[HN Gopher] Take more screenshots
___________________________________________________________________
Take more screenshots
Author : pcr910303
Score : 259 points
Date : 2022-07-24 16:55 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alexwlchan.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexwlchan.net)
| aosaigh wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/
| behnamoh wrote:
| macos makes it really easy to record the screen. cmd-shift-5
| brings up the screenshot app. but converting them to gifs or
| other video formats is not possible, unless you use third party
| apps. in that case, you might as well just use a better
| screenshot app that does that for you.
|
| what I wish we could record, however, is the system interactions
| (kinda like how you record games inside the game itself). it
| doesn't record a video, but rather your mouse movements and
| keyboard inputs, along with the location of apps and windows and
| their state. it would take more space but it would be more useful
| in case you wanna go back and run counterfactuals.
| eastbound wrote:
| My gripe with MacOS is that it creates huge files. A few MB for
| a screenshot, when 250KB are often enough; and probably 10MB
| per minute for a small area, for video, which makes it
| immediately impossible to send to customers.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| You can configure the native screenshot app to create jpegs
| (smaller), but I think you lose transparency.
| behnamoh wrote:
| he was talking about videos and he's right, recorded videos
| are huuuge
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Here you go.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/BARUMWQ
|
| EDIT: Ah, I realise now this achieves the same thing. But it
| _does_ record video, so I 'm not sure what's missing other than
| a visual representation of keyboard input.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I take screenshots of the Windows update with an iPhone.
|
| A spinner shows with the words _Working on updates. 100%
| complete. Don 't turn off your computer_
|
| _Windows 11 is ready--and it 's free! Get the latest version of
| Windows with a new look, new features, and enhanced security.
| [Download and install] [Stay on Windows 10 for now] Checking for
| updates ..._
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| For a few months I ran a simple Python keylogger to study my
| keyboard usage, in response to pain. Much later I found disk was
| filling up and traced it back to periodic screenshots, like every
| few minutes. It was a creepy feeling but also kind of fun to step
| back in time and see what I had been doing. Would've been more
| fun if it were during the days when I did 3D modeling and pixel
| art.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| For Windows folks, I've found OneNote's screenshot tool
| convenient for quickly adding screenshots while taking notes.
| ffitch wrote:
| Can't pass by without recommending my https://shottr.cc (app for
| Mac.) I've set a dedicated folder for screenshots and save there
| literally everything now -- purchase receipts, important chat
| conversations, work in progress, reminders to myself, zoom
| slides. Agree with the author, screenshots are under-appreciated.
| pluijzer wrote:
| I like to take a screenshot too when having just created
| something. Myself I like to create a screenshot of my whole
| desktop. Years later I get a nice feeling of nostalgia seeing
| what theme, wm, apps etc. I used to work with. For the same
| reason I usually enjoy old photos more for what is in the
| background than the subject itself.
| imperialdrive wrote:
| ShareX for you Windows folks. It's great. https://getsharex.com/
| binarycrusader wrote:
| If you're on Windows 10 or later, there's also Win + G which
| will bring up the Xbox Game Bar. There you can capture
| screenshots and video or set up custom key shortcuts to start
| recording, etc.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Windows 10 and up also has Win-Shift-S, which brings up a
| screenshot UI similar to that found on macOS with the
| Command-Shift-5 shortcut.
| karencarits wrote:
| You can also configure sharex to run tesseract ocr locally on
| the images, making them searchable while keeping everything
| sound in terms of privacy. There is also a hack to compress
| pngs so that the file size becomes next to nothing
| yardshop wrote:
| ShareX looks great, I will check it out.
|
| In Windows 10, you can also press Win+PrintScreen to save a
| numbered screen shot to your Pictures\Screenshots folder.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| This seems like just what I need. Does anyone have
| recommendations for something similar for MacOS?
| rejectfinite wrote:
| https://flameshot.org/ posted above. Not sure if it does all
| that sharex does.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| Was going to post this. It is amazing.
|
| But I think it will upload to imgur, be sure to configure it
| off. I have it sent to have in a local folder.
|
| It also has great .gif making support and can also screen
| record to a .mp4
| jarenmf wrote:
| One of the things I regret most is not keeping backups of the
| programs I wrote as a child almost 25 years ago. They all just
| gone, tens of thousands of lines of code. I remember spending
| whole summers coding and it's all gone.
