[HN Gopher] Take more screenshots (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Take more screenshots (2022)
Author : sanketpatrikar
Score : 342 points
Date : 2023-01-27 09:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alexwlchan.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexwlchan.net)
| jerieljan wrote:
| 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 screenshots.
|
| It's a thing I didn't expect to be a quality-of-life improvement,
| but it really did, whether it's to remind me of the little but
| important things that I've done and am glad to recall weeks
| after, or to provide helpful TODOs or visual documentation on
| things that I end up doing from time to time.
| ilteris wrote:
| Is there any place that you explain your process thank you
| thejarren wrote:
| I 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 "They're not as good as having the
| original, working thing - but they're much better than nothing. I
| can dip in quickly and easily, and instantly be reminded of the
| creativity of my past self." And I think arguably Rewind solves
| for that completely (with the added cost of increased storage
| space and less specific capturing/resolution).
|
| This isn't a pitch for their product, it's just a natural
| progression to screenshots/capture that I believe is relevant
| here.
| thejarren wrote:
| As an added note, I stopped using Rewind because of the "steep"
| monthly cost ($20 a month), and the fact that I'd only want to
| use it as a backup to use long term.
|
| Upon reflection, $240 a year to have completely uncut video of
| my computer screen instantly searchable forever is a very
| valuable offering. Not to mention the fact that the file size
| is fairly small compared to large 4k videos.
|
| If it were built into macOS I'd be blown away and use it
| forever, still on the fence about it.
| sandkoan wrote:
| If the rewind feature set--especially the search through
| screen recording aspect--is the most compelling, then perhaps
| something I've been working on may be of use. It can
| basically do everything rewind can (though audio support is a
| WIP), doesn't cost anything, and feedback would be really
| helpful.
|
| Shoot me an email at govind <dot> gnanakumar <dot> com if
| you're curious or interested in beta testing it.
| benatkin wrote:
| It's a niche product it seems. I have zero interest in it.
| stavros wrote:
| I mean, I have zero interest in Instagram, but that doesn't
| make it a niche product.
| thejarren wrote:
| That makes sense. This archive tool is even more out there
| because it's not a direct link or file of the content, but
| just a capture of what the content would be. My work is
| mostly UI/UX and design related, so the capture is actually
| pretty valuable.
|
| I'm a bit of a digital packrat, and sometimes like to
| review personal files from nearly a decade ago, so I think
| something like this would increase in value for me over
| time.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Sort of. The more you hoard, the more painful it is to
| trawl through the hoard to review. It reminds me of Linus
| Torvald's "Only wimps use tape backup. REAL [adults] just
| upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of
| the world mirror it." -- let your work be remembered on
| the basis of who it had an impression.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That quote is partially missing the point here : part of
| the value to you is the emotional one as the creator of
| that thing - the most obvious example from a slightly
| different domain being baby photos.
| thejarren wrote:
| I've been looking into Nextcloud/Photoprism for a more
| efficient storage/browser experience, but honestly the
| software seems pretty amateur so far (vs Google Photos /
| Apple Photos).
|
| For now, everything is loosely store on an SSD, with
| different folders for year/month/day (of backup).
| Screenshots are stored by year.
|
| I'd really like a google photos browsing experience for
| all my data backup, regardless of content type (well,
| with filters).
| __t__ wrote:
| I also stopped using it for the cost, even though I loved the
| software.
| sneak wrote:
| 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 part of your threat model, but it should at
| least be known by people so they can evaluate the risk
| themselves.
| brandon272 wrote:
| From Dec 7, 2022:
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/07/apple-advanced-data-
| pro...
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Tomorrow it might become opt-out.
|
| But I still wouldn't trust Apple 100% : we know that they
| were among the companies silently cooperating with the
| NSA, and the potential for backdoors in their software
| isn't nil. (Whether you should consider this as a real
| threat depends on your circumstances of course.)
