Recently I’ve been intrigued by the personal statistic service over at Daytum.com. In brief summary Daytum is a service that allows users to quickly generate graphs about anything they’re interested in. It then publishes them in a beautiful interface for others to see.

This new service got me thinking about how awesome it would be to have a detailed statistical overview of one’s life. I’m not talking bare bones stats, but rather in depth detailed statistics. I.E. cups of coffee consumed daily, total number video game hours played, the longest period of time spent awake, the number miles driven, the amount of jokes told, the amount of jokes flopped, etc.

Well, interestingly enough it was pointed out to me that the head graphic designer behind Daytum actually has compiled some yearly statistics of his life. You can check them out over at Nicholas Felton’s site.

Looking at Nicholas’ statistics made me start to wonder, how would you track these sorts of things? I imagine some of it would have to be guess work, maybe sitting down once every two weeks and going over your four or five big categories. “What was my average amount of sleep this week? How many girl’s numbers did I ask for, how many did I get? How much time did I spend reading?” Then, over the course of the year you could keep these life stats tracked in a service like Daytum. Or you could tweet them to a private twitter feed. Then at the end of the year you could run all this information through an excel sheet and see exactly where you stood. Granted it would be a definite time commitment, but I think it might be worth it to see an overview of your life in statistical format.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has other good ideas for how to document these sorts of things, perhaps a good iPhone app? Leave your ideas in the comments or hit us up on Twitter @imulus.

Update: Edited spelling mistakes of Feltron vs. Felton, oops.

A few weeks ago I decided to set up a new service on my personal website to track all the social services that I’m a part of. Basically I wanted a central place where people could go to find out what I was up to, what pictures I was posting, and where I’d been. Now, I know there are services like FriendFeed and Socialthing! that do this on a larger scale but I don’t foresee many of my family members signing up for those just to see what I’m up to.

Enter Sweetcron, a free Wordpress like PHP and MySQL content system specifically built to handle lifestreaming. I heard about Sweetcron from my buddy Ryan and decided to give it a try for my new site. To my excitement it was exactly what I was looking for. Below I’ll cover the installation, interface, and end result of my Sweetcron experience.

Installation

Sweetcron is the easiest content system I’ve set up in quite some time. You download the compressed files and upload them to your server, create a MySQL database, and edit a few lines of a configuration file with the info. Once this is done the script has a built in installer that runs to finish the installation. By the time you’ve gone through this process you’ll have a username and password through which you can login to your Sweetcron administration section.

Interface and Use

Once you’ve logged into the back-end of Sweetcron you’ll see a few pretty basic options. Write: for posting quick notes, items: a list of your imported (published or unpublished) feed items, feeds: a list of the feeds you’re importing, and options: which contains basic account settings. Setting up your feeds to be imported into your lifestream is a piece of cake. Grab RSS from your favorite social networks and add them into your feed list¹.

Adding a Feed

Feed List

Imported Items

Sweetcron will automatically format and grab the necessary items related to the feeds. From there you can select from a few different themes of how you want your information to be displayed. If you’re ambitious you can set up your own theme by using the Sweetcron documentation.

Pulling Results via Cron

As the name suggests Sweetcron is reliant on pulling information from your RSS feeds at a regular interval in order to update your database. To do this Sweetcron works in one of two ways. First, you can use a pseudo method that will have Sweetcron update itself if the last update is older than 30 minutes. This method waits for someone to hit the site and then has that visit trigger the fetch. This may work for people without cron hosting access but I found the normal cron method to work better. To set this up I logged into my hosting administration and had the following cron job run every fifteen minutes:

/usr/bin/curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link Note that sweetcron uses curl and this program may be located at different locations on different hosting providers, for instance:

curl -s http://your-url.com/cron/link

End Result

The end is a great looking lifestream that stores all of your information into a MySQL database that you host. The benefits are awesome. First, you own look and feel of the information output. Second, you don’t have to rely on a 3rd party service. And last, the whole setup is opensource, free, and easy to set up.

1. If you have issues with a particular feed’s RSS being supported I’d suggest routing it through Feedburner first and then importing it into Sweetcron. I had to do this with Brightkite.

