It's always bugged me that software breaks so easily. Even with the full source code, it can be impossible to get something running again just months later. I've documented my entire work history with screenshots in my portfolio [1], which is sort of weird considering the heavy backend work put into it that isn't reflected.
Take more screenshots (2022)
171–178 of 178 posts
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does! I ran into this issue (disk filling up with screenshots) and realized that the optimal compression solution already existed and was called a video file, so set up a script to run on cron to convert the folder full of pngs to a mp4.
What size differences are we talking about here? I took one screenshot (+webcam shot) once every hour for three years and it takes up around 5gb for 14,000 images. I believe I compressed it slightly some time ago.
Yeah, TimeSnapper takes them every 5 seconds, so I'd get 5-10 thousand images per day, about 1GB per day depending on quality settings.
I appreciated the (relatively) high frame rate because I enjoyed watching the timelapse at the end of the day, as a kind of review.
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#173I take screenshots all the time, and sync them to iCloud so I can access them immediately on my phone/iPad. I also back up previous years of screenshots, I think I have back to 2015 right now. But one thing that I've been keeping my eye on as well (and used for a month) is https://www.rewind.ai/ which records everything that happens on your M1/M2 mac screen and is immediately searchable. Just like Alex says here "The…
Actually came here to mention rewind, too. It’s simply put a groundbreaking game changer for me. Be it finding text in conversations, using it to recall the face of an applicant when their name doesn’t ring a bell, find code, find text in websites you visited, going back to make sure your eyes didn’t trick you, … I recently started to enable closed captions in all applicant interviews so I can search for specific ter…
How does it work when a simple search returns too much data? Or is that an edge case? I think that if you used Rewind for several years, the amount of hits a specific search would return is insane (for example, searching for "dog", if you remember seeing a specific dog breed some time ago, but not sure when or where)
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested, and I'm attempting to email you, though I can't quite figure out the email address. I keep getting an address not found error.
I poked around their post history and their email is actually: govind gnanakumar outlook com
Wow thanks for that! Much appreciated.
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rewind looks cool - almost magical (I imagine part of the magic is due to the M1/M2 chips). But I would be concerned overly relying on them. They've raised VC money, which means their future path is unclear. I don't know what direction their product will take if pushed by VC growth expectations. In particular, this is just a client-side only app with a pretty clear and finite feature set. But VC influence means there…
(I’m the co-founder & CEO of Rewind.) While it’s true we raised money from VCs we did not give them a board seat or voting control. I have super-voting shares and am the only member of the board. We will never be pushed around by VCs. Our vision is to give humans perfect memory and we will not let VCs get in the way.
Hey well I'm glad to see you in the replies to one of my comments! Love what you're doing, and I'm following updates.
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How can I do that?
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#177When 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! Very interesting to see the development in the timelapse. Going to do this for my next Unity project.
Re: Take more screenshots (2022)
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How can I do that?
On Windows, there's an API to capture the display as a DX texture. Then either use NVENC or AMF to encode. You'll get compressed frames that you can just stuff straight into whichever video container you like.