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Take more screenshots (2022)

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Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#121

Post by albertzeyer »

I had a script once which generated a screenshot every minute or so. The idea was that I would then use some other machine learning supported scripts to extract some statistics. One motivation was that I needed to collect working time statistics, and I wanted to count the minutes that I had Eclipse open.

I even wrote a DB to store PNG files more efficiently. It deduplicates blocks, and thus achieves much higher compression rates: https://github.com/albertz/png-db

The analytics were harder than I thought. I had OpenCV at hand, and tried using those SIFT features (if I remember correctly) (note, that was 12 years ago, before we had more powerful neural networks), and it took me lots of trial and error via a lot of ugly heuristics, and in the end I just tried to identify the Eclipse icon in the Mac Dock. But it worked more or less.

And the scripts to analyze the screenshots: https://github.com/albertz/screenshooting

Then, I developed some scripts which would collect such information more directly, about the app in foreground, including the opened file or URL, etc. This is still running, with many years of data now. But I never really had any use of that data. Maybe someday I will extract some interesting statistics out of it.

This script is here, with support for Linux and Mac: https://github.com/albertz/timecapture

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#123

Post by exikyut »

GaggiX wrote: post #30
switchbak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got in this habit, and I guess I'm old enough to only become aware that it is a habit recently. I do take screenshots while debugging or if I want to show someone something curious, and I'll take those pretty aggressively just in case (the files are small, hard drives are cheap). But I feel no compulsion here. Where does the drive to take so many screenshots come from?

For me probably in thinking I found something interesting that I could share with my friends, but eventually it developed into taking screenshots for even the most remotely interesting stuff, which no one really cares about but me.

  $ ls -1 | grep scrot | wc -l
  76422
That's just this laptop. My file server's broken at the moment (ZFS redundancy FTW \o/ first ever disk failure) and it has a few more moved onto it from different machines (probably maybe 50-70k), and then there's probably 20k on my previous desktop I haven't moved over. Hrm, and then there are my phones... maybe 200k all up?

I'll eventually figure out an aggregation and OCR pipeline. In the meantime while circumstances don't permit that I've slowly accepted the scale I've decided to operate at. It's a commitment. It started out as OCD and now it's just... an interesting habit I actually think would be suboptimal to break. I've never known how to organize words into a journal format, so this is the next best thing I've got.

And it's fun holding down the 'p' key in sxiv and just rewinding through the flickery slideshow of interestingness. Literally everything has a story in it. It's fun.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#124

Post by albertzeyer »

darkteflon wrote: post #39

So, if I write a script that takes screenshots of my desktop every minute or so, are there any tools out there I could use to “de-dupe” based on some arbitrary threshold of similarity to existing screenshots? I imagine it would be quite straightforward for identical screenshots, but what about stuff that’s just “mostly unchanged”?

See my other post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34566857

I wrote a DB for PNG files which deduplicates PNG blocks (only exact matchs): https://github.com/albertz/png-db

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#125

Post by namibj »

_8j50 wrote: post #3

I actually am in a position where I need to take a screenshot but haven't found any tool on linux that has the right UX like macos builtin screenshot or on windows, greenshot and lightshot. I want to press printscr or some shortcut and immediately screenshot an area of the screen or the whole screen and by default have it saved to a numerically incrementing files under a folder I configure and not have to close or in…

If you can deal with it being a datetime name, a script that generates the filename and calls `maim` should be really easy, just to be hooked up to the key combination through the desktop environment/window manager.

Make two to distinguish between "save entire screen" and "let me drag a selection that it will save".

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#126

Post by srcreigh »

cloudmike wrote: post #34

When I started making a game [0] last year, first thing I did was write a little Unity script that takes a screenshot of the opening scene, counts current lines of code using CLOC [1] (for fun, not as a true measure of anything), and occasionally renders it all out to an image file. With that I'm able to create some pretty fun time lapses of progress. I've been doing this at an arbitrary milestone, whenever my Luau […

Thanks for sharing, Super cool. I wishlisted and downloaded the demo.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#127

Post by kaetemi »

andai wrote: post #110
kaetemi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just set up a screen recorder to record a frame once every second into a video file.

I used to use TimeSnapper for that. The classic version is free. It did use a crapload of disk space though (20GB per week?), and most of the data is almost identical, so I started designing an algorithm to store only the differences between images before realizing I had reinvented video codecs... so I just made a ffmpeg one liner to convert the image sequences to mp4 :)

You can capture straight from the GPU into the GPU's video encoder and directly get h265 frames efficiently without laundering the whole framebuffer through system RAM each time.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#128

Post by sneak »

brandon272 wrote: post #84
sneak wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that iCloud Photos is not end to end encrypted, and that both Apple and the US federal police (FBI et al) have warrantless access to the contents of iCloud, so you are creating a huge trove of data that could be misused against you by police at any point in the future should it be politically expedient to do so. Screenshots frequently contain all sorts of extremely sensitive information. This may not be pa…

From Dec 7, 2022: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/07/apple-advanced-data-pro...

Approximately nobody has this turned on.

It's opt-in, so approximately nobody ever will.

Everyone you iMessage with will still be putting all of your conversations and attachments and iCloud message sync keys into non-e2ee backups from their end, so turning this on won't accomplish much even if you know about it.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#129

Post by ilteris »

jerieljan wrote: post #58

I've definitely learned to take more screenshots for over a year now and I'm glad I took the time to "optimize" my process: making use of tools like Syncthing to collect screenshots from my phone and laptops, automatically renaming and filing them in folders and aggressively compressing old screenshots with Hazel, and taking better screenshots overall with Shottr. Oh, and a few handy Shortcuts to stitch and grid scre…

Is there any place that you explain your process thank you

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#130

Post by oblak »

andai wrote: post #110
kaetemi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just set up a screen recorder to record a frame once every second into a video file.

I used to use TimeSnapper for that. The classic version is free. It did use a crapload of disk space though (20GB per week?), and most of the data is almost identical, so I started designing an algorithm to store only the differences between images before realizing I had reinvented video codecs... so I just made a ffmpeg one liner to convert the image sequences to mp4 :)

Good thing you realized this is exactly what video codecs have been doing for decades. Thanks for the chuckle, though.
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