Experiments in Lifelogging, Part 4: Out of Order

Upload problems solved!

I got notice from Narrative support that a new version of the Narrative Uploader for the Mac is available and it finally solved the upload problems I had from the beginning. Yay! No more limiting the upload speed to get anything to upload at all. Oh, and I notice they fixed the "kb/s" vs. "kB/s" confusion, too. Now it say kB/s everywhere. Good work, thanks.

If you're on a Mac, you may want to download the Uploader again from start.getnarrative.com. Check the version number as displayed in the Finder. It should now start with 2014 (whereas the previous one started with 2013).

How do you wear this thing, continued

I'm still looking for the best way to wear the Narrative Clip. Now that I'm back to work, I wear regular shirts again and clipping it between the buttons seems natural (I don't wear a tie) and provides good results. Alternatively, I could clip it to the shirt pocket.

The coat I mostly wear these days has a flap over the zipper at the front, which also turned out to be a good location for the Clip, even though I notice it does vibrate quite a bit when I move. The light weight of the camera probably helps here. It's more visible in that place, though. I do get the occasional puzzled look when I'm wearing it like that. But so far, nobody has dared to ask me about it.

I also tried clipping it to the shoulder strap of the bag I usually carry to work, which seemed like an obvious place to put it. However, it ends up facing away from me in a 45 degree angle, i.e. it's taking photos of things happening next to me; sometimes even things I didn't notice at the time. So it's not exactly a reproduction of the things I've experienced. Also, when sitting down in the underground, it often ends up pointing more or less straight up. I've got lots of footage of the lighting of the underground carriages as a result.

For best results, when taking off your coat or putting down your bag, you will obviously have to adjust the location of the Clip. So I'm practicing to put it on discreetly. That doesn't always work as smoothly as I hope it would. But, as mentioned above, nobody seems to have noticed or at least cared enough yet to ask me about it.

Mysteriously starred photos

I'm pretty sure by now that the cause of the mysteriously starred photos in my moments is sudden movement. This seems to accidentally trigger the feature meant for double-tapping the device. Oh well, I can live with that.

I can also confirm that the iOS app has a bug that doesn't let you unstar photos. When scrolling through a moment, you can select the current photo and star or unstar it. Starring works, unstarring doesn't. It will remove the star but when you call up the moment again, the star is back.

What does work is to unstar it from the list of starred photos, which also happens to be much more convenient. Be aware that that view does have a redraw problem, though. Unstarring a photo will make it disappear from the view and after unstarring a couple, you may end up with a half-empty screen. Which makes you wonder where all the other photos went. Try scrolling back and forth a bit - they'll show up then.

Moment Oddities

I'm having an odd and spurious problem with the moments view in the iOS app. Sometimes, the trimmed view will show photos in a random order.

Here's an example: I went grocery shopping at the local super market, then to the baker, then headed back home. Have a look at the screenshot of the preview of that moment below. It shows the bakery, a scene inside the super market, the way home, then 2 more photos from the bakery, then (half visible) the checkout of the super market.

When viewing the untrimmed moment, everything seems to be in order. The problem is also temporary - a moment that was scrambled before was okay the next time I revisited it and vice versa. The Narrative team is on the issue, apparently, but they don't seem to have found anything yet.

Another thing that I noticed: The trimmed view of the moments of my daily commute to work mostly starts with photos of the underground station, skipping photos from my walk to get there. Is the Narrative software intelligent enough to recognise those as (mostly) showing the same things every day?