Blimey!

'm doing a new build. It’s called Project Life-Cam. The idea is to build a small, wearable, digital camera that I can wear constantly for up to a month; that's seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, taking one digital picture every 30 seconds. The total number of stills per day will be 2880; or 20,160 digital pictures a week; 80,640 a month. I would then look to edit all 80,640 low res images into a video sequence. At 25 stills a second (based on the 25 frames per second UK TV standard), I would end up with a movie of one month of my life that lasts just under 54 minutes.

I have the technology in place. I’m going to use my Nokia 6680. My research threw up a third party add-on for Symbian that with a bit tweaking allows me to take a still every thirty seconds. I need to add a 1GB memory card to the phone (Nokia make one that they say is compatible, despite the 6680’s stated maximum of 512MB). The final challenge is to power the phone. I can plug it in when I’m at home, but I need a fool-proof power option for when I’m out and about all day. While at CEBIT I came across a stand selling a tiny, clamshell 'phone' sized solar power unit. Something like this would be ideal as I could mount the phone cam in/on one breast pocket and the tiny solar power unit on the other.

I plan to upload my pictures every night by switching memory cards for a few minutes or so. Like the issues surrounding power consumption, solar power and phone performance, I’ll only know how long it takes to upload two thousand plus images every night when I’m actually doing it. Each image will weigh around 35K. For the night’s I stay in hotels, a necessary evil when working for The Gadget Show, I may opt to transfer the images to my laptop for a later upload as I don’t trust 3G and I refuse to pay through the nose for Wi-Fi.

I'm using Flickr as my server solution and something called on my phone Shozu to offer me the chance of uploading my images to Flickr when I'm away from home and can't do my nightly broadband upload.