A few years back I was going through some old floppy disks I found in a box and, on one of them, I found a screenshot I took of my desktop circa winter of 2000. In it was a window open with a MUD I was logged into at the time. Another window had Winamp open with a playlist of songs and another window had ICQ open. The only reason I took it was because there was an unofficial competition between our pub and another pub elsewhere on the MUD about which was more popular, and we had finally surpassed them.
It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again.
Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/
Exact same thing happened. Found a bunch of old screenshots from 2000 to about 2006. So many programs you just stopped using at some point without really realizing, but seeing the screenshot immediately makes you feel like past you again, and what it was like to use your computer back then.
Especially when you see parts of a conversation with someone you didn't talk to in over a decade, or who passed away. You'd think that's what a photo would do, so I was surprised how strong of an emotional reaction screenshots can trigger. But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.
> But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.
You know, this is a very enlightening point. I never really thought about it from this angle, but there is a lot of truth to this.
I struggled a lot as a teen with anxiety, depression and bullying. I had a few IRL friends, but the very vast majority of my social interaction during that time came via MUDs and chatting. Many of the people I played and chatted with were fellow social outcasts, and we created our own parallel virtual communities to support and lift each other up. It didn't matter where we were, what we looked like, or how we did or didn't fit in. Many days in the 90s it felt like going to school was the thing I had to put up with, and logging in and seeing my friends when I got home was my real life.
Without them, there's a very real chance I might not be here today. Even all these years later, the people I met virtually during that time are still some of my best and closest friends, and it's a real treat when my travels take me close enough that we can meet for coffee or lunch. Many were at my wedding even, and in one case that was the first time I had ever met them IRL. And yet we knew each other deeply. It felt like we all grew up together because, kinda, we did.
When you look at it like that, those of us who grew up in that environment would look at a screenshot from that era the same way others might look at random photos from high school. Because this was our world.
Very cute story!
I have a lot of my files going back to my first computer. Maybe 2003 or so. I have a lot of screenshots, high school work. I have all of my chat logs from msn. I just know when I’m older and my mind is weaker, looking back will help jog my memory.
I still have computer files from 15 years ago, the time I was in high school. They are of no use, but I keep them around. Class projects, power point slides, word files.
I've gotten mixed reactions whenever I share this, but when I program I like to record my screen with OBS.
* It's a mental hack to keep me accountable, especially now working from home. If I'm in an office anyone can look over and see whether or not I'm working. It started as an attempt to mimic this feeling at home, even though I'll be the only one to ever see the recordings.
* It allows me to go back and see how I worked in the past. I have a few videos of myself working from 2015 which I think is pretty neat just because of how different my workflow was back then compared to now. I'm not using the same tools or even on the same operating system.
* I'm working on video games which is what makes this very useful for me. If something visually interesting happens, or if there's graphical bug of some kind, I can go back and breakdown exactly what happened. I've stepped through videos frame by frame in the past to debug, it's been surprisingly helpful.
* It allows me to go back and see my progress. I can know what I was working on a given day, see how far I've progressed, it's just generally a good motivator. You can of course do this with git, but if you're working on something visual it can be nice to see it in motion rather than a textual diff.
I discovered a while ago that all those errors and bugs that only appear when you demo something to an audience also magically appear when you record yourself demoing it to nobody. Maybe narrating a feature to a pretend audience takes the blinders off enough that you notice little mistakes you wouldn't have otherwise.
Sometimes, I do a full screencap with my face when I am coding. Then at the end of all that, I will even do a reaction video to my full video.
Why? I REALLY enjoy the dopamine rush when you are struggling then find a solution. I see myself pulling my hair, staring blankly at the screenshot then at a random moment of pure luck I find a solution and it literally is euphoric.
Nice to hear this! I am a big fan of screen casts as a way to do async updates inside remote teams. Tools like mmhmm an dyac are really good at this and its gives everyone a high bandwidth walkthrough of whatever you're working on however you do it so code, drawings, docs, etc works across a wide spectrum of activity. The rubber duck effects are a bonus!
It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like 8hr/day × 20 days/month of recording my multi-monitor setup would fill up my drive pretty fast.
If you have an old machine you can use as a NAS and run raidz2, disks are $7.50/TB or less: https://diskprices.com/
Screen captures also compress much better than live action since most frames are duplicates of their predecessor. So a cheap NAS can run for years before you start thinking of deleting VODs.