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > Approximately nobody has this turned on.
|
| It doesn't matter as long as the person storing
| screenshots in iCloud turns it on.
|
| > 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
|
| Weren't we talking about storing screenshots in iCloud
| photos?
| totetsu wrote:
| Ubuntu ..14 or so.. had a really good activity journal, where
| you could see on a timeline every file you touched, website
| visited, song played, etc. It was not quite a continuous video,
| but it was so helpful. Something changed that seemed to have
| stopped the whole project working on newer versions. Maybe the
| zeitgeist log it relies on is not used by applications so much
| any more
|
| Edit: found it
| https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/gnome-activi...
| pxoe wrote:
| one kinda similar app on windows is ManicTime
| https://www.manictime.com/ which can track opened apps,
| documents and URLs, and put them on a timeline. it can also
| automatically take screenshots (on a rolling period, limited to
| paid version), but I find the limited free version to be quite
| useful in itself.
|
| though, while it's neat to have activity history be accessible
| like this, it still doesn't compare to the value of
| intentionality of manual screenshots, and bookmarks, and notes,
| and files, and stuff like that. while it may be neat to be able
| to get back like this to something you missed while you browse,
| if it's done only to find it and put it down as a
| note/bookmark/screenshot/file, you just come back to systems
| that are already present and searchable.
| 19h wrote:
| 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 terms I recall after
| the fact.
|
| Truly amazing.
| maest wrote:
| 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's a risk they will be shoehorning in
| features and online capabilities to promote growth.
| dsiroker wrote:
| (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.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| This looks absolutely amazing, it honestly feels like someone
| made this program just for me because I kept nodding to myself
| as I was reading through the feature list. Just what I want!
| But I'd never use a closed source software for something as
| personal as recording everything I do on my laptop. They can
| have Wireshark traces and weekly audits with a digest going
| straight to my inbox, proving nothing ever leaves my Mac, but I
| still wouldn't use it. It'd just feel unsecure even if it
| realistically probably isn't. Hopefully we'll see something
| like this as a fully OSS solution some day.
| kledru wrote:
| While images might last longer than some other files in terms of
| compatibility, the most durable and flexible format is still
| plain text. So if what you want is to preserve your ideas, try
| writing.
| pigtailgirl wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215277
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34544199
| smusamashah wrote:
| I will recommend using OneNote for putting down screenshots along
| with text description or whatever you want to write.
|
| It suits perfectly for this kind of usage and is as freeform as
| the screenshots. Write anywhere, put screenshots anywhere, even
| attach any other kind of files anywhere within the doc.
| simonw wrote:
| I deeply regret the many projects from earlier in my career that
| I never thought to take screenshots of. And I'm mostly a backend
| developer!
| kasperset wrote:
| I use TimeSnapper for taking screenshot of the active screen area
| every 5 seconds. It has helped me on some occasions for notes
| that I missed during the online meeting.
| cmod wrote:
| I'd add to this: Take screenshots, and consider compiling them
| into a book. [0]
|
| [0]: https://craigmod.com/journal/digital_physical/#book
| digitalsushi wrote:
| i regularly right click a word i dont know, get the definition,
| and then screenshot the context with the web page, the word
| highlighted, the definition, and toss the fresh screenshot right
| into a vocab folder on the desktop
| dewey wrote:
| I take a lot of screenshots, even if it's just for reason as "oh
| I have to remember that". I automatically store them in a
| directory that's synced via Syncthing between my work laptop and
| home NAS. That way I have access to all of these from everywhere.
|
| Sometimes I just jump back to some point in time and scroll
| through them, it's very easy to get "stuck" after looking at old
| screenshots for 15 min. Old websites, old projects, screenshots
| from IRC. It's always fun and I feel like I get a lot of value
| out of that simple workflow.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| One of the most powerful things in the mid 00s was having this
| app that automatically uploaded any screenshot on my Mac and put
| a URL in my clipboard. This also combined with the feature of the
| Mac to screenshot a specific area of the screen.
|
| This was before the UX of sending images was trivial and the UX
| of this was so amazing that others asked me to help them set it
| up.
|
| Mind you this was high school and university so it was for what
| are now called memes as well as homework related stuff. So no
| real fear of uploading work secrets or whatnot.
|
| The other killer feature was turning on this ability to zoom in
| the whole screen with hot keys + mouse wheel. I used it
| CONSTANTLY. It was just a habit to zoom to the width of the
| actual website content, for example.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > automatically uploaded any screenshot on my Mac and put a URL
| in my clipboard
|
| This is built into windows nowadays and it's just so helpful. I
| cannot believe macos doesn't do it natively. I always have to
| browse to the desktop and the use the image. It's just Ctrl V
| on windows.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| A URL to a web hosted copy you can share with others?
|
| For OSX you've always been able to screenshot right to
| clipboard.
| lstamour wrote:
| Pretty sure the app was Skitch.
| https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/skitch-for-mac I used to love it
| for that feature too.
|
| On Windows a similar app was Jing.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jing_(software) but the Skitch
| app could also really easily add text, and had a neat way of
| dragging and dropping the tab containing the filename to save a
| file to a particular location or send it somewhere that you
| rarely see today. It wasn't intuitive but it was easy once you
| knew how, like dragging the file icon from the window title bar
| (a hidden feature of only some document-based macOS apps).
