickr password!
   • In PC Lifeblog, again click on “Tools” -> “Blog Account Manager” -> “Add New”. In the dialog, change the Blog server address to http://www.flickr.com/services/atom/ as indicated on http://www.flickr.com/tools/lifeblog. Also, the rest of the details you should take from http://www.flickr.com/tools/lifeblog. Remember: log into Flickr before going to http://www.flickr.com/tools/lifeblog! Let me also mention that it is a good idea to type the Flickr Password into the Lifeblog settings manually.

* Movable Type

Using a preconfigured and hosted solution is too lame for? But you lack the time to write your own solution from scratch?

If you have a server that fulfills the requirements listed here, another solution from Six Apart might be for you: Movable Type. Even though Movable Type is a commercial solution, the Personal Edition is free.

Unfortunately, Movable Type is not shipped with Lifeblog support. Therefore, some additional
assembly is required besides the basic installation. Luckily, all the information, bolts and screws are available from Robert Price’s blog. If you do exactly as you are told there, it should work quite nicely. At least, it did for me. 🙂

Good luck! And: if you know more blogging services that support Lifeblog uploading, please let me know.

I have about 25,000 items in my Lifeblog vault; amongst these are about 19,000 still images and 300 videos.

Even though browsing is fun, it can be tiresome to find this one image that I want to find just by navigating in the timeline. And my memory is too bad to remember the day -or even the exact year- of it.

In my previous post, I already explained the power of search in Lifeblog. But you can do even better if you follow a few simple rules.

Here is my proposal for a search strategy:

• Never ever delete any messages from your PC Lifeblog! No, not even stupid messages from local providers such as “Welcome to Italy…”. No, not even if you don’t care about messages at all. Why? Because you never know whether they will provide for a pointer during a later search.
• Before your search, disable any type-based filtering! Then you can be sure that your search will cover your whole database incl. all data and metadata. And you are more likely not to miss any pointers to this one little missing image.
• When typing your search, watch for the immediate feedback while you type away! Lifeblog shows a list of search terms that occur at least once in your database. Once you hit the search button, you can be sure that you get at least one hit back as long as you stick to the proposals.
• Watch for tiny pointers in the search result! In case you can’t spot the wanted image right away in your search result, look for clues. Such as the “Welcome to Italy…” message. It can be the missing pointer to the SLR image of Milan that you were looking for.
  When you have found such a pointer, just scroll the timeline such that your pointer is in the middle of the screen and push the “back” (<-) button. Now, you can see the time-based context – and your Milan image.

How to explain best what you can do with search in PC Lifeblog? Maybe the best advice is: Just use and see! 🙂

Seriously, there are plenty of things that you can do with that small search box that Lifeblog offers.

Search for text contents

It’s probably obvious that you can search for the contents of all items that contain text (text messages, multimedia messages, text notes):

• if you want to find all messages and text notes that contain the terms “football” and “worldcup”: just enter “worldcup football” (again, the order of terms does not matter)

Search for manual tags and descriptions

Of course, also all the manual effort that you spent on describing and tagging your items can be used during search:

• if you want to find all images that you tagged with “football” and “worldcup”, use the same search string again
• if you want to find all videos that have “football” and “worldcup” in their description field, you already know what to do. 😉

Search for automatic tags and descriptions

When creating items, such as images, on the mobile, Lifeblog enhances them with metadata. This metadata includes the name of the country that you are currently in, the information from calendar entries that apply to the current time, any sender/recipient information in case of messages and, of course, the timestamp. Hence, what you now can do is:

• if you want to find all the mobile images that you took in Germany, just enter “Germany” – even if you did not spend any manual effort on tagging
• if you search for “birthday stephen”, you will get all items that you created or received on your mobile at the time for which the calendar entry for Stephen’s birthday was valid
• if you want to find all the messages that you exchanged with somebody from Nokia, just enter “Nokia” in the search field
• if you want to find all your pictures from Chistmas Eve (independant of the year), just enter “December 24”. If you are only interested in pictures from Christmas Eve 2005, then you enter “December 24 2005”. Quite handy isn’t it?
• if you want to find all weekend items, you should search for “Saturday Sunday”.
• if you are interested in the pictures that you took in August over the years, you can enter “pictures august”
• etc. 🙂

You are a routine guy and want to view how a certain area has changed over time:

• Right-click on an images that you took with your mobile and select “Show objects from same network area”. It feels a bit like magic. 🙂

Let’s assume you want to view the exchange of messages that you had with John Wayne.

If you want to view such a message thread on your mobile, you can go to “Options->Find” and the enter “John Wayne” into the search field. Actually, you could even enter “Wayne John” as the order does not matter. And voilà: what you get is a timeline of all the messages that you have written to John or received from him.

As Lifeblog takes the name from your mobile Contacts application you need to be a bit careful of how you have spelled the name there: because a prefix search is used in mobile Lifeblog, a search for “John Wayne” would still reveal all the right messages if the corresponding contact entry says “Johnnie Wayne”. But it would fail for “John Waine”.

PC Lifeblog follows the same basic principles, but it provides for a bit more flexibility: “John Wayne”, when entered in the search field, will reveal all messages related to John. But on the PC, Lifeblog uses infix search rather then prefix search. And in addition you can also search for phone numbers.

If the phone number of John happens to be +1234567890 then a search for “1234567890” will show all his messages and so does “567890” or “2345678”. Also, “ohn ayne” would do the job.

Can be quite an entertaining feature for cold dark winter evenings. 🙂

Yes, in Lifeblog you get fully automatic tagging of your collection with cellids, country names, filenames, etc.