No need to record 4k 120fps videos if you're doing web development, something like 1080p in 10fps might be enough and it won't take ridiculous amount of space.
I've been streaming some of my side projects on Twitch, with OBS.
During the stream, I keep up a fairly constant spoken description of what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what problem I'm stuck on, etc.
I've noticed I've also been speaking my thoughts out loud when programming, but not streaming. It ends up being a continuous "rubber duck" conversation, and feels (completely subjectively) like it helps me develop easier/better.
Yeah that's neat! The part about reviewing the video. Back in the day we would use VHS to record the game and capture rare glitches to review. Nowadays our QA runs with OBS always on and can attach clips to bugs. It would be cool if every dev had it too.
I've found this too... at work I regularly make videos of what I'm doing for other people. Then I realized how much stuff comes up in the videos because I'm being attentive, and started making videos I never share. Like it splits my attention to both act and watch myself acting
I've started doing this more. The videos of my work has always outlasted the work itself. Even though technically I can dig up old compilers or try and update my dependencies, I rarely do. So whatever was captured in the video becomes the only artifact of my older programming projects.
I used to think that video formats would no longer be supported over time, but even the oldest weird video formats still play in VLC and MPC, and probably would work fine if uploaded on YouTube.
I did the same for a while. It's a neat productivity hack. There are a few services that market accountability by hooking you up with strangers. Both of you must have your webcams enabled, and you just work on whatever you need to do for a set period of time without talking.
How do you setup OBS to keep the recording sizes tolerable?
I've used this before on engineering grade machines, but it doesn't do so well on "everything is in the cloud so you can use a word processor quality" laptop, any advice?
I have a 4k display but record to 1080p, bit blurry but I'm not really using it to find small copy of text, but to see general state of things. Recording in 20fps as well.
I have a small shellscript that takes all video files recorded by OBS, and runs them through this ffmpeg command:
Using mpdecimate removes duplicate frames, so if nothing is happening on your screen (although smaller changes gets ignored, like my clock showing the seconds), it removes those duplicate frames.
So one ~1 minute video of you thinking for 40 seconds can get reduced to 20 seconds. Not uncommon for some of my video files to go from multi-GB to just ~100 MB when removing all the pauses.
The space requirements can be very low capturing something like writing code, where only 1% of the screen might change second-to-second.
"ffmpeg -f gdigrab -i desktop -c:v libx264 -preset medium -fps_mode vfr -crf 0 -an -vf mpdecimate capture.ts" (Windows, -f x11grab -i $DISPLAY for Linux on X11) produces a lossless video that averages 102 MiB/hour for me (1920x1080 @ <= 60fps). That's about two cents a day at current disk prices, and easy to upload as a private YouTube video if you don't want to lug the files around.
If you don't like the CPU hit, use -preset ultrafast to record the capture using less processing power but giving a larger file, and then re-encode that file later using -preset slower. There's no quality loss if you used lossless mode (-crf 0), and for content like this the savings are especially large (reducing to around one-quarter ultrafast size, in my experience).
BTW do you think twitch is best for this? I'm working with js for the first time and tools seem really slow and poor, I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, I figure looking at others would be great.
I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes. But I just don't find value in intentionally preserving a digital record of myself, and instead allow serendipity to poke my nostalgia centers on occasion. Sorry for the violating the spirit of the thread with a contrarian opinion. My point is just that I've done the digital hoarding thing for years and it turned out to not have value, for me.
I am myself dealing with the effects of my digital hoarding and trying to delete as much as I can, but I do think that is different from this.
1. Photo apps like iCloud Photos, Google Photos, and Photo Prism are getting much better at auto organizing/cataloging what photos are and surfacing them together in much more interesting ways. More photos is now a plus instead of a minus.
2. You can always delete, but if you never record you can't go back and record (often).
So I take a Marie Kondo "Keep what Sparks Joy" approach and delete anything I find that I do not care for when I find it. I also sometimes pick an area of stuff I have and try to aggressively delete things I don't care for.
>It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes.
I find that horrifying. I would probably scramble to delete that as soon as possible. Don't know about anyone else here, but having my junk float around the internet is mortifying. I delete unused accounts as soon as the thought of it pops into my mind.
