It's not an easy question. Like what did you have for lunch yesterday? It's history, something humans easily forget.
With quotes like "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." by Winston Churchill and "History takes time. History makes memory." by Gertrude Stein it is clear we create and internalize our own history. For our purposes at Techlife Rudyard Kipling said it best,
"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."
Last summer the Techlife West office was my home base for a few great weeks. I traveled the Pacific Coast and soaked up the people, food, climate and culture of California. I made some great personal history in other words: memories. In today's digital world, there are a few great ways to remember the time. Most readers have seen or own a digital picture frame. These are a nice and easy way to allow you to rotate the old analog picture frame image. But what else can you do with the memories you make?
Many people move their photos and videos online to easily share. It is also great to have them online for a cloud storage backup. Fast forward one year, now only you care about that history, and how often do you see it? If you are like most people the answer is never.
We have great camera tools such as mobile phones, point and shoot cameras, flip cameras, DLSR cameras along with great photo and video editing software but what becomes of our personal history after the initial share? It fades from memory, from our personal history.
This week one of our Tehclife West readers asked about an email I sent him that was a little jog down memory lane of the places, sites and photos from a day we spent together a year ago. I sent him one of my Timehop emails. Timehop is a simple concept. Send me a daily email with what I was up to 1 year ago. To automate this it uses your choice of services including, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Text Messages.
Another service I use is Memolane, which offers a visual timeline of your history on their site and a daily email. Memolane can tie into more than 15 different online services to extract last year's memories and let you relive them. Plus the timeline feature allows browsing of the chronological history by day which adds a new dimension to reviewing your online and offline life. Memolane also offers MemoSearch and MemoShake, available on Google Play.
One of my favorite tools for personal history is the Android app WallSwitch. This app does a single easy thing, rotates my wallpaper every so often and uses my photos folder to pull from. Since my phone is always with me to capture my history it is great to pull out a photo from 3 years ago and relive the moment. WallSwitch seems to have an uncanny knack for pulling recent photos and anniversary of 1 year, 2 year or 3 year photos. I haven't seen the algorithm, but it's perfectly balanced. I have WallSwitch change hourly from my more than 3000 photos.
Are you an iPhone user? Do you have a wallpaper rotation or wallpaper automatic switching tool you love? Please share it.
Originally published in the syndicated column Techlife by Dave Kaufman. http://bit.ly/P6HI6Q
