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I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

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Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#61

Post by doodlebugging »

LeonB wrote: post #24
karencarits wrote: post #21

For Windows, there is also TimseSnapper [1], not open source, but the developer is sometimes here on HackerNews [1] https://timesnapper.com/

Cheers, yeh, I am here a bit.

Thanks for TimeSnapper Pro. I started using it in 2010 I think after cross-testing the field of options available. I especially like that I was able to purchase a permanent license as opposed to being locked in to a SaaS model where my time data ended up in someone else's control. Everything right on my machine where if it is lost I get all the blame so I never have to stand up from my desk and shake my fist at the cloud.

Excellent product for a consultant like myself to have on hand to document everything happening on their machine. The ability to change the screenshot interval and add notes along the timeline are real power tools for someone involved in multiple projects every day. You can secure your time record snapshots with a password. Playback at multiple speeds so you can jog your memory by browsing the timeline to the exact time when you flipped to something else. Classify by project, client, etc.

Really a great bit of software.

I once found one of my invoiced time periods being challenged during a regular audit of one of my client's operations. I frequently billed long hours since I worked long hours on 24-hour call (remote oil and gas data processing and support of international operations). The auditor called and requested anything I had that could support a particular time period where I billed "excessive" hours (>20 consecutive). I told them I would get them everything that I had and asked whether they were interested in any other dates or time periods or work for specific projects. They narrowed it to one single invoice entry so that made it simple for me.

Thanks to TimeSnapper I was able to produce a GIF movie of the screenshots (I always used a 1 minute snap interval to allow fine-grained operations review) during the requested interval that documented everything happening on screen and I provided a PDF of the notes dumped from that interval documenting phone calls taken, etc. I also sent copies of my handwritten notes I always maintain as primary memory-jogging tool. In the return note to the auditor I asked if they were interested in any other dates or time periods and offered to send an archive on their request.

The auditor called me up and we talked for a while and they thanked me for the detailed records and told me they wouldn't need anything else.

It really helps that my wife is a CPA/Auditor/Fraud Examiner. Tools like TimeSnapper Pro helped me in my business to maintain excellent records about day-to-day operations that made it simple for me to invoice clients for all the time that I spent on their behalf.

Thanks /u/LeonB

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#62

Post by agons »

LeonB wrote: post #29
wartijn_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fast :) Do you get notified when someone mentions your product, or are you _that_ active?

Neither, lol. Just happened across the comment within five minutes of it being posted. I think it was one of the first times I visited HN today.

> one of the first times

I don't think you can say it's "neither"! :)

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#63

Post by hu3 »

karaterobot wrote: post #57
drdaeman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black Mirror is fiction, a lot of it works well thanks to our suspension of disbelief. Remove cloud from the equation, replacing it with a properly safeguarded fully owned hardware located on your own premises - basically make it privacy-respecting, minimizing abuse potential, do a proper audit, and it becomes a super desirable system for people with neurological differences (or just stressed folks - attention and me…

I have a coworker who was tracking Black Mirror premises that were being taken as inspiration by people on the internet. This may be one of those. A lot of SF authors have expressed this idea: "I meant it as a warning, not a road map". I think I read either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson expressing this about their respective dystopias and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were trying to implement them. Anyway,…

I'd rather not make conclusions of a technology impact based on a 44 minutes episode that was optimizing for maximum entertainment.

So there's nothing fundamentally wrong in taking inspiration from sci-fi.

Sure the presented perspective is negative but that is because the producer explored local maximums to the benefit of the audience. They are obliged to paint technology in a certain way to captivate viewers.

Does that mean that the presented reality is the only possible one? Certainly not, that would be reductive.

Many popular technologies today are used to scam a defraud people. Does that mean said technologies are fundamentally bad? Not at all.

I use technology as a force multiplier.

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#64

Post by cj »

cableshaft wrote: post #40
shiftpgdn wrote: post #20

This could easily be sold for $5/seat to giant corporations who want to stick spyware all over their employee workstations.

If I knew companies were recording my screen constantly I would just quit and save everyone the trouble of them getting on my case for not coding 100% of the time. I know my screen can be checked at my current client, but I also know the product owners don't really care as long as the work is getting done on time (or at least they haven't bugged me about it since I've starting working with them a year ago and have gi…

Screen recording probably won’t take off in this context, luckily.