|
| Turning on zooming likely refers to
| https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210978 which was a feature
| added to Snow Leopard (maybe) where you could hold the control
| key and use the mouse wheel or Magic Mouse to zoom in.
| thdc wrote:
| This is a lesson I learned too late.
|
| Consider extending this idea outside of digital work, to any
| online hobby. In my case, I think back to all the time I spent on
| MMOs (basically raised online) and wish I had taken screenshots
| or recordings of my time then; I have none and it makes me sad.
|
| Apply it to real life, too. You'll never know what little
| meaningful events you'll wish you had records of in the future.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Also, doing it in meatspace has practical benefits. How do
| these screws go back into this hardware? Oh look, here's a
| photo that shows the thing disassembled with each screw placed
| next to the hole it came from, which also shows which bits slot
| together - maybe I even took multiple pictures to show which
| part of the case came off first.
| david422 wrote:
| I've been doing that with my house as well. Every year I end
| up trying to rediscover some mundane task like - how do I
| remove this darn window screen with these hidden latches. So
| I'm trying something new:
|
| I write up a google doc with some pictures. Then I make a QR
| code of the url and attach it. I've done it for several
| things: - how to put the air conditioners in
| the windows - documenting the water filtration system
| - documenting the septic system - documenting the
| propane fireplace - documenting the network wiring
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've picked up a habit of photographing everything even mildly
| notable outside so when the topic comes up at some point, I've
| got useful photographs.
|
| Sometimes it's years later and someone will bring up a building
| or street that's not notable enough to have photos online and
| my photos are much better than what you get from street view.
| hgsgm wrote:
| What are some interesting minor notable things you've
| documented?
| Gigachad wrote:
| I was in a discussion about modern street design that
| prioritises pedestrian safety and I brought up a trend I
| had noticed of new laneways putting the road and sidewalk
| completely level with no clear boundary between cars and
| people walking. I had taken a few photos of these streets,
| not because I had anticipated this discussion but because I
| just take a photo of all new construction and google photos
| makes it very easy to search through my photos to find
| them.
|
| I've also ended up incidentally taking photos of areas
| which later got renovated/redeveloped so I get to show a
| before and after. It's mostly possible with google maps but
| a proper photo from a phone is better quality.
| magicbuzz wrote:
| Absolutely. When I do front-end work, I screenshot every visual
| change in the PR. Boss wants a look at the current work ->
| screenshot Users want to see a difference -> screenshot.
|
| But the most valuable it that it builds up a visual history of
| changes in my Screenshots dir.
| ty_2k wrote:
| This is my favorite use case as well. There's nothing better
| than starting a pull request review on someone else's front-end
| work and seeing the changes they've made before looking at the
| code.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| 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
| whatever to your friend. You check your bookmarks, well, nothing
| there. You check your browser's history and can't find it - you
| don't even remember the website. Later, you realize that on top
| of evertyhing, you were using the Incognito mode and there is no
| way to find anything for that session.
|
| Well, when it comes to browsing history, there is a chance to
| look back and go through the visited websites (if you are lucky).
| However, what about web forms or something you were coding and
| then said "f### it, i don't need it", closed the file and then in
| a few days later: "damn, i should've saved that file"..
|
| So, I had millions of situations like that. At some point, I was
| like: "this shit can't go like that forever". And I found the
| solution.
|
| I installed a spyware on my own computer. The spyware would make
| screenshots either every Nth second or each time a user switches
| from one application to another. To activate the spyware's
| interface, you (as an evil hacker who has access to your victim's
| local computer) would have to setup a secret key combination (say
| Ctrl+A+I+P), followed by a password. The spyware interface allows
| you to see everything that was happening on the computer: list of
| loaded applications, screenshots (!), keys you typed, everything!
|
| This post gets so long, but the result was a pure success. I used
| the tool a shit ton of times to recall what I did in the pass.
|
| FAQ:
|
| Q: Wouldn't the screenshots take a lot of space on your hard
| drive?
|
| A: No. They were compressed. The quality was good enough to
| understand everything.
|
| --
|
| Q: What about the data going to someone else's computer over the
| network, say, the creators of the spyware?
|
| A: This was a local spyware. No network traffic whatsoever.
|
| --
|
| Q: Do you still use the tool?
|
| A: No. This was many, many years ago. I was a Windows user back
| then. I haven't seen similar tool since I switched to Mac
| computers.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Although I haven't tried it, rewind.ai does something similar
| with Macs (records searchable screenshots and audio)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Sorry, but the risk that there's a backdoor (that doesn't phone
| home, or at least not regularly enough to be easily spotted)
| would be just way too high for my liking.
|
| This is orders of magnitude worse than using Windows8+ !!
