HotRecorder, Skype and My Life Bits
Inspired by listening to talks about the Microsoft Research project, My Life Bits, I decided it would be a good idea to record my telephone conversations when I can. Fortunately it turns out to be really easy if you use Skype and the free program HotRecorder. The product is not the prettiest I have ever used, and the UI is a bit quirky but it gets the job done. Recording quality is good, and you can add key words and the name of the person you called to each recording making retrieval easy. The ad-supported version is free and the premium version is only $14.95. Well worth trying out, if only to listen to the different responses you get when you tell people you are recording the call, from the slightly guarded/worried to the “where can I get a copy”, so far!
If you want to get up-to speed on My Life Bits I recommend the recording on IT conversations, which I listened to on my Treo while walking along the beach last week.
My Life Bits progress so far:
- Photo’s
- Emails
- Web pages
- Documents read
- Documents reviewed
- Audio listened to
- Contacts talked to, or want to talk …
I have just upgraded all of my servers and everything seems to be working fine except for skype. When I click on the Contacts Tab the contact list is not reliably displayed. If I close skype and then open it again then it is displayed once, but from then on the tab changes to show focus, but the actual contact list area continues to show the content of the previous tab (whatever that was). In the screen shot I have attached you can see that contacts tab has focus, but the start screen is displayed.
Today in our little town we were celebrating the fact that after much campaigning we now have our own town council which gives us a more effective voice at the Borough Council, celebrations were mainly of a musical nature, and this picture is of one of the local bands. The town was buzzing, helped by the fact that its was a gloriously sunny day. We walked home along the beach playing football, which regular readers will know means that physically I am on pretty good form today.
In recent years we have seen a lot of money spent on appropriate development, which has successful regenerated the town centre and this year we are hoping to see further investment in our promenade gardens and in our town centre park. This picture is of my mum and the kids in one of the beach side cafes.
On Saturday I started to pull up all of the strawberry plants that had rooted from runners last year. I ended up with several hundred plants in a big heap. I decided that it would be a good idea to give them away, but my wife thought no one would be interested. I took this as a bit of a challenge, I am one of those people who likes to think the best of others (which is an extension of having a positive outlook) my wife in contrast always expects things to go wrong and tends to distrust those she doesn’t know. Anyway I bagged the plants up – 15 plants to a bag – and to make the challenge more interesting decided to give the plants away but allow for donations.
I have been pretty pleased with 
Michael 
Where I live we have a micro climate, we always get better than average weather, a lot less rain than just a few miles inland. But this Winter has been amazing, in fact it feels like we have missed winter altogether. the last month it has only rained a couple of days and most days we have had at least some sunshine. I took this picture of the flowers as we walked along the beach promenade on Sunday, the picture was taken with the built in camera in my Treo 640*480, but good enough for the odd blog posting.
I just got the following invite from Microsoft, it looks like a great event, hopefully someone will pay for me to attend 
After an initial abortive attempt at using 
It’s been widely reported (see this