Yeah like, dude deletes all his local files and is fine with personal stuff floating through the internets and randomly finding that stuff. I'd rather do it the other way round.
I used to save everything I did in the past. Over time, I've found that I almost never needed to access those files and most of that wasn't even useful for the kick of nostalgia.
Old games? I already replayed them to exhaustion.
I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time.
I don't miss old code or Old OS's. I miss that sense of wonder when I was less experienced and more naive, and everything was new.
>I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time.
I'm learning the same - whenever I feel nostalgic about playing an old SNES or PSX game, I've realized that it was just about that time in my life, and usually just watching a clip on youtube or listening to the soundtrack is enough to scratch the itch, rather than actually playing the game again
While your memory might be great now, it won't be so forever. Serendipity might not happen as often as you would like, and "important things" may not be all you want to remember.
I'm sure your parents or someone from their generation have actual, physical photo albums from their past - and that the experience of browsing through these photos brings back things that they haven't necessarily _forgotten_ about, but that they wouldn't have brought into active memory unless they were browsing through them.
Over the years I have experienced and built many things that I do not deem "important" to me, yet when I see them mentioned (even in writings by myself), it takes me back to that point in time - all the feelings, learning and discoveries that it brought to life.
An example is scrolling through a list of my repositories on GitHub. Some of the projects on there I have "forgotten" about, but with the mention of it I am instantly brought back and remember a whole lot more details - motivations, feelings, the ecosystem...
This is just the way I see it: unless you make a deliberate effort to scrub yourself off the Internets, most people leave a bewilderingly enormous digital footprint. I think that's what makes the analogy with the physical generation not really work: that generation had a scarcity of records, while we have an absolute over-abundance. For most of history, most of our conversations, creations, the way we looked, etc. were not recorded, so I just don't see this over-abundance of preserved records -- which is quite a novel thing -- as being important to the human experience. But definitely appreciate your perspective, thanks!
Yeah, I think it can be great if you're intentional about what you're preserving and why. To elaborate a bit, I went from having tens of thousands of emails a few years ago to "only" having about 5k now. I did that by adopting a strategy of aggressively deleting trivial emails. I apply "aggressive decluttering" throughout my digital life, with screenshots also (trying to stay on topic a bit), old conversations, failed creative projects, etc, and have found the benefits of less clutter to be profound.
I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future.
I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.
I.e. photos and important documents are only about 50GB so very easy to keep. This would be the things that I wanted my family to keep, If I died.
Then theres random projects and files that I keep in yearly archives, just to look and remember what I was up to x years ago. That's also not huge amounts of data (1-2 GB per year).
And then theres data which I didn't create. E.g. movies, game installer,... Where a loss wouldn't really be a big problem.
I used to feel the same way. Then the internet forgot the stuff that I thought would be there forever. Now only a few remanants remain. I still look at my DeviantArt and Livejournal accounts when feeling nostalgic. Those will also one day be relics of the past. I should back them up somewhere.
The "Virtual Trash Can" approach can be a middle-ground. You keep records, but regularly move them to a NAS or any other storage that isn't something you'd accidentally wonder into.
In day to day life these past record could as well not exist, but you still get to go look at them if you're willing to make the effort to do so. Also being willing to lose these items if something catastrophic would happen relief a lot of the archiving burden.
Yeah. I meant that I don't see the value in keeping those snapshots for years and years. Space is cheap, but for me there was something unhealthy about the practice, which is why I used the word hoarding. Deleting the hoard was actually quite freeing for me, and it was a little surprising that I never actually missed e.g. the hundreds of screenshots of in-progress games I was developing. So I just wanted to share that perspective, not really expecting people to agree (almost didn't post my comment at all.)
I use Hazel[0] to archive everything in my "downloads" folder after a month. Files get separated into "~/Archive/Images/", "~/Archive/Screenshots/" "~/Archive/Audio" ..." depending on certain criteria (mostly file type). Each sub-folder is broken down by year and month, for example "~/Archive/Images/2015/05/". I also occasionally dump stuff that doesn't belong elsewhere into the same folder system, for example WhatsApp media.
Basically, if it doesn't need to be specifically filed somewhere, I just put it in my "downloads", knowing that it will be somewhat searchable in the archive by either date, file type or in-document search. This is great for all of the bits and pieces that you don't necessarily have a home for or want to manage.