Here at Imulus we all use glass top studio desks. There are a few main reasons for this: sex appeal, weight, and office personality. However, there are also a few hidden benefits.

From time to time when brainstorming and talking out ideas we’ll simply pull out a whiteboard marker and start drawing right on the desk. Rather than getting distracted moving into the conference room and drawing on the whiteboard (which usually involves erasing it first) we’ll just get our ideas out right away. Plus then you get the added benefit of being right next to the computer and you don’t have to retrace your ideas onto a notebook.

Sure, this could be done using a sketchbook or a portable whiteboard, but we find it a nice add-on to the standard “desk setup” of today’s office.

Let me get this out of the way right now: I haven’t balanced my checkbook … ever.

However, recently after entering the stage of “real life” I thought it might be beneficial to start: budgeting my finances, tracking my credit cards, and generally trying to not get myself into horrendous debt. After coming to this conclusion I started looking for realistic ways to track my finances. Particularly ways that would take as little effort as possible.

Now, there is good news for someone in my shoes. First, there are about 10,000 programs available to do finances on the computer. Some are web based and some require a software installation. However, I have yet to find an online based finance tracking system (such as Mint) that doesn’t scare the hell out of me. This is because they require you to enter in all of your online banking information, including: usernames, passwords, account numbers, and bank security questions (i.e. an identity theft’s wet dream). Okay, so online money budgeting (as of now) is out of the question.

That leaves me to the software side of things, here’s my ideal goal for such a piece of software:

• Fast transaction entering. Preferalbly the ability to pull it from the web, but otherwise accept transaction importing via QIF or CSV files.
• Tagging. A must for working with purchases that belong in multiple categories (i.e. a dinner might be classified as: entertainment, drinking, a gift, and food).
• Fast searching. I don’t want to scroll through thousands of transactions to find what I did on January 10th, let me see that instantly.
• Bill tracking. I need to know what bills I have coming up and how much they are. Preferably I would like to have reminders that take me directly to an online payment site.
• Quick budgets. It’s nice to see a three month graph of my spending, but what if I want to see individual transactions and how I am stacking up for the current month’s budget? I should have this option.
• Security. I want to make sure only I can work with my finances.
• Usability! If the app is slow, the keyboard short cuts suck, or things are hard to find, I won’t ever use it. This app has to be easier to use than my iPod.

After doing a bit of research I came to the conclusion that there are no apps that do everything I want (particularly the online transaction gathering). However, there is one that comes damn close: Cha Ching. Cha Ching is a $40 app that is exactly what you would expect from a group of indie OS X developers. It is simple and intuitive. The application itself is just what I need, something that I can import transactions into and spend less than 5 minutes using per week. It does tagging that is inexplicably easy, not to mention it allows organization via smart folders. Meaning I can create dynamic (self-updated) groups of transactions based on price, tag, date, name, etc. What this means is that within seconds I can know exactly how much I have spent on gas for the month, or just how many transactions have taken place with the word “liquor” (hey! it’s just an example) in the title.

There is room for improvement with Cha Ching. For instance, it’d be awesome to be able to put a web address for online bill payment into each reoccurring bill reminder. Further, global search could work a bit better. Not to mention a find and replace function for transactions (imagine doing a find for the title “diamond shamrock” and globally applying the “gas” tag to it). Still, that said I am extremely impressed with Cha Ching and I hope it will be the answer to my finance tracking. I’ll check back in a few months and let you know how things are going.

There have been many websites rushing to be “social” due to the success of Facebook, MySpace and Digg. With so many social sites making noise these days it was easy to miss one of the best social websites, patientslikeme.com.

Patientslikeme.com is a community of users with various diseases and illnesses that share their successes and failures as they battle through their experiences. The most refreshing aspect of this website is that it was the brainchild of three MIT engineers, not by some huge pharma corporation. The operating costs of the effort are covered by partnerships with healthcare provides that use annoymized data from the permission-based community.

Users are able to chart their progress, compare stories and rate the effectiveness of various medications. It helps network together shared experiences and provides a community of people who can relate to each other. Although I currently have no use for this site I am glad to know that in the event that I or someone I love gets ill, there is a community of people who I can turn to.