I think employers would be more interested in basic things like “did this person login their computer today, between what times were they active, how many hours in the day did they type at least 100 words?” … or things like “here’s a list of people on PTO today, which people not on this list haven’t typed on their keyboard today?”

That sort of data would be easy to collect - keyloggers have been around forever, doesn’t trigger MacOS to show the “recording screen” notification, and the data is easier to aggregate and view across a large number of computers.

I think the fact that keylogging didn’t explode as a method of tracking productivity during Covid WFH probably means we’re safe from screen recording for the foreseeable future.

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#65

Post by [deleted] »

compsciphd wrote: post #23

We built in almost 2 decades ago now (including the ability to scrub to a point in the past and resume execution from there) http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~orenl/papers/sosp07-dejaview.pdf Abstract: As users interact with the world and their peers through their computers, it is becoming important to archive and later search the information that they have viewed. We present DejaView, a personal virtual computer recorder…

[deleted]

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#67

Post by theblazehen »

helpfulContrib wrote: post #46

A long time ago, someone got "cryofreeze" working on Linux processes, where you could freeze a process to disk and unfreeze it later .. but this was purely experimental and doesn't seem to have persisted. Anyway, in my lab environment where I had this running .. over a decade ago now I guess .. I set up scripts to automatically cryofreeze the daemon processes I was writing, so I could indeed reset to the state in tim…

Have you came across CRIU?

https://criu.org/Main_Page

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#68

Post by Intralexical »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #36
compsciphd wrote: post #23

We built in almost 2 decades ago now (including the ability to scrub to a point in the past and resume execution from there) http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~orenl/papers/sosp07-dejaview.pdf Abstract: As users interact with the world and their peers through their computers, it is becoming important to archive and later search the information that they have viewed. We present DejaView, a personal virtual computer recorder…

Did you actually build it or just write a paper? Where can I download it?

Previously commented with some other details.

TL;DR: It's an old PhD project that requires custom patches to an ancient kernel version. So I guess you can't download it, and even if you could it wouldn't work on any system you'd want to use today:

> compsciphd on Oct 11, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Linux NILFS file system: automatic continuous snap...

> we used NILFS 15 years ago in dejaview - https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/pubs/sosp2007_dejaview.pdf

> We combined nilfs + our process snapshotting tech (we tried to mainline it, but it didn't go, but many of the concepts ended up in CRIU though) + our remote display + screen reading tech (i.e. normal APIs) to create an environment that could record everything you ever saw visually and textually. enable you to search it and enable you to recreate the state as it was at that time with non noticeable interruption to the user (processes downtime was like 0.02s).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33165519

> compsciphd on Oct 12, 2022 | parent | next [–]

> sadly (as with much work form phd students like I was), the closest one could get to it today is trying to duplicate it. i.e. combining criu with nilfs (but a lot of the work that we did to get process downtime to minimal numbers requires being in kernel, as described in paper) and unsure criu can do it.

> In addition our screenrecording mechanism was our own "proprietary" (not really proprietary as fully described in research papers, but also not a standard) and something that was built as an X display driver 15 years ago (so not directly usable today even if code is available). Could probably duplicate it with vnc based screencasting. vnc didn't work for us as we needed better performance (i.e. it was built to demonstrate remote display of video and games and there was no real remote audio setup back then so we had to create our own).

> the "text" search just used gnome's accessible API much like a screenreader would do (with a bit of per application optimizations as can filter out things like menus and the like, primarily was to dump text out of terminals, firefox and perhaps open office and maybe even a pdf reader if memory serves me correctly, but a long time ago).

I've been looking into it myself though, mostly for forensic concerns (capturing state/evidence in a way that's harder to forge than screenshots). Hopefully, running the desktop environment through VNC and then running `criu dump --leave-stopped --prev-images-dir …` immediately followed by `mkcp --snapshot …` (or `btrfs subvolume snapshot …` would also work, I guess) would be enough for basic functionality.

Re: I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen

#70

Post by fmos »

karencarits wrote: post #21

For Windows, there is also TimseSnapper [1], not open source, but the developer is sometimes here on HackerNews [1] https://timesnapper.com/

For time tracking with screenshots and advanced tagging based on window titles (and sometimes open documents), there is also ManicTime [1]. I don’t think it has OCR though.

[1] https://www.manictime.com/

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