Information Overload

Information abundant: information pools, information pockets, information streams, information databases; Information sources of so many types delivered in so many formats. I have too much information to manage it properly. Well, when I say 'properly' I mean there's too much to remember all of it, digest all of it, to take full potential of all the data being delivered to me.

I am a child of the information age: When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is get behind my computer to catch up with the world around me. I've got social networks, business networks, email accounts, and am a programmer so have a multitude of other internet services and jobs running on schedules. I need(read want) to know certain things at certain times. If a client has requested my attention via email I need to know as soon as possible. If it's my mothers birthday I need to know 7am in the morning. If my web server goes down, I need to know five minutes ago.

With so many online services and so many of them offering an RSS/Atom stream about nearly everything; An RSS reader does a good job on keeping me up to date with 66.67% of my knowledge source. But even reading my master RSS feed every morning doesnt provide all the information I need, but more importantly it doesnt invoke some simple actions that I find repetitive when I come across certain data.

• I have a facebook account; I want to be alerted of birthdays in the early morning.
  
• I follow some twitterers'; I only want to view tweets that are re-tweeted.
• I have family members on Flickr and Picasa; If they post photos then I want to see them, better yet funnel them straight to my wireless photo frame in one merged Media RSS stream.
• I've got an AreMySitesUp account: I need to urgently know when my servers are unavailable.
• I've got Gtalk, Skype and AIM acocunts...
• I have setup FTP locations that clients drop work in...
• I've got several email accounts...
• I follow several open source projects on forums, bug trackers, and version releases...
• I run several projects and each of those have several checks and balances in place to make sure all is in order.

I could go on, but the point is made. I've got so many sources of information of varying types and each hold a certain level of importance or urgency to me. Now I want a central way to organise all of this; A way to manage and schedule my information.

I am a programmer; I'm going to make something. An information engine. This engine will:

• Store data
• Consume data stream/trigger inputs
• Publish stream/alert outputs
• Provide a management console for all of the above

More on this to come...

My First Digital Frame

Yesterday I bought my first digital photo frame. It's a Kodak W1020. It has its ups and downs (imho), and I've been stirring up some ideas for this new gizmo of mine.

The major ups:

• It's wireless
• It reads from media rss streams

Without too much hassle I plugged in the power, latched into my home wireless network, and had connected to my Flickr account. Soon after I connected to the open net the frame asked if I wanted to upgrade my firmware - I did so and it was painless and easy; I would reccomend doing this.

My major downs:

• My second button on the vertical menu does not work. Darnit!! Most of the time it is used as a play button and I can get around not having it... but its just damned annoying.
• Minimum change time of 3 seconds... would like it to be smaller (I'll explain why later).
• I cannot get my (vertical) images to 'Fill screen'? (Image's can either leave space either side or get cropped in order to fill display real estate.. I prefer fill screen)

So I'm happy with the purchase but I think they've got a couple things to fix for the firmware upgrades.

Congrats and crits aside.. Here's my latest idea: Since the frame can read and display images from a properly formatted media-RSS feed, host such an RSS service on a machine on the same local network as the frame.

This RSS feed could/would be the aggregation of interesting media sources such as my Flickr stream, my contacts photos, youtube videos, etc. Further more I would like to be able to plugin RSS feeds that provide small amounts of textual info, like microblogging feeds or news headlines. The textual info should be rendered to an image, which is then cached on the stream server, and can then be picked up by the digital frame.

This is all a means to an end. The main idea here is that now I can write a small app that polls my email accounts. Then when I get an email I can push an alert to a text rss stream, which will feed into my RSS engine thingy, render the relevant picture, and ultimately get displayed on my digital picture frame sitting in front of me on my desk.

Further down the line I thought it would be great to hook the frame up to my VOIP client. So as I get a call, the frame should display who's calling me with a pretty picture of them. The problem here is latency of the picture change on the frame. 3 second changes for something more realtime as this is not practical. One last idea,.. Winamp plugin: on song change - display song details?..

The more I develop this idea in my head the faster it grows - cant wait to make this (or for someone else to make it first).