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Agreed. That's also one of the reasons I wouldn't want to
| install anything of that sort these days. The risk is too
| high. Back then (10+ years ago), just to stay on the safer
| side, I think I even firewalled all the outbound network
| traffic originating from the spyware, even though there was
| none.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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...
| nickjj wrote:
| Yep this is sound advice. I have dozens of screenshots of old
| websites I built from 1997-2002 and it's fun revisiting them once
| in a while. It's all sitting in a "_legacy" folder with 104
| projects that I've copied from HD to HD over the years.
|
| On the other hand, I have a few old VB6 apps that I didn't
| release publicly that I wish I had screenshots of because I
| didn't think about screenshotting them at the time.
|
| Back then taking screenshots was more common I think. Having a
| "screenshots" section on your tool's website was pretty normal
| and expected. Especially since back then streaming video wasn't
| readily available. A screenshot was the only way to showcase what
| you've built visually. Also for websites you usually had a PSD
| file with the whole site's layout that you later sliced up into
| images when creating the markup, so at the very least you
| probably have that PSD sitting around.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Everyone doing any sort of creative work should maintain a
| portfolio (writer, developer, musician, painter, architect,
| interior designer, literally everyone).
|
| I keep recordings of websites I've done on YouTube and add them
| to my portfolio (http://zchry.org/). It's kind of cathartic to me
| to be able to revisit things I've spent hundreds of hours on,
| especially long after they've run their course.
| neilv wrote:
| With most side-project software I wrote in the 90s, I definitely
| found that, nowadays, a screenshot would be more valuable to me
| than being able to run it.
|
| Some side-project screenshots I do have, I couldn't practically
| reproduce the conditions under which they were made, even when I
| can easily still run the code.
|
| I do need to be better about my _professional_ nostalgia
| /portfolio. Even a couple years ago, when I wrote an internal-
| only iOS app that worked very nicely, and was sure to get
| screenshots and video, adding them to the company-wide "nostalgia
| folder" I maintained... in all the work I did for a smooth
| handoff when I left that startup, to make sure the company didn't
| effectively lose any data, I didn't think to ask about keeping
| some copies of less-sensitive nostalgia photos/videos for myself.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Want an archival program that would take 25% size screen shots
| every X or seconds (or fraction of) and record low bitrate sound
| when computer active. Index to searchable text and have system up
| sample data later. Maybe black and white with very limited color
| info for recolouring as well. So many link rot content that's too
| hard or difficult to track down online vs being assured there's
| some fragment of local version that you know you've consumed in
| the past. Probably log a life times activity with a few dozen
| terabytes.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| For link rot, automatic website backups when making a bookmark
| seems to be a better idea ?
|
| P.S.: Shame of everyone involved that something like SingleFile
| is not a web standard yet.
| aj7 wrote:
| Screenshot->crop->Apple Notes is very standard for me. I try to
| remember to select and copy some appropriate text from the page
| to act as title text. Copying the url into the note completes it.
| bmitc wrote:
| Not everyone can take and take with them screenshots of their
| work though. The vast majority of my work is hidden behind
| company and other walls.
| press-any-key wrote:
| I use SnagIt to capture a screenshot with a single keystroke when
| I hit the print-screen button. I have configured SnagIt to
| automatically store .png file with a date/time stamp.
|
| Out of 100 screenshots, 99 will never be viewed, but that 1 out
| of 100 is valuable.
| b215826 wrote:
| > SnagIt [1]
|
| $62.99 for something that you could hack together in a few
| lines of (power)shell script?
|
| [1] https://www.techsmith.com/store/snagit
| robjan wrote:
| Greenshot is a FOSS alternative which achieves a similar
| thing
| Arainach wrote:
| Win + PrintScreen does exactly this already?
| ctxc wrote:
| 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
| lostmsu wrote:
| 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.
| Jaxkr wrote:
| Have you seen https://www.rewind.ai/ ?
|
| It's almost exactly what you're describing.
| lostmsu wrote:
| 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.
| mgerb wrote:
| 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
| s1mon wrote:
| I worked with someone who took a lot of screenshots and dumped
| them into powerpoints as a record of the work done on projects.