I do something similar, except files are moved from Desktop > Downloads > 'Needs Review' after 1/7/30 days. The vast majority of files are trash, and I simply delete them every other week from the 'Needs Review' folder manually.
It's too bad that screenshots don't have more useful metadata. Or any useful metadata, beyond a timestamp.
I'd like to have the names of all programs visible in the screenshot (easy), possibly application specific metadata like the opened filename or a URL (more difficult) and more generally full OCR of the visible text (pretty easy). You'd need a PDF to get the most out of this, but presumably most other image formats have generic metadata storage.
A paid tool in this direction is APSE (https://apse.io) which bills itself as a personal search engine that OCRs intermittent screencaps. I loved the idea, but in practice it lacked polish. I agree that additional metadata like foremost application filepath/url would take this to another level.
Additional meta-data may in the future be extracted through machine learning from such videos.
Regarding open programs: I once led a project where we developed something that keeps track of the software you're running (no screen recording) in order to conduct research into attention and distraction. We didn't have the resources to support many platform versions, so we wrote only a Windows client (most used OS on the floor). It was similar to RescueTime https://www.rescuetime.com/ but more respecting one's privacy and absolutely avoiding the cloud, as we deployed the experiment in a lawyer-intensive environment; for instance we logged running program names but not titles of open windows because file names often reveal sensitive matter. We questions occasionally how productive they felt in the last half hour, and they could comment.
I take screenshots of my computer screen every minute since 2008.
I've a dedicated 2TB hdd storing these archives compressed with 7z
It takes just about 100-200MB/day so it's quite easy to store.
These archives saved me from data loss a few times (due to powerloss, or bad mistakes). I just browse through the archive to look for the screenshot where I was coding to recover them by typing it again.
I'm glad you found something that works for you, and I don't mean to dissuade you even if I could, but to me that feels like an antipattern if you only use it for typed text.
Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space.
Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption.
Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them.
When I was 8 or 9, my dad brought home a Macintosh SE/30. On it, I used MacPaint to create 5 or so black and white paintings using the various patterns and brushes. It is probably the first creative thing I did on a computer.
When we upgraded to System 7, the version of MacPaint didn’t run and he told me that essentially the art was lost and unrecoverable. I can picture in my mind what they look like, and wish I had the file to look at.
At one point I realized that whenever I went on vacation I took pictures of wherever I went: Germany, France, Sweden, Costa Rica, Texas, Florida, etc.
But then I realized most of the "traveling" that I do is the different places that I go on my computer. If I'm going to take photos when I travel, I should also be taking screenshots constantly, to document places I went on my computer. Such screenshots are useful because they will capture:
1. the large number of websites that exist in a particular year, but which won't exist 5 years later
2. minor interests I have one year that I don't have later. Occasionally I'm curious when I first got into a particular interest, and seeing the screenshots is helpful for documenting that.
When I go back to the oldest entries of my weblog, from 2005, I notice that more than 80% of the links are now 404. The Web is constantly disappearing. Like a forest on its way to extinction, you might as well photograph it now, because it won't be there 10 years later. Most of the websites you visit, you cannot go back and visit them a few years later. Take a photo of them while they still exist.
Readit News
It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again.
Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/
Especially when you see parts of a conversation with someone you didn't talk to in over a decade, or who passed away. You'd think that's what a photo would do, so I was surprised how strong of an emotional reaction screenshots can trigger. But then if you were spending 90% of your time online as a teen/early 20s it's not that surprising on a second thought.
You know, this is a very enlightening point. I never really thought about it from this angle, but there is a lot of truth to this.
I struggled a lot as a teen with anxiety, depression and bullying. I had a few IRL friends, but the very vast majority of my social interaction during that time came via MUDs and chatting. Many of the people I played and chatted with were fellow social outcasts, and we created our own parallel virtual communities to support and lift each other up. It didn't matter where we were, what we looked like, or how we did or didn't fit in. Many days in the 90s it felt like going to school was the thing I had to put up with, and logging in and seeing my friends when I got home was my real life.
Without them, there's a very real chance I might not be here today. Even all these years later, the people I met virtually during that time are still some of my best and closest friends, and it's a real treat when my travels take me close enough that we can meet for coffee or lunch. Many were at my wedding even, and in one case that was the first time I had ever met them IRL. And yet we knew each other deeply. It felt like we all grew up together because, kinda, we did.
