Ben Yee @ ITP

The first two segments of the semester focused on “logging yourself” and “logging your environment.” The most recent segment focused on “logging your computer.” Some of my peers tracked and visualized their mouse movements, some were sniffing packets, and others logged their keystrokes. I fell into the latter group, using a program called logkext to keep a record of my typing. The advantages of the program are that it’s lightweight, free, runs in the background, and encrypts the log file. Still, there is a bit of risk in logging key strokes because of sensitive information including login details and private conversations. Regardless, I installed the client and ran it for about a week. The terminal interface was simple and refreshing to use.

Once I gathered the data, I found the first step in analyzation (word countring) to be tricky, but fortunately our helpful instructors at ITP provide code to move that process along (see Daniel Shiffman – concordance and Dan O’Sullivan – language). Even with the code, getting the raw data into an organized list of counted words wasn’t obvious for a eclipse coding novice, but I got to the stage I wanted. **Note: in Eclipse, there’s an option when you select “run as” called “run configurations,” which allows a user to specify a file path in the “(x)=arguments” tab. You can see the top 500 words here. To get that nice round number, I manually removed noise and cropped off anything typed less than twice. The next step with this project would be to compare this data to other data …

After saving the photos from my first attempt at snapping about a day’s worth of photos, I used the Open Image Sequence option in Quicktime to make a time-lapse video. I tried various frame rates, and found 10 fps to be a fair balance for me in this case. I added some audio with iMovie as well: Millenium from Outkasts’s ATLiens, because I was listening to this album for a good portion of the time while the camera was capturing images. Check it out below.
snap-a-day from ben yee on Vimeo.

My intentions moving forward would be:

• repeat the process with higher resolution photos and shorter intervals, perhaps 1024×768 and an image every 5 seconds.
• capture a day that includes more interesting content (i.e. beyond monitoring my laptop screen)
• include an object that remains consistent for reference (see youtube example)
• experiment with different angles
• analyze scenes more carefully, noting the relationship between activity duration and level of happiness, interest, excitement…
• insert music samples or sound effects to create a multi-layered story of sorts
• continue ideation

As of my last entry, the plan for the enviroment-logging-assignment has changed a bit. I’ve learned that Blackberry devices are relatively locked down, and therefore difficult to use for creative projects. Rather than trying to hack the Blackberry, a beautiful solution occurred to me — why not borrow a Symbian device and try loading an existing application readily available online. Smile. With some generosity from ITP, I now have an N95 in hand, with 8gb of memory already available (another 8 gb chip and ipod shuffle are on the way via dhl still). After some reading and tinkering, I’ve concluded that N series devices are pretty dope…free connection through wifi, Bluetooth giving easy access to the images. So, I installed an application called Snapper written by Markus Mertama. Super simple and free. I started the capture around 2 pm today, and I’m shooting 640×480, every 20 seconds, just above waist level. I’ve been sitting in front of my machine most of the day, working with this for an hour or two to get it going, but then moreso coding a little Dating Game Show project for LiveWeb. I’ll keep shooting pics tonight and then again tomorrow morning. So far, I have around 1000. This should be cool.

Part of the assignment for the week is to read a study about American youth and flow/happiness here. I’ve read it through once and am about to give it a second pass in order to get a stronger understanding and opinion. At this point though, I recall the study to be engaging, but the method and the read itself to be semi-tedious…

2nd go: While some of the study seems to fall into the realm of common sense: “teenagers are happier when they do certain things (e.g. in leisure) than when they do others (e.g. study)”, it also introduces many interesting points of discussion. I found the excerpts below to be noteworthy.

• Hope, optimism and the ability to experience flow can be learned and thus moderate one’s level of happiness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Seligman, 2002).
• Experience Sampling Method (ESM) … relies on subjects’ responses to an electronic pager that signals at random times during the waking hours of the day, yielding up to fifty measures of happiness at specific moments during an average week.
• To measure whether a person was more likely to be in a Flow condition we calculated the percent of time spent in situations that were above the mean level of challenge and the mean level of skill at the same time. When a person was above the mean of skills but below mean challenge, the condition was considered conducive to Relaxation. High challenges and low skills were counted as Anxiety, and low challenges with low skills as Apathy.
• Discussion from pages 196-198.

The other part of the assignment is to plan an environmental logger. The Logomatic and Logomatic v2 from Sparkfun seemed like the most simple solutions for the task but are currently out of stock. Fortunately, this misfortune caused me to take a closer look at several of the links from the class blog, including WayMarkr, Sensecam, UCLA, Biomapping, Off-the-shelf. So now I’m in a predicament: uncertain hardware plan and possibilities aiding my indecisive nature. I really just want a Sensecam… hopefully tomorrow’s class will give insite and I’ll still be able to get supplies soon enough.

A sidenote while looking at other sensors on Sparkfun and thinking about trusting my body as a sensor of sorts: So yes, we’re tracking our environment beyond our body, beyond what we see, smell, hear, feel, taste, (and remember), so as a humans, we are equipped with some pretty awesome physical “tools.” A thought entered my mind though, which is nothing new (ie the existence of a bio-tech industry), but I guess new to me — What if we could upgrade a component of our body in the same way we upgrade our devices? Corrective lenses, earpieces, etc aside, I’d like some more memory and a nicer internal filing system. Better battery life wouldn’t hurt either.

* I’ve decided to go with a Blackberry Pearl for my sensing device, which will take a days worth of time-lapse photography. I’m thinking of positioning it at waist level to give an idea of what a child would see. Power issue – check. Storage issue – to buy microSD card. Functionality – to research today.