Yes, you can also tag stuff manually, both on the mobile and on the PC.

But there is also a middle way: Use the calendar on the mobile. For example, you can put all personal events into your calendar such as “12.12.07, 17:00-23:00 Birthday Party, Jenny”. Afterwards, you will be able to find all your images from that party just by entering “party” or “party jenny”.

Similarly, you can pre-tag all your holiday images from Crete. Or your videos from the football match Finland vs. Portugal.

And, as a side effect, you won’t forget about Jenny’s birthday party, anymore. 🙂

That’s an easy one: Just use “Find” in your mobile Lifeblog 2.X. 🙂

Seriously, chose “Find” from the “Options” menu in the Timeline and you will find:

• all messages from/to Alina by typing in “Alina”
• all images that you took in Italy with your Nseries device by typing in “italy”.
• all notes that you tagged with “party” by typing in “party”
• all videos that you took during your holiday by typing in “holiday” (if you had an entry for your holidays in your calendar)
• all messages to/from Alina related to Lidl by typing in “alina lidl”
• all blog postings you did about restaurants by typing in “restaurant”

and much more. I guess you get the point.

But you can take it even further: You have taken an image of Costello. It was some time ago. You don’t remember the exact date. It was when being in a pub in Finland. You were watching Sweden vs. England at that time. You have neither tagged nor named the picture with “Costello”. And you have 500 images on your Nseries device.

You can start browsing. Good luck.

Or you can type: “Sweden England” will find your message “come 2 chelsea. sweden vs england is on tv”. All you have to do then is press “Back” and voila: here are all the images from the Chelsea bar you took that night. Including the picture of Costello.

Unfortunately, Nokia distributes the mobile Lifeblog 2.X versions only for Nseries devices. There is only one serious flaw about the Nseries: not everybody owns one. Just take my wife as an example: she owns a 6670.
So how can you use Lifeblog 2.X together with non-Nseries devices? I see three options:

• Option A (if you have a Nokia S60 phone): check from the official Nokia Lifeblog page, whether your phone supports Lifeblog 1.X. If it does, download the application from the same pages and install it on your phone.
  On your PC, install the latest version of Lifeblog. Nobody requires you to own an Nseries device in order to do so. Neither do you need a license for Lifeblog 2.X. 🙂
  After you have installed Lifeblog 2.X, go to the directory where you have installed Lifeblog to, e.g., C:\Program Files\Nokia\Nokia Lifeblog. In this directory, you will find a file called “SyncConfig.xml”. This file you need to modify in order to get Lifeblog 2.X to work with Lifeblog 1.X on the phone:
  1) Make a backup of any existing Lifeblog data – but that’s part of your routine anyway, isn’t it? 😉
  2) Create a copy of “SyncConfig.xml”
  3) Open “SyncConfig.xml” with your prefered editor; in the worst case, plain “Notepad” will do
  4) Remove the comment that encompasses the first <Adapter> element
  5) Save “SyncConfig.xml”
  Afterwards, you will be able to read the data from the mobile Lifeblog 1.X into PC Lifeblog 2.X. You might not get all the metadata that Lifeblog 2.X supports. And the user experience might be a bit special. And Nokia doesn’t support it. But for my wife and her 6670 it works fine. 🙂
• Option B (if your device connects to your PC as a hard drive): Then, you can import compatible data via “File->Import from PC” into Lifeblog. More elegantly, you can drag and drop the device folder onto Lifeblog’s timeline. Lifeblog scans any given directory recursively and will figure out by itself, which files it can use. However, you are back to pre-Nseries metadata stoneage here: if you want to use metadata with your stuff, you have to add it yourself.
• Option C (if your device does not connect to your PC as a hard drive): You are pretty much on your own. Meaning: you have to figure out a way how to transfer images, etc. from this device to the PC. Afterwards, you can import stuff into Lifeblog from the PC. Not very elegant, I am afraid.

Metadata -incl. descriptions, tags, timestamps, calendar entries, contact information , etc.- is what makes Nokia Lifeblog different. Sure, other applications use metadata as well. But in Lifeblog, most of the metadata comes “for free”. That means, I don’t have to spend weeks in order to tag and organize their tens of thousands of pictures. Hence, it is easy to get metadata “in”.

But how to get metadata “out”?

There are at least two options to access all -and I really mean: ALL- of your metadata from outside of Lifeblog:

1. Read the metadata directly from the SQLite 3 database of Nokia Lifeblog 2.X.The database is called \MyDocuments\NokiaLifeblogData\DataBase_2\NokiaLifeblogDataBase.db3.
   The savy ones can create their own scripts/applications in order to access this database, e.g., via php.
   If you want to take a glimpse only or if you want to deal with your metadata interactively, you can use existing SQLite tools, such as the SQLite Database Browser. Such a browser enables you to investigate the database schema, trigger queries interactively and even update the data. If you add or modify data, there is a chance that you corrupt your database and might not be able to start Lifeblog afterwards! If you read your data only, your data is quite safe, unless the tool that you are using is either buggy or malicious.
2. Export the metadata into an XML file and read the XML file.
   If you want to read the metadata only, that might be the recommended way. What you have to do is initiate a full, incremental or selective backup in Lifeblog: Menu Tools->Back Up.Afterwards you go to the Lifeblog backup directory that you selected and open the zip file there. In there, you will find only one file: the XML file that provides for a snapshot of your metadata.

Just in order to be complete: the data itself -images, videos, etc.- can be found in subdirectories of \My Documents\ NokiaLifeblogData\ DataStore\Files. There, it is organized according to months and data types.