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Take more screenshots (2022)

alexwlchan.net

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Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#91
I am actually pondering about making a service or an autonomous app out of a tool I made for myself, that records the screen, keystrokes, mouse, keyboard focus location, and additionally traces the gaze if you have suitable hardware (e.g. Tobii). The goal is to be able to make some sense of all that data with the current deep learning techniques (think Copilot on steroids).

Although as a service it would be extremely expensive: video adds terabytes of storage every year, and will require even more expensive compute for deep learning. Probably a few thousand or even tens of thousands $ a year.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#92
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…

I use i3 and I think I pretty much had that at one time…

Basically I bound a key combo to a script, and that script would call scrot (the app), screenshot, and save the picture to date_plus_random_4_digit_number.png.

I think I wrote that script in Ruby and put it in .local/bin. But you could write it in another language too.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I lack perspective on this and am not quite understanding what you mean. Where is the interruption coming from? Why do you need to take screenshots? I have this too but it's in the form of saving URLs of interesting things. I just fear stumbling upon something nice, not saving it and then not being able to find it again (which happens regularly btw; Google search and reddit search are pretty bad at finding…

Safari (and I think other browsers) has some great history search features. You maybe could explore those. https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/search-your-web-brows...

>Your Mac can keep your browsing history for as long as a year, while some iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models keep browsing history for a month.

>Your History shows the pages you've visited on Chrome in the last 90 days.[1]

I'm not sure if nextaccountic would find 1 year or 1 month or 90 days sufficient.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95589

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#94
post #91

I am actually pondering about making a service or an autonomous app out of a tool I made for myself, that records the screen, keystrokes, mouse, keyboard focus location, and additionally traces the gaze if you have suitable hardware (e.g. Tobii). The goal is to be able to make some sense of all that data with the current deep learning techniques (think Copilot on steroids). Although as a service it would be extremely…

Have you seen https://www.rewind.ai/ ?

It’s almost exactly what you’re describing.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#95

> For example, my oldest files were made in Microsoft Word on an iMac G3 running Mac OS 9. I can open them in a modern word processor, and they look similar – but it’s not the same. Some of the fonts and graphics are missing, and I don’t know where I’d find replacements. > It’s even harder for an undocumented side project I abandoned years ago. Having the code isn’t the same as a working application. The author's sol…

> For software, side project or not, it should probably come with dependency configurations (granted, in early 2000s this isn't as mature as it is today) and some tests. These may or may not help. Things have certainly changed in the past several years, but if we have learned anything, the "infinite memory of the internet" is anything but. Dependencies vanish and die all the time. So, while you may have a list of dep…

Or, point maven to a directory in your repo (`-DlocalRepository`) and include it in your git with lfs. Best of both worlds. Get to use dependency management and always have your dependencies around.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#96

Here is a fun story about screenshots. All of us had that feeling: you are browsing the Internet and suddenly see something cool. You either forget to bookmark it or that cool thing is not cool enough to be amongst your bookmark items (which are clearly much cooler). Sometimes you may also think: "Whatever, I have my browser's history, I'll find it later if needed". Later, you want to show that cool website or app or…

I did the same thing with my IDE. It auto-saves the current file every N seconds to a separate directory on my drive. It's been very useful for finding code that I've "oopsed".

I've also thought about building a web proxy for my internet traffic, keeping detailed logs of every HTTP transaction in elasticsearch, crucially, including full HTML contents, so I can search for things later. But, too lazy...

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#97
post #94
post #91

I am actually pondering about making a service or an autonomous app out of a tool I made for myself, that records the screen, keystrokes, mouse, keyboard focus location, and additionally traces the gaze if you have suitable hardware (e.g. Tobii). The goal is to be able to make some sense of all that data with the current deep learning techniques (think Copilot on steroids). Although as a service it would be extremely…

Have you seen https://www.rewind.ai/ ? It’s almost exactly what you’re describing.

I have not. From the changelog, the differences between my work and theirs are:

- Mac only vs Windows only

- They have already wired some AI stuff like speech recognition (trivial with Whisper these days, I was able to use it to generate synchronous lyrics ala karaoke to my home music collection in about 1 week of coding. Unlike video does not require much compute)

- They have slick GUI and presumably reliable recording - as I did not decide to productize it yet, I only have 2 global hotkeys to start and stop.

- I capture more data: keyboard + focus, gaze traces, and mouse traces. This will allow better behavioral models (they could and probably should have an option to do it too). I especially rely on gaze, as it is a very dense data channel.

- I have functionality to replay user actions both to just view, and to actually replay them (this is where copilot-like AI will eventually be connected).

It was funny to see the codename of my project in one of their screenshots as a label on a control.

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#98
I built something to take periodic screenshots of Electron apps while discarding duplicates. Sadly I never got around to building more Electron apps, so it's not feature complete (I intended it to have more options). But the basic periodic screenshotting mechanism works.

I might continue if there's any interest :)

https://github.com/CatalanCabbage/electron-vlog

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#99
It saddens me that I don’t have many screenshots from when I was younger, even if it was just pictures of my desktop. Although I make an effort to take more screenshots these days, I made a simple tool to take screenshots on an interval. I wish I had done something like this 15 years ago.

If anyone is interested: https://github.com/mgerb/mgcapture

Re: Take more screenshots (2022)

#100
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My regular life is being interrupted by taking screenshots all the time, so I have relatively less time to work on important things. I think I lack perspective on this and am not quite understanding what you mean. Where is the interruption coming from? Why do you need to take screenshots?

> I think I lack perspective on this and am not quite understanding what you mean. Where is the interruption coming from? Why do you need to take screenshots? I have this too but it's in the form of saving URLs of interesting things. I just fear stumbling upon something nice, not saving it and then not being able to find it again (which happens regularly btw; Google search and reddit search are pretty bad at finding…

It could be worse once you realize that webpages can disappear. So your saved URL doesn’t even help, you’ll actually need to save the page as some kind of archive.
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