[extropy-chat] Enhancing Our Truth Orientation

[Hal Finney]

Slashdot had an article last night about a guy using a wearable
video camera to take footage of the big CeBit electronics show,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/14/028207.  The page with the
videos is http://cebit.150.dk/.  He has BitTorrent links to download them,
but the one I downloaded didn't play on my Mac.  They're quite large,
20-300 MB, but there are a zillion people seeding them today so it is
an easy download with BT.  I'll try some of the others.  (While writing
this I downloaded another one and it worked OK.)

He's using a "Pocket Media Assistant", the Archos PMA430.  This is an
interesting gadget, primarily a portable video player crossed with a PDA.
It's very expensive, $760 at amazon.com.  It has a 30 GB hard disk
drive and can play and record videos and mp3s, capable of holding up to
120 hours of video.  It can sync to a PC using either USB2 or 802.11b
wireless, so it would be pretty fast to upload video periodically;
in fact, he did it from one of the manufacturer's booths at the show.
The PMA430 runs Linux so you can actually load many kinds of free software
onto the device which would make it useful for experimenting with.

The person who had it at the show, Charbax, used an inexpensive head
mounted surveillance type color video camera connected by cable to the
handheld PMA430.  He said running the video recorder constantly used up
a battery in about 5 hours, so he had to switch batteries once during
his day at the show.

This device is surprisingly close to a practical always-on wearable
video recorder.  It just needs a bigger battery.  Then if the price
comes down in a few years it will be practical for widespread use.

Hal