General

Lifeblog on other service providers (Six Apart partners)

Posted on by charlie

As you probably know, Lifeblog works with Six Apart’s TypePad service. Well, it so happens that Six Apart has other partners that use TypePad for their own customers. I know that for some of them Lifeblog will work fine, I just don’t know which ones and am waiting to hear back from Six Apart for more info (Hallo, Jean-Yves!).

But, the Six Apart Europe web page is so nice and informative, that I couldn’t wait to talk about this.

The list of partners:

They are also available in a bunch of local languages:

The Six Apart Japan team is also not sitting on their butts and have also started a list of impressive partners:

                        

If you have a Lifeblog phone and want to use one of these blog services with Lifeblog, let me know how it goes (good or bad). I hope to eventually have a list of services that work with Lifeblog.

Tips & Tricks

Using a Nokia Digital Pen with Lifeblog

Posted on by charlie

I use the Nokia Digital Pen to doodle, take notes, and
sometimes make something to post. One problem is that the pen
saves images in “.gif” format and not the “.jpg” that Lifeblog is looking for.
So, I trawled the net for an app that would help out. Would you believe that
there are no imaging apps that do the conversion? I guess it’s not a major use
case here.

Well, the funny thing is that I found an app buried in Forum
Nokia. The app is part of a tutorial on graphics formats, so it’s really just a
programming example (hence the generic icon). But, hey, it serves the purpose
here.

Here is the file: ImageConverter.SIS (don’t know if I’m allowed to distribute this, though)

How to get your digital pen drawings into Lifeblog on the
phone:

0) Transfer the drawing to your phone and save it where you
can find it. Remember the file name!
1) Open the Image converter app
2) Find the file to be converted: Options->Open then
browse to find the file.
3) To convert it: Options->Save As. This opens a list of
formats to save to. Select JPEG. Press OK!
4) Select where you want to save it to.
5) Give it a name and end the name with ".jpg".
You need the extension for Lifeblog to pick it up.
6) Once you’ve saves the JPEG with the extension, Lifeblog
will automatically pick it up. Hooray!

Now, wouldn’t it be easier if Lifeblog just supported GIFs?
I’ve been asking for almost a year now. Guess I haven’t convinced them yet.

Sigh.

Have fun.

General

Digital memories: we can forget them for you wholesale! | The Register

Posted on by charlie

Andrew Orlowski from The Register had a chat with our Fealess Leader, Christian Lindholm, about the memory banking business and the future of memories.

Link: Digital memories: we can forget them for you wholesale! | The Register.

But one of the more awkward questions is what happens to "Our Stuff", once we trust it to the digital void. This was brought starkly into relief when I met Nokia user interface designer Christian Lindholm, at 3GSM in Cannes last week.

Musings

The Brightest Blast, noticed by a very small creature

Posted on by charlie

Link: Sky and Telescope – The Brightest Blast.

The "superflare," from a magnetar named SGR 1806–20, irradiated Earth with more total energy than a powerful solar flare. Yet this object is an estimated 50,000 light-years away in Sagittarius, on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy behind dense interstellar clouds. "This is mind-boggling when you think about how far away it is," says Kevin C. Hurley (University of California, Berkeley), one of the lead investigators.

I can’t help but think of how tiny and insignificant we can sometimes seem. Isn’t it a marvel that we exist at all? Think of it: beings that are constantly going against entropy, living on a think crust of a little ball of molten rock, spinning around a tiny star, part of an immense galaxy, in a universe we can’t even fathom the size of?

Sigh.

Tips & Tricks

One example on how to adapt a blog server to work with Lifeblog

Posted on by charlie

Robert Price went ahead and documented how he got his homegrown blog server software to work with Lifeblog. Not only does he say he did it, but shows how.

All he did was download the specs from here, fired up his 7610, and did his magic. Check out some of his posts. I like his little "Lifeblog Entry – Posted via Lifeblog from a Nokia smart phone" posted at the bottom of each entry.

Way to go Robert!