| It becomes a way of journalling or recording. Having that kind of
| record is really helpful, and I wish that I had the habit.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I used to sent screenshots of chat conversations to my ex all the
| time because she was always "reinterpreting" the details of past
| conversations. Turns out this was a maladaptation to cope with
| her abusive behaviour and wildly untreated borderline personality
| disorder. So FYI, if you find yourself in the same situation,
| take a step back, reevaluate, and ask others around you for help.
| cloudmike wrote:
| 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 [2] LOC surpasses C++ by another factor. This
| post reminded me I'm overdue for another now that Luau > 3x C++
| LOC.
|
| I find it rewarding to look back at my progress. I'll share in
| case it's interesting for you too [3].
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2168330/Helmscape/
|
| [1] https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc
|
| [2] https://luau-lang.org
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/kineticpoet/status/1619508466212831232
| srcreigh wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, Super cool. I wishlisted and downloaded the
| demo.
| david422 wrote:
| Nice, love the time lapse gif!
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Just record your entire session with OBS, set at 3fps.
|
| I can't count the number of times I've found it helpful to be
| able to check what I was doing X time units ago.
| dewey wrote:
| That sounds like exactly what https://www.rewind.ai is doing.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| AMD and Nvidia Drivers can both be set up to record the X last
| minutes of the screen. I've found it very useful when logging
| bugs to be able to step back through my last few minutes to see
| the steps that led to the bug.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Do you keep that forever? How often do you need something from
| a 1/3 second time slice, vs, say 1s or 5s?
| accrual wrote:
| Yes! I take screenshots on my personal machine whenever I feel
| like it would be interesting to look back on. I have about 12
| years of screenshots from different machines. I can see the music
| I was listening to, the tabs I had open, my wallpaper and theme,
| the OS. I can see my digital workspace evolving and changing over
| time and I appreciate being able to do this.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I on the other hand should take fewer screenshots, I have more
| than 136000 screenshots on my phone and it is not even a year
| old. Similar number with my PC.
| artdigital wrote:
| I am similar so just recently started wiping them all.
|
| On Mac I use Hazel to auto-move old screenshots into the trash.
| On iPhone I use Gemini Photos to clear out screenshots that are
| just random screens or something I wanted to share to someone.
| simlevesque wrote:
| So, around 38 per day ?
| GaggiX wrote:
| 136,000 not 13,600
| cjsawyer wrote:
| Why? That's hundreds per day.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Every time I see something remotely interesting, I get the
| tic to take a screenshot (I don't know if it's actually a tic
| or not, I can't think of a better term). if I consciously
| decide not to take a screenshot I have to suppress the action
| or else it is automatic for me.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| I made my first website on geocities and it kills me that I
| cannot for the life of me find a record of it any longer.
|
| It was a website that "sold" replica/counterfeit watches.
|
| I was enthralled with them as a child for some reason. I knew
| they were popular items on the fledgling internet so I created a
| webpage for them on geocities and setup an email address to
| contact if you would like to purchase one.
|
| I had lots of interested parties who wanted to buy the watches
| but unfortunately my parents would not front a 12 year old the
| cash required to purchase them in bulk from the shady internet
| supplier I had found. Probably a smart move on their part.
|
| Fun times!
|
| I ended up purchasing a few really high quality replicas when I
| visited China decades later as an adult.
|
| I miss the early internet.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Geocities was reasonably well archived, do you remember the
| URL?
|
| https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
| darkwater wrote:
| I'm in a similar situation, I even remember more or less how
| it was visually but for the life of me I cannot remember the
| URL or what nickname I could have used, I cannot find it by
| my 16yo me nickname I remember :(
|
| Edit: reading the page, it's a scrape from 2009. My page was
| from 1997-1998 and basically used only by me and my circle of
| friends, chances are it has been lost forever.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Iirc You can search web archive by string, not just url
| mmcgaha wrote:
| If I were your father, I would have been damn proud of you. I
| wouldn't have fronted you the cash either though.
| samstave wrote:
| [flagged]
| myth2018 wrote:
| I'm in a similar situation too. I had a website in 2000 hosted
| at cjb.net.
| jkepler wrote:
| My first website, which I started in 1999, was first crawled
| by archive.org in 2005. I think that it was a few years late
| the computer science department decided to no longer allow
| alumni to have free home pages, and I lost access to the
| site.
| szszrk wrote:
| I was worried about same issue as well, although mostly in the
| area of website/knowledge screenshots as my desktop screenshots
| are pretty low in quantity.