When you look at it like that, those of us who grew up in that environment would look at a screenshot from that era the same way others might look at random photos from high school. Because this was our world.
I have deleted everything from uni though.
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* It's a mental hack to keep me accountable, especially now working from home. If I'm in an office anyone can look over and see whether or not I'm working. It started as an attempt to mimic this feeling at home, even though I'll be the only one to ever see the recordings.
* It allows me to go back and see how I worked in the past. I have a few videos of myself working from 2015 which I think is pretty neat just because of how different my workflow was back then compared to now. I'm not using the same tools or even on the same operating system.
* I'm working on video games which is what makes this very useful for me. If something visually interesting happens, or if there's graphical bug of some kind, I can go back and breakdown exactly what happened. I've stepped through videos frame by frame in the past to debug, it's been surprisingly helpful.
* It allows me to go back and see my progress. I can know what I was working on a given day, see how far I've progressed, it's just generally a good motivator. You can of course do this with git, but if you're working on something visual it can be nice to see it in motion rather than a textual diff.
Why? I REALLY enjoy the dopamine rush when you are struggling then find a solution. I see myself pulling my hair, staring blankly at the screenshot then at a random moment of pure luck I find a solution and it literally is euphoric.
I enjoy relieving those moments.
I do this sometimes. the accountability hack works even better if someone could be watching.
Bonus points is that it feels way more natural to narrate aka rubber duck problems when you are streaming.
You can go even lower with other encoders (x265) + if you don't record audio at all
Screen captures also compress much better than live action since most frames are duplicates of their predecessor. So a cheap NAS can run for years before you start thinking of deleting VODs.
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During the stream, I keep up a fairly constant spoken description of what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what problem I'm stuck on, etc.
I've noticed I've also been speaking my thoughts out loud when programming, but not streaming. It ends up being a continuous "rubber duck" conversation, and feels (completely subjectively) like it helps me develop easier/better.
I used to think that video formats would no longer be supported over time, but even the oldest weird video formats still play in VLC and MPC, and probably would work fine if uploaded on YouTube.
I think I’d prefer live streaming to keep myself accountable to one-on-one sessions with both cams on.
I've used this before on engineering grade machines, but it doesn't do so well on "everything is in the cloud so you can use a word processor quality" laptop, any advice?
I have a small shellscript that takes all video files recorded by OBS, and runs them through this ffmpeg command:
Using mpdecimate removes duplicate frames, so if nothing is happening on your screen (although smaller changes gets ignored, like my clock showing the seconds), it removes those duplicate frames.So one ~1 minute video of you thinking for 40 seconds can get reduced to 20 seconds. Not uncommon for some of my video files to go from multi-GB to just ~100 MB when removing all the pauses.
What about hard disk space? How you handle it?
"ffmpeg -f gdigrab -i desktop -c:v libx264 -preset medium -fps_mode vfr -crf 0 -an -vf mpdecimate capture.ts" (Windows, -f x11grab -i $DISPLAY for Linux on X11) produces a lossless video that averages 102 MiB/hour for me (1920x1080 @ <= 60fps). That's about two cents a day at current disk prices, and easy to upload as a private YouTube video if you don't want to lug the files around.
If you don't like the CPU hit, use -preset ultrafast to record the capture using less processing power but giving a larger file, and then re-encode that file later using -preset slower. There's no quality loss if you used lossless mode (-crf 0), and for content like this the savings are especially large (reducing to around one-quarter ultrafast size, in my experience).
I'll try it!
1. Photo apps like iCloud Photos, Google Photos, and Photo Prism are getting much better at auto organizing/cataloging what photos are and surfacing them together in much more interesting ways. More photos is now a plus instead of a minus. 2. You can always delete, but if you never record you can't go back and record (often).
So I take a Marie Kondo "Keep what Sparks Joy" approach and delete anything I find that I do not care for when I find it. I also sometimes pick an area of stuff I have and try to aggressively delete things I don't care for.
I find that horrifying. I would probably scramble to delete that as soon as possible. Don't know about anyone else here, but having my junk float around the internet is mortifying. I delete unused accounts as soon as the thought of it pops into my mind.
