Keeping A Digital Diary On A Treo

About a year and a half ago, my wife and I took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico. In my backpack, along with my laptop, I had stowed a Siemens SX56 PDA. This was the first time we had ever visited Mexico, so I decided I wanted to keep a day-by-day account.

The SX56, like most PDAs, has a microphone. I changed the recording settings to a low frequency -- 8 kHz 8 bit stereo (still good enough for voice recording) -- and recorded the events of our Mexico vacation. Since then I've maintained a personal audio diary on my PDA, trying to put something in for each day without being bogged down by boring minutia. Of which, sadly, there is enough.

The SX56 has only 32MB of storage, and part of that is used for system files. I found myself filling it up and having to dump to my laptop far too frequently. It turns out this was hardly an insurmountable problem.

I bought a Sandisk 256MB flash card, and switched the voice recorder to save to it automatically. This solved two annoyances at once: I didn't have to dump the voice recording files as frequently to my laptop, and I no longer needed to sync via cable, which is always a pain. I could just plug the flash card into my laptop move the files off with Explorer.

For a long time, this was a very workable solution. It still would be, in fact, but by a small stroke of fortune, I was able to upgrade to a Treo. Here's a picture:

The journey of a digital photo: This picture was taken on my wife's Nokia cell phone, emailed from there to my Gmail account, download to my laptop, cropped using Gimp, and then FTP'd to my website.

Not very long ago, a guy I work with brought in a box of about thirty Treo phones like the one I snagged above. He had gotten them from his old employer who no longer needed them since they had just gotten a new budget. (Aren't they the lucky ones...)

After playing with one for a while, I decided I'd take him up on his offer of having one for free. It had all the features of the SX56, and then some. Like twice the storage space on the phone itself. And a real keyboard and navigation button, instead of purely on-screen controls. And of course, my 256MB flash card plugs right in.

Also, it has a camera. This didn't seem that significant at first, but we were recently on a hike, and I was able to take a picture of my wife and daughter, and save it on the flash card along with my diary's audio files. So now my diary has taken on a whole new dimension: It will include real as well as audio imagery.

This isn't the first time I've tried to keep a diary. A couple times in the past I was inspired to do it, and each time, it fizzled. The reason my PDA diary hasn't, I think, is because it lends itself so well to the task. It's portable, by which I mean it has a battery and fits in your pocket, and it requires little effort -- just click and talk about the day's events.

Really, the hardest thing at this point is making sure that you only record things that are actually interesting. You don't want to bore your future self, after all.