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April 13, 2006
Dictaphone
Lately I've been trying to get more organized. It's been an uphill battle, especially with various debris crashing down on me in the occasional avalanche, but I'm making some progress.
One of the things that I was battling was the "think of it in the shower" syndrome. That's when you remember something important but only at times when you can't do anything about it, i.e. remembering in the shower that you need to call Jim. (Yes, Jim, I'm thinking of you constantly in the shower -- just so you know.) The key is to capture those thoughts somewhere in a trusted system and then go over them later when you can organize them into actual actionable to-do items.
I do have a PDA, but I've found that it's not quite convenient enough. It's a little too big to carry around in my pocket, and even then, writing something down isn't always practical. I'd tried carrying around a little tape-recorder before, but it suffered from the twin problems of size and tape management. It was about as big as my PDA, and the resulting recording was a long rambling monologue that had to be played, paused, played, paused, etc. for transcription.
What I wanted was something very small, i.e. smaller than my cell phone, that could record at a touch and organize those recordings into discrete chunks that I could manage independantly of each other, preferably on my computer.
Well, it looks like I found it.
It's actually an MP3 player, but it also functions as an AM/FM receiver and a dictaphone. It remembers what mode it was last in, so I can put it into dictaphone mode and just leave it that way. It's not quite one-touch, but it's close. I have to turn it on, hit a button to start recording, hit it again to stop, and then turn the thing off. Still, it's reasonably simple to do one handed. The resulting recordings are encoded to MP3 automatically and numbered. It connects to my computer via USB, and it opens up as a file folder showing me each recording. I can play them one at a time, act on them, delete them, or copy them to my computer for archiving and/or later action. It's pretty much exactly what I wanted, and I picked it up for about $70 at Fry's Electronics.
Now, if only it was waterproof I might finally get around to calling Jim.
Technology by Dan at April 13, 2006 08:55 AM