|
| Recently decided to selfhost Archivebox.io app. It feels a bit
| rough but delivers decent results. I love the PDFs and single
| file HTML dumps.
|
| Managed to secure some very old sites I relied on for ages but
| never really saved them. All can be refreshed, dumped again,
| tagged, searched. UI is actually a Django admin page.
| urda wrote:
| I love screenshots. In many of my internal code reviews and
| changes I will include them to demonstrate or highlight changes.
|
| Take more screenshots! Let me see what you see!
| jw1224 wrote:
| Shout out to CleanShotX[1], top-quality software and now
| absolutely indispensable to me.
|
| [1] https://cleanshot.com/
| karmelapple wrote:
| The recent history additions have been very helpful, too. I
| really like this app.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| 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
| darkteflon wrote:
| 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"?
| danhak wrote:
| I've had a lot of success using the pixelmatch library for
| image comparison / deduping
|
| https://github.com/mapbox/pixelmatch
| darkteflon wrote:
| Thank you, that looks perfect.
|
| > "pixelmatch is around 150 lines of code, has no
| dependencies..."
| giantrobot wrote:
| * Except hundreds of megabytes of Node.js
| augusto-moura wrote:
| I imagine that compressing the screenshots daily with something
| like gzip would do the magic for screenshots. A lot of the
| image would be repeated anyway, task bar, active windows,
| background, etc.
|
| A good question would be if you screenshot your screen twice in
| a very small time, how much of the binary would be the same?
| Are the tools and PNG reproducible enough to dedupe most of the
| second file on gzip?
| lttlrck wrote:
| Recording the whole screen using H.264 or similar at a low
| frame rate might be easier.
| Ayesh wrote:
| A very low tech approach would be to create a video from the
| screenshots, and let the video codecs do this for you. Av1/x265
| are quite mature in detecting differences between frames.
| jefftk wrote:
| I agree that's not a bad starting point, but it should be
| possible to do a lot better than this because a screenshot
| will often be very similar to an earlier one that's not the
| previous one. For example, repeatedly switching between a few
| views. Video codecs are optimized for (a) streams that rarely
| go back to an earlier pattern, (b) minimal ongoing memory
| usage, and (c) realtime decompression, so they aren't going
| for quite the same use case.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Even h264, which is way over a decade old, can reference
| frames that are further back than the last one. And it
| supports lossless. Now the only thing to research is if
| those two features can be used together and how many frames
| back it can reference.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| 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
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Don't use whatsapp or instagram, apps that prevent taking
| screenshots. Or jailbreak your phone.
| xpressvideoz wrote:
| I have been taking screenshots for years, but it developed into a
| hoarding OCD. And it is ruining my life. My regular life is being
| interrupted by taking screenshots all the time, so I have
| relatively less time to work on important things. I don't even
| view those screenshots again in the future so the time spent on
| those screenshots is completely wasted. I don't recommend having
| a habit of taking screenshots to those that may be vulnerable to
| OCD.
| wingerlang wrote:
| You can download existing auto-screenshot-tools or even setup a
| cron to take them every 2 seconds. Maybe it could reduce your
| OCD by knowing it is always being done for you?
| lostmsu wrote:
| I feel like screenshots every 2 seconds would take more space
| than a full screen video capture.
| andai wrote:
| 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.
| switchbak wrote:
| 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?
| GaggiX wrote:
| 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| I and many others can easily empathize if we look back at
| our phone camera libraries, full of mundane momentarily
| interesting images from our lives.
|
| But what screenshots trigger that capture itch?
|
| One thing I have (on my phone) are high score/achievement
| moments in games. Ironically, Threes game has its own
| internal hall of fame, and the UI is made up like a framed
| picture on a wall.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It's quite a common thing, Xfire went even further and
| introduced its Flashback feature 15 years ago :
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/82410-xfire-gets-
| video-c...
|
| > The TiVo-like function allows users to go back and
| record footage five to ten seconds after it happened.
| exikyut wrote:
| $ 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.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I should put everything into CLIP and make a semantic
| search engine. (Also OCR is a good idea)
| ketzo wrote:
| Since you used the phrase "my regular life is being
| interrupted," it really does sound like a bit of a compulsion.
| I'm sorry to hear that.
|
| Have you tried talking to a psychologist or a psychiatrist? OCD
| and similar disorders are hard to "cure," but I know from close
| friends and family that therapy and some drugs both can be
| helpful in giving you back some control, as well as dealing
| with some of the itinerant anxiety and depression.
|
| Either way, hope you're doing okay!
| jxf wrote:
| > 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?
