Around three years ago, lifecasting was all the rage. We idolized iJustine, Justin.tv and the countless other people brave enough to film every action, every day. The trouble with their form of lifecasting is that it's done via a camcorder strapped to a hat, filming all your actions plus everyone else's. You could almost say the SenseCam is the lifecasting device for shy people who are merely interested in jogging their memory at a later date; people who want to tell a story without having to hear themselves.

So, What The Heck Is It?

Measuring the size of a square pack of cards, it hangs from a lanyard around the neck and films everything within your eyesight in 640 x 480 resolution photos, compressing them as JPEGs on the device's internal 1GB SD card. It can store over 30,000 images—which works out to around 100 hours' worth of lifecasting, based on approximately 300 photos taken each hour (which is the average number automatically shot), plus the time each photo was shot at.

Its 0.3MP VGA image sensor may not be as good as your cameraphone or even laptop webcam (though it does shoot in a wide-angle fish-eye style effect which I loved), but those devices require you to click a button every time you want a photo taken. The SenseCam takes photos passively, based on changes to the light, temperature or movement—or you can set it to take photos on a timer instead.

It contains several different sensors—light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared detector for measuring changes in body heat, a temperature sensor and an accelerometer for detecting movement. It's certainly interesting moving between rooms with different lighting conditions, and seeing how many more photos the SenseCam takes.

Every Step You Take, It'll Be Watching You

When connected to a computer it pops up as an external hard drive, with individual folders dedicated to each batch of 100 photos, or roughly 20 minutes' worth of memories. I used the SenseCam over two days, and by the end I had thousands of photos to sort through. Opening all the folders and previewing them on my Mac, I just ran through them quickly, so they turned into something akin to a flipbook. It was shocking seeing how often I open my Twitter tab when working, and how many times each hour I chew on my nails.

Cooking dinner provided the best results. The SenseCam detected the change in temperature and likely the light as well, so took as many as eight shots a minute. Chopping sundried tomatoes turned the shots into a movie when I ran through them quickly on the laptop later—and stirring pasta with a wooden spoon saw my hand move very slightly in each shot.

Sadly—and this is more of a reflection on my life than the SenseCam—none of the photos are really worth showing anyone. In fact, what you see below in the gallery are the only photos I deemed interesting enough. No-one, especially not me, wants to see hours' worth of photos of my laptop screen as I work, flipping tabs and checking email. An alarming amount of photos showed my BlackBerry in front of the camera, as I replied to emails when I was away from my laptop. A good number featured my cat in them.

Here Comes The Fun

But the potential here is huge. Whereas strapping a camcorder to a hat is deemed as intrusive, having a small box the size of a deck of cards strung from my neck on a lanyard is far from it. Filming makes both you, and the people around you, very aware of every action. Affectations are created that way; egos are born. Having a camera that you don't have to control means it's forgotten, so a truer representation of your life can be broadcast—should you choose to put the photos on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr.

As there's no plans for Microsoft to send the SenseCam down the production line (excluding the fact that they've licensed the technology to Vicon, who'll sell it to the medical industry), it's not too important hypothesizing on why you could ever want or need one.

I do wish however that I was wearing it several nights ago when my friend won tickets to the London premiere of Remember Me, and we were stood 5m away from Robert Pattinson (he of Twilight fame). The one shaky photo I managed on my BlackBerry, which while it has a better image sensor than the SenseCam's, was ruined thanks to my nerves and emotions running wild. The SenseCam, while triggered by changes in bodyheat or temperature, doesn't have stage fright when confronted with celebrities-you-really-shouldn't-fancy-but-actually-do.

There's a future here with the SenseCam, if Microsoft can find the right partner to license the technology to for personal use. They could even launch it successfully themselves. I wouldn't use it everyday, and certainly have no need for reviewing 100 hours of my life through the form of 30,000 photos, but it'd be great fun to wear while at a party—especially for those of us who often suffer from memory loss the next morning. Adding a 3G chip and GPS, so each photo could be sent to an online profile and tagged with your whereabouts would be future features I'd like to see...but then, who would be interested enough in viewing someone else's life from their perspective?