I learned that the nostalgia is not about the files by itself but my life context at that time. I don't miss old code or Old OS's. I miss that sense of wonder when I was less experienced and more naive, and everything was new.
I'm learning the same - whenever I feel nostalgic about playing an old SNES or PSX game, I've realized that it was just about that time in my life, and usually just watching a clip on youtube or listening to the soundtrack is enough to scratch the itch, rather than actually playing the game again
I'm sure your parents or someone from their generation have actual, physical photo albums from their past - and that the experience of browsing through these photos brings back things that they haven't necessarily _forgotten_ about, but that they wouldn't have brought into active memory unless they were browsing through them.
Over the years I have experienced and built many things that I do not deem "important" to me, yet when I see them mentioned (even in writings by myself), it takes me back to that point in time - all the feelings, learning and discoveries that it brought to life.
An example is scrolling through a list of my repositories on GitHub. Some of the projects on there I have "forgotten" about, but with the mention of it I am instantly brought back and remember a whole lot more details - motivations, feelings, the ecosystem...
Legally it’s very helpful if you create a paper trail of your work
I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future.
I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.
I.e. photos and important documents are only about 50GB so very easy to keep. This would be the things that I wanted my family to keep, If I died.
Then theres random projects and files that I keep in yearly archives, just to look and remember what I was up to x years ago. That's also not huge amounts of data (1-2 GB per year).
And then theres data which I didn't create. E.g. movies, game installer,... Where a loss wouldn't really be a big problem.
In day to day life these past record could as well not exist, but you still get to go look at them if you're willing to make the effort to do so. Also being willing to lose these items if something catastrophic would happen relief a lot of the archiving burden.
Basically, if it doesn't need to be specifically filed somewhere, I just put it in my "downloads", knowing that it will be somewhat searchable in the archive by either date, file type or in-document search. This is great for all of the bits and pieces that you don't necessarily have a home for or want to manage.
[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/
I'd like to have the names of all programs visible in the screenshot (easy), possibly application specific metadata like the opened filename or a URL (more difficult) and more generally full OCR of the visible text (pretty easy). You'd need a PDF to get the most out of this, but presumably most other image formats have generic metadata storage.
Regarding open programs: I once led a project where we developed something that keeps track of the software you're running (no screen recording) in order to conduct research into attention and distraction. We didn't have the resources to support many platform versions, so we wrote only a Windows client (most used OS on the floor). It was similar to RescueTime https://www.rescuetime.com/ but more respecting one's privacy and absolutely avoiding the cloud, as we deployed the experiment in a lawyer-intensive environment; for instance we logged running program names but not titles of open windows because file names often reveal sensitive matter. We questions occasionally how productive they felt in the last half hour, and they could comment.
Why can't we le the ML models figure classification themselves and then give them the human data to adjust to be readable by the human.
You can set the File name using various parameters in combination like - time date - program name - window title
This can also be configured to do complex workflow like
- for each screenshot add a border then copy image to clipboard and then upload to Imgur and copy url finally run and ocr and copy results as well.
These archives saved me from data loss a few times (due to powerloss, or bad mistakes). I just browse through the archive to look for the screenshot where I was coding to recover them by typing it again.
this is the screenshot tool I use https://github.com/soruly/TimeSnap
Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space.
Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption.
Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them.
[0]: https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/
[1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree
[2]: https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo
I would also like this, but what worries me is privacy. There’s already so little that it makes me wonder whether this is degrade it even faster.
When we upgraded to System 7, the version of MacPaint didn’t run and he told me that essentially the art was lost and unrecoverable. I can picture in my mind what they look like, and wish I had the file to look at.
But then I realized most of the "traveling" that I do is the different places that I go on my computer. If I'm going to take photos when I travel, I should also be taking screenshots constantly, to document places I went on my computer. Such screenshots are useful because they will capture:
1. the large number of websites that exist in a particular year, but which won't exist 5 years later
2. minor interests I have one year that I don't have later. Occasionally I'm curious when I first got into a particular interest, and seeing the screenshots is helpful for documenting that.
When I go back to the oldest entries of my weblog, from 2005, I notice that more than 80% of the links are now 404. The Web is constantly disappearing. Like a forest on its way to extinction, you might as well photograph it now, because it won't be there 10 years later. Most of the websites you visit, you cannot go back and visit them a few years later. Take a photo of them while they still exist.