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > 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 things when my only context is "I
| saw it last week or something")
|
| Honestly it's exhausting.
| karmelapple wrote:
| 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...
| Thorrez wrote:
| >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
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| You can use a personal search engine, it runs locally,
| allowing you search back the content you visited without
| SEO junks nor privacy leak.
|
| https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| Doesn't yacy do the same thing?
| steve1977 wrote:
| 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.
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| The tool I mentioned above auto save the full text
| content of your visited web pages locally so you could
| look back even if the server is down
| post-it wrote:
| Sounds like it's a compulsion, same as people who check the
| stove or faucet just in case, GP takes screenshots just in
| case.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Just set up a screen recorder to record a frame once every
| second into a video file.
| andai wrote:
| 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 :)
| oblak wrote:
| Good thing you realized this is exactly what video codecs
| have been doing for decades. Thanks for the chuckle,
| though.
| kaetemi wrote:
| 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.
| touisteur wrote:
| Nvenc is actually quite nice and easy to use for that,
| but if you want to do any serious post processing you'll
| need to parse h265 (headers at least) and it's not the
| easiest parser to write.
| aaws11 wrote:
| previous discussion:
|
| sept 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215277
| naet wrote:
| I made some art zines in an older version of MS Word that I
| saved, the source files for, but when I went to open and print
| them years later the formatting and images were completely
| destroyed even though Word is supposed to be backwards
| compatible.
|
| I thought the .doc file would be a good way to save it, since it
| was closest to the source and I could edit things later if I
| needed. I ended up having better luck when I could find the
| rendered PDFs or rasterized images instead. They were less
| editable, but far more stable for archiving and returning to
| after long periods of time.
| badrabbit wrote:
| 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 interact with any
| popups. This is on Linux. Any recommendations?
| namibj wrote:
| 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".
| mfkp wrote:
| I've been using https://screencloud.net/ for the past few
| years. Custom file naming rules, you can upload to your own FTP
| server, then it will automatically copy a link to the file.
| Works perfectly for sharing and archiving screenshots.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| It's best to just use a printer, makes it easy to review
| screenshots I've taken at night or in the loo
| doerinrw wrote:
| I think this is highly dependent on your distro (and comfort
| with the CLI but I'm taking that for granted on HN) but I found
| the gnome screenshot to be very simple, quick, and effective.
| Piping a hotkey to a CLI command is presumably easy, and after
| 5s of googling I found the guide below for Gnome. Not exactly
| fancy and I haven't used this specific tool recently enough to
| say whether it meets all your requirements exactly (e.g. you
| might need to press "Enter" once to close a popup), but I think
| a solution like this might fit the Linux ethos best!
|
| https://linux.die.net/man/1/gnome-screenshot
| https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/proc_setting...
| badrabbit wrote:
| Thanks, will check it out, my main problem with gnome-* is
| the package pulling in gnome deps into my "minimal" lxqt
| environment.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I use Sharex on Windows and I don't think there's any better
| tool, so I searched for "run sharex on linux" and there is
| indeed a guide - https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6531 -
| maybe you can get it to work?
|
| I believe it can do all of the things you want. Certainly area
| capture, remembered area capture, fullscreen capture, all bound
| to different hotkeys. Mine saves with the name = the timestamp
| but you can probably config it to be an incrementing index.
| It's incredibly full-featured.
|
| I also have hotkeys for "capture current pixel's hex code" and
| "measure bounded box in pixels." When you take a capture you
| can also annotate it including showing labeled steps. After
| capture you can do one or more of: save locally (to one or more
| places), upload (to one or more hosts), copy to clipboard, etc.
| That includes pastebin if you have text saved to your clipboard
| so I use this for that also.
| kroltan wrote:
| I can't recommend ShareX enough, it is the most well thought
| out, intuitive and comprehensive tool for handling
| screenshots. I really miss it on Linux, I'll try that guide.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Thanks, looks featureful. But I really need it very stable so
| running it in wine is a dealbreaker, since I already have a
| wine setup I have to fumble with a lot to get different
| windows executables to behave in certain ways.
| julianeon wrote:
| 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.
| cwaffles wrote:
| I can recommend flameshot[0]. It has good editing tools built-
| in, low dependencies, and is ergonomic.
|
| [0] https://flameshot.org/
| badrabbit wrote:
| Thanks, from the demo gifs on that page, this is my favorite
| so far.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > 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 solution to this is apparently screenshots, I have
| to respectfully disagree.