Innovative device with huge potential

Easy to use, easy to transfer to computers

Fish-eye effect is fun

It'll probably never see the light of day in Best Buy or on Amazon

Photos could be higher-res, admittedly

bill cant fart

bill cant fart

SeventhExile Speaks

Of course, there are rumors swirling around that Bing might be coming to your iPhone in other capacities than an official app, which, with the Apple-Google continuing to escalate, don't seem so far fetched. [Bing]

The casket was designed by Alexis Vanamois and has space for an accompanying controller. That seems like overkill, though, because everyone knows that in video game heaven, Natal works flawlessly. [PC World via Kotaku]

This seems like a complicated subject. It's not. There's some data that's private, both in terms of content as well as the very fact of its existence, and your viewing of it. Let's say you look at porn. (You do.) This fact—not just the art porn itself—belongs to you. There's no need for it to be a discoverable part of your digital life, or, god forbid, your digital legacy. Here's how to make sure your private collections are in order, and our of sight.

Level One: Obfuscation

Who hasn't created a folder called "Business" only to fill it with an entirely differently kind of business? It's a hallowed tradition, enjoyed by nearly everyone who's used a computer in the last 20 years. And as ridiculous and inept as it sounds, it probably worked—then.

There was a time when hiding a folder deep within an operating system's file structure actually hid it. Family members and spouses never had a reason to explore C:/Windows/System32, much less the "Nrop" folder you cunningly stashed there. And unless anyone went out of their way to search for incriminating content, it just wouldn't come up.

Today, things are different. Both major OSes have deeply integrated and everpresent search features—Spotlight in OS X and Start menu search in Windows 7—which bring the depths of your file system bubbling to the surface with alarming ease and frequency. They prioritize file types over file locations, so your buried videos are just about as discoverable as if they were stored your "My Videos" folder. As far as hiding your shit, and keeping your bereaved family from discovering your bizarre-but-harmless-but-still-pretty-bizarre video collection, this offers only the slightest protection.

The section age-old variation on pornfuscation is the trusty file rename. Here's how it goes: Save your files, change their names to something innocuous, and switch their file extensions to something inscrutable. LadiesEatingFriedPigsFeetInLingerie.avi becomes lefpfil.dat. And it helps to sew together a little cipher, too. Something like:

.avi=.dat
.mpeg=.dll
.mp4=.lib
.jpg=.docx

While this will probably accomplish your goals with almost no initial effort, it's pretty unwieldy in the long term, and far from failsafe.

Level 2: Encryption

The word "encryption" evokes spy films, shady government agencies and more than anything, nerds. But here's the thing: It's actually super easy. It's also nearly 100% effective, unless someone very serious is looking very seriously for something seriously incriminating on your computer, in which case I probably don't want to help you out anyway. So!

Mac OS X: Creating a password-protected archive is your best option here. It's dead simple, consolidates your files, and puts your stuff one extra layer of abstraction further away from search indices and the like. To make a passworded .DMG file (an image/archive file that you can open with a simple click) from an existing folder, just do this:

• Open Disk Utility (Spotlight search Disk Utility)
• File>New>Disk Image from Folder
• Select the folder, click Image
• Select encryption (128-bit AES will do)

• Choose a unique password

And that's it! Now you have a whateveryouwant.dmg file that can't be viewed, opened or edited by anyone but yourself. Your very own little lockable porn capsule! (Ugh.)

Windows

To create a password-protected archive in Windows Vista or 7, you'll want to download a 3rd-party archive utility, like WinZip or WinRAR. And by like WinZip or WinRAR, I mean just download PeaZip. It's free, and better than the software you're used to. Then:

• Open PeaZip
• File>Create Archive
• Select the files you want in the archive
• Click the Lock icon under the Output selector
• Select "Encrypt Also File Names"
• Select archive type "PEA" (the fact that you're using this program's proprietary format, as opposed to something like ZIP, means that it'll be even less identifiable as, well, what it is.)

And there you go.

Level 3: Liquidation

Seriously, people, stop storing incriminating material on your computer. You're already getting this stuff from the internet, so just leave it on the internet. Stream videos online, and look at pictures without downloading them. It's easy.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer have private browsing modes, which don't accumulate history, cookies, or local caches of any kind. Use them. Your digital self will thank you.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy secret-keeping, folks!

Benguin

(Starman) 258, Brigadier-General of the FireWire Battalion

tonyn84

The Design by Community project kicked off last week and will run through May. Every week, users will have the chance to vote on a different aspect of the fantasy phone's design. This first week focuses on the device's display and user interface, letting users pick their ideal screen size, keypad, secondary buttons, and the rest. Following weeks include size and shape, materials, operating system, connectivity, and more. Democracy! It worked for America, so why not for your smart phone?

Sadly, Nokia says it has no plans to actually build the device, though the company will be posting interviews with members of its design team and comments from "key bloggers" as the phone takes shape. In May, after you've slid your sliders and cast your votes, Nokia will create a series of concept sketches to cap the whole project off. Then, looking at them, they'll wonder, "why don't we actually make this thing?" [Nokia Conversations]

BloggyMcBlogBlog

The message board was started by the CIA and Saudi government as a "honey pot" for gathering intelligence on extremist activities in the area. By all accounts, the strategy was working—the website saw significant terrorist traffic and provided a wealth of intelligence to both nations.

But according to the National Security Agency the site was a little too well-trafficked, and in 2008 it determined that the site was being used by terrorists to facilitate attacks against American forces in Iraq. A task force of officials convened and, despite the CIA's objections and one official's claim that the the NSA had no authority to do so, the plan to shut down the site went forward.

Dismantling sites is tricky business, and along with the forum the Pentagon unit that was carrying out the operation accidentally took out 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas. The Germans, as well as the Saudi officials who had lost a valuable intelligence resource, were not pleased with the disruption.

Cyberspace is a new, complex front that officials are still figuring out to defend. If the CIA's website was in fact contributing to the death of American soldiers, then it makes sense that it was dismantled. But, as one researcher noted, "you can't really shut down this process for more than 24 or 48 hours"—on the internet, where there's a will there's a way—and the CIA maintains that the NSA only managed to drive the terrorist activity into the shadows of the net, where it can't be as easily monitored.

Cybersecurity will only become more important going forward, so it's good that we're working out these kinks now. The internet is fundamentally a different kind of battlefield and securing it is a daunting task. But I'd imagine a good first step, for government agencies, would be getting on the same page. [Washington Post]

When I was a kid, my dad had a Rolodex. Actually, my dad still has a Rolodex. My dad is one of the least organized people I know. In his apartment, he is good at stacking things (like newspapers and bills and books) on top of other things (like pingpong tables and folded easels) on top of other things (like trunks and cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and bills and books). I was adult before I learned that you're supposed to continue to replace the toothpaste cap on the tube after you use it.

However, Mr. Grossman is organized about one thing: correspondence. He has a log book in which he draws pictures, staples post cards, and keeps notes on every phone call he has. But his greatest feat of organization is his Rolodex. No residence or phone number in his life (or my life, or my siblings' lives, or his ex's lives) has ever gone undocumented. Sometimes he throws out useless cards, but mostly they live on stuck to the little wheel, reminding me of my uncle's ex-wife's parents' phone number or my camp address from 1989 or my great aunt Betty who died last year. The cards are mostly white—or more precisely, they're nicotine white, which is actually more of a kind of gold color. Some are pink, because apparently there was a period where the stationer tried to appeal to... people who like pink. Each one has a degree of soul and meaning that no entry in my Gmail address book will ever possess.

The Wheel of Life

When I got my first job at a newspaper in 2001, I had a small Rolodex. I got it because everyone around me had one. What's more, people talked about their Rolodexes. "I think I have her in my Rolodex," they'd say. Or, "If he leaves, he's going to take his Rolodex with him." This, of course, meant that someone's "contacts" were veeeeery important. Sometimes, people would take a card out of their Rolodex if I needed it, and I'd go copy the information and bring it back to them. There were people who stapled cards onto Rolodex pages and people who hand wrote all the information. Cards could be added or tossed or shared with ease. It was a genius, efficient and highly personal way of staying in touch.