|
| 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. My side projects basically
| all have tests, these tests are vital for picking up years later
| and for validation while developing.
|
| For personal notes, I use this script which upon `$ diary` would
| create/open an entry for the current day in the appropriate
| folder with vim:
| https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh.
| Text files will last forever, it has some basic flavoring with
| markdown, but that's it. The folder where this is indexed is
| without a doubt the most valuable data on my computer, and it
| stretches back years.
|
| I do occasionally take screenshots but never for reasons that
| author find screenshot to be useful for.
| simonw wrote:
| Good luck compiling an iOS app you built and last touched in
| 2012 against a modern version of XCode.
|
| You'd need to keep an entire old, un-upgraded Mac around just
| to have a chance of doing that without MAJOR engineering work!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| What about a Virtual Machine? I've found VMWare Fusion does a
| good job with Mac guests. Snow Leopard works quite well. You
| could even do it from a non-Mac host if you don't mind
| applying well-known patches to VMWare.
| wingerlang wrote:
| I think the best solution is to just keep both, I have all
| the source code for all my projects since maybe 2008. But I
| also keep a lot of screenshot, if I want to refer to an old
| project I go to those screenshots (or even better, videos)
| in 99.9% of the cases.
| humaniania wrote:
| Turn a copy of your old PC into a VHD for a VM before you
| retire it.
| whartung wrote:
| > 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
| dependencies, if you don't have those actual dependencies
| locally with you, you may be out of luck. Even if the actual
| project still exists, the older versions you depend on may not.
|
| I can't speak to others, but if you were to actively shelve a
| Java project, and were using Maven or relying on its
| infrastructure, I would clean out your local repository cache,
| rebuild and test the project, then snapshot the project
| directory and the repository cache. At least then you might
| have a solid chance of resuscitating the project later on if
| you needed too.
| spockz wrote:
| 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.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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 dependencies, if you don't have those actual
| dependencies locally with you, you may be out of luck. Even
| if the actual project still exists, the older versions you
| depend on may not.
|
| I say this problem impacts most of the development stacks out
| there, whenever you're dealing with a package manager:
| - Node and Javascript have npm - Python has pip -
| .NET has NuGet - Java has Maven/Gradle - PHP has
| Composer - Ruby has gem
|
| And all of those have packages that could technically
| disappear, or you could have network issues and so on (when I
| build my container images, I sometimes even have apt fail,
| though very rarely). I think a safe bet is to run your own
| package proxy, like Sonatype Nexus:
| https://www.sonatype.com/products/nexus-repository (there's
| also JFrog Artifactory in this space, probably others too:
| https://jfrog.com/artifactory/)
|
| This can improve build speeds because you refer to your own
| server for getting packages, the proxy will also pull
| packages that it doesn't have automatically, there are no
| rate limits to deal with (e.g. DockerHub pull limits vs the
| image being pulled once and stored in Nexus, unless changed)
| and you can also pretty easily see just how much stuff you're
| relying on.
|
| The next step is to also use this server for publishing your
| own packages, which is suddenly easier - you can manage your
| own accounts, with nobody to tell you what you can/can't
| upload and how: you literally have all of the storage on the
| server at your disposal, redeploy as often as you want.
|
| The only real downside to this is that you are indeed self-
| hosting it: you need updates, storage and all that. Well,
| maybe there's also the issue that using custom repositories
| downright sucks in some stacks - while npm supports something
| like --registry, I distinctly recall Ruby being a total pain
| in this regard in a container context (something about
| Bundler configuration, since it doesn't seem to support a
| command line parameter):
| https://help.sonatype.com/repomanager3/nexus-repository-
| admi...
| whartung wrote:
| In a related matter it behooves open projects to do a very
| clean build before they do a release.
|
| By that I simply mean they should take a source
| distribution of their project and perform a build with
| their repository caches cleared to ensure the project
| actually still builds in the wild.
|
| Dependencies can silently vanish behind the facade of a
| local proxy or cache.
| torh wrote:
| > The author's solution to this is apparently screenshots, I
| have to respectfully disagree.
|
| It's a good thing you're respectful about it. Your proposed
| solution seems to miss of of the main point of the author:
| creativity. Using a standard set of mature programming tools
| isn't creativity. The other aspect (that you touched) is time.
| Unless you set up a virtual machine, you will never get the
| same visual result of your toy project in Microsoft Visual
| Basic -- or maybe even get it to compile.
|
| The author argues that screenshots is the fastes and most
| convenient way to reminiscence about the past, and for that she
| is right.
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