I didn't keep my Rolodex for very long. There were several reasons for this. For one, I'm actually pretty good at memorizing numbers. Like 19. And 34. And 5. 19 34 5. I just rewrote them without even looking! This is funny because my memory for everything else in life is so bad that I usually can't remember the beginning of a sentence by the time I get to the end which is why I have no idea what this sentence is about. Another reason is that my dad taught me this nifty number memorization system [http://www.the-number-thesaurus.com/Rules.asp] when I was a kid. But the main reason is that I, like (almost) everyone else, eventually started keeping numbers and addresses on my computer and phone. Now I'm at the point where I hardly do that. I just search my Gmail or text people or Google around until I find the digits and street names I need.

But just because this is the more "modern" method of keeping numbers and such doesn't mean that it's a better system. Really, the Rolodex might be one of the more important memory systems ever created.

Arnold Neustadter, Inventor

The Rolodex was the brainchild of Arnold Neustadter, a somewhat anal twentieth century inventor from Brooklyn. His daughter Jane Revasch, now in her sixties, clearly grew up putting the toothpaste cap back on the tube. "If I took a message for him, he wanted to know everything—first name, last name, where they were calling from , why, their number, the time...and I was just a little kid!" she told me.

Still, way back when, Neustadter's address book presented a kind of mess that he couldn't harness. Mid-century families were infamous peripatetic. Vaguely dissatisfied despite being well-clothed and fed and in possession of a nice station wagon and decent wet bar, they determined that the real American dream existed just two suburbs over: Between 1948 and 1970, an estimated 20 percent of all Americans moved each year. How was anyone supposed to keep track of all those new street names without having to rewrite their whole address book every few months? Plus, some people died! Pages cracked with layers of caked White-out. New phone numbers meant that, when there was no longer room under M, a coda symbol would have to indicate that those entries were being placed in W. The S's were mostly residing on an inserted piece of paper clipped to the back cover and any completely new entries were just going to have to wait until you could find a replacement book. Sure you could just start a new book every few months, but who had the time!

This was pre-Google, so think of all the hours it took to do what I did just this morning: research what happened to the boy from ET, wonder whether or not Coca Cola used to actually contain cocaine, and figure out which president came before Grover Cleveland. (Interjection from Mr. Grossman: "The library was really far. Before the Internet, if I had questions like that, I just made up the answers.")

Neustadter had combatted office disorder before. His Swivodex was a device that kept ink bottles from spilling. The Clipodex was a device that attached to the knees and helped stenographers keep pads from moving. The Punched made holes in papers. In the late 1940s, he and a designer came up with a way of dealing with the address book dilemma: a propped-up rotating wheels fitted with inexpensive removable cards. Some models had a cover equipped with a lock. (Each lock actually took the same key—but don't tell!).

All in all, it was an elegant solution. The cards were removable so that the Q didn't have to take up any space at all if it had no entries; the circular design allowed the more demanding letters to have more space when necessary.

When Neustadter first started selling the Rolodex in the 1950s, stationery shops were skeptical that anyone would want the spindly device on their desk. By the 1980s, however, the Rolodex had become such an icon that lawsuits were filed by companies who accused former employees of taking them with them when they left—having a Rolodex filled with important names meant everything. There were models selling for more than $200 and people often valued them at prices far higher than that. An entire 1986 episode of Moonlighting was devote to one stolen one being held ransom for $50,000. Hell, it was worth it! Those numbers didn't exist in some kind of "cloud" or on a hard drive in the closet. And the library was really far.

Facebook Schmcebook

Rolodexes were a testament to your relationships and your personal history. In 2008, Stanford University professors found that the average Facebook member aspires to have around three hundred friends, but that would've seemed a piddling number to the average Rolodex devotee, who often made it a point to use as many cards as the contraption could allow—and some held up to six-thousand. I remember an officemate who used to leave his Rolodex flipped open to important people. He didn't realize this made him look like a douche. But I guess people do the same kind of thing on Facebook. Did I mention I'm friends with Wendy the Snapple Lady?

Mr. Neustadter, who died in 1996, never saw the way in which digital storage would affect his iconic invention. But his daughter insists he would've argued that his Rolo-baby was as relevant as ever. When I called to tell her that I was going to include the Rolodex in OBSOLETE, my book about objects that are fading from our lives, she got huffy. She spoke in a tone that requires exclamation points. "They still work! You just can't carry them around! Places still sell them," she said. I told her she was right—the book is about things that still exist, but just barely. She continued. "They aren't obsolete! Give your book another title! You know, look at it this way: computers get viruses! But the Rolodex, it's never taken a sick day in it's life."

Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

JrsyDevil's Advocate®

The theory was especially popular in the 1960s and 70s, when scientists were just beginning to unravel the mysteries of the double helix. Our DNA determines our physical appearance, the reasoning goes, and our predispositions to various illnesses, and plays a role in our general disposition and skill set. All of that has been passed down to us through countless generations. So why not memories?

It sounds far-fetched, but there are still vast swaths of genetic code whose purpose is unknown. And the evolutionary advantages of having memories passed down—even one as simple as "FIRE BAD"—are overwhelmingly clear. Will we be able to tap into those memories any time soon? Probably not. But one day some generation might. And when they do, they'll see exactly how that great-great-great-grandpa Brian spent all his spare time on cheese snacks and 90s sitcom reruns. [American Chronicle]

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

mrgibblechip

The Wrapsol adhesive film is priced from $25, and while probably not intended for what's shown in the video, can supposedly handle six foot drops.

Of course, no one's showing us a six-foot fall. Instead we're to believe that the film has magical shock-absorbtion abilities based on little bounces against concrete. I'd have an easier time believing this whole thing if someone had made it a point to show that the abused phone is completely functional and not just scratch-free. And dropped it from six feet up. [SlashGear]

In an interview with Vice, Dr. Gottesman covered the big mysteries of gas, such as what determines the signature scent of a fart:

A baby is born with a sterile intestinal track. During the delivery, there's lots of fluid and stool and whatever, and it's thought that at that exposure the baby's colon is populated by the mother's colon bacteria, thereby affecting the smell of the individual's farts for the rest of their lifetime. There's also other theories claiming the colon is populated during the first few months of exposure to fecal material, but that probably doesn't affect the smell as much as the initial intake of feces by the baby during delivery.

He also covered the effect of our favorite beverages have on our bums:

Beer is carbonated, so that's why it makes you fart. Coffee causes the sphincter muscles to relax just a little bit, so you tend to have more farts by accident if you're drinking something with caffeine than if you aren't.

And of course Vice didn't let him go before he explained the phenomenon of oops poops, more crudely known as sharts:

It has to do with the muscles of the anus. There are two muscles of control. One muscle, the internal muscle which is active all the time, it's the one that allows you to sit on that chair without shitting on the chair, then you also have the external muscle which is a voluntary muscle like your biceps. And when you need to hold stool in it will contract, and keep the stool on the inside. The passage that you are describing happens for one of several reasons. One is that the internal muscle has become very labile, meaning any little input inside the anus causes it to relax. Sometimes it relaxes too much, and that can cause stool to slip out. The other reason is you could have hemorrhoids–everybody has hemorrhoids, but people with bigger hemorrhoids sometimes experience gas slipping out between the hemorrhoids and taking with it mucus material produced by the hemorrhoids, which can cause staining of your underwear.

You can read the complete interview over at Vice and I highly recommend that you do, because it covers all the concerns we may have about our rear ends. [Vice]

Yeah, that's right. I'm on to you! Just try to fool me, you crop tool using liar. [Tree Hugger via Twitter]

Batman: Arkham Asylum Game Of The Year Edition Hops On 3D Bandwagon
FREE GLASSES INCLUDED!!

God of War III Review: Olympic Glory
Watch out, this game will break your hand.

FarmVille How To: The Tips and Tricks of The Farming Masters
Tip #1: Don't play Farmville.

The Silver Age: Is Valve The New (Old) Marvel?
Neat piece.

Star Wars MMO Pricing Plan May Have "Some Twists"
Micro-transactions.

Heavy Rain Patch Is On The Way
I encountered one big bug during my playthrough, but that was less than most.

The Amazing Bill Paxton Pinball Machine
Next, Heck will construct machines for the three sister wives.

Mass Effect, Dragon Age Creators Consider The Post-Release "Romance Pack"
This is important.

So, How Laggy Is PlayStation Move?
A lot like Wii MotionPlus, according to Jason.

Dead Mario And Crucified Jesus
It was only a matter of time, Princess.

Scrap Metal Micro-Review: There's a Difference Between Mindless and Pointless
Two hours of my last weekend fully agree with every word of this review.