| muro wrote:
| Is there some software (macos) to regularly create screenshots
| throughout the day? Preferably if it merges it into a time-lapse.
|
| I could probably create something with cron, but maybe a neater
| solution already exists.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Yes, I have ten years of screenshots (and webcam shots) at half
| hour intervals from having _LifeSlice_ :
|
| Source:https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice
|
| Download page: http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/
|
| I developed it as an early Quantified Self tool primarily for
| the Webcam shots, but also have been saved on more than one
| occasion by having screenshots of work that would otherwise be
| lost.
|
| Edit: the first version was just a shell script, which if you
| want a starting point to modify:
| https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice/blob/master/1.0-S...
| Nzen wrote:
| I used to use chronolapse, a python program to take
| screenshots, including picture in picture with a webcam. It can
| use mencoder to create a video. I found I preferred using
| ffmpeg for my use case.
| yonrg wrote:
| Something bash'ish while sleep 5 do
| import -id root `date -Is`.png done
|
| Then make a time lapse with mplayer et.al.
| scubbo wrote:
| $ which import import not found
|
| How should I install that tool?
| foodstances wrote:
| It's part of ImageMagick.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Last month while I was backing up my old files from my 2005-ish
| laptop, I also realized that screenshots are very nostalgic. Just
| like this old Android project I worked a decade ago and if anyone
| wants to feel nostalgic on Google's Nexus 7:
| https://initviews.com/2022/07/16/legacy-projects-part.html
| radiojasper wrote:
| I use ShareX[0] to screenshot all my work. I have it set up so
| that CTRL-SHIFT-F6 makes a screenshot of a region and it's
| automatically uploaded to some shared hosting server. It's a lot
| of fun to see work back from years ago!
|
| [0] https://getsharex.com/
| pkdpic wrote:
| I couldn't agree more an I appreciate someone giving permission
| to not feel bad about accumulating screenshots.
|
| I just went through three years worth of screenshots from
| attending tech bootcamp and working my first dev job. It was a
| great reminder of projects and people I care about who I'll
| probably never get to work with again. Like random office
| polaroids for the remote work era (as if I'm that old).
|
| To my own surprise my only regret was that I should have taken
| more screenshots... Also they're all pngs...
| mywacaday wrote:
| I am a big advocate of this, I spend a lot of time in online
| meetings and presentations and use Onenote to take my notes. A
| screenshot in context is extremely useful when revisiting later
| as I am a visual thinker. The ability of Onenote to index text
| in a screenshot is one of the most useful features in any
| program and allows me to find items even if I only recall a
| snippet of context.
| suby wrote:
| 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.
| laumars wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. I might try this myself
| scottlilly wrote:
| 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.
| akersten wrote:
| It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store
| all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like
| 8hr/day x 20 days/month of recording my multi-monitor setup
| would fill up my drive pretty fast.
| darzu wrote:
| If you're working on open source, stream straight to YouTube
| or Twitch. Can be private or not.
|
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| 1080p may easily mean that the code is unreadable if you
| have a decent size screen.
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| Parent comment specifically mentions recording for game
| development so 1080p at 10fps probably isn't going to cut
| it.
| capableweb wrote:
| Update it to be 20~25 fps then, still won't take
| ridiculous amount of space.
| [deleted]
| haunter wrote:
| x264/veryfast, 1080p 10fps at 2000kbps, is more than enough
| for plain text recordings and it won't take that much space.
|
| You can go even lower with other encoders (x265) + if you
| don't record audio at all
| sp332 wrote:
| You're using 4:4:4 (disabled chroma subsampling) to keep
| text readable?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You only need 40kbps for acceptable audio, so I wouldn't
| worry about that at all in this ballpark of video bitrate.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| A while ago I tried to see what compression I could get out
| of screen recording losslessly to a scratch disk and
| encoding afterwards as slowly as I could wait. I didn't
| write any numbers down, but the difference in efficiency
| was significant. Some observations:
|
| - Of the lossless encoders in OBS/libav, utvideo was the
| best in both CPU usage and efficiency, followed by lossless
| ultrafast x264.
|
| - An SSD can handle even uncompressed 24bpp 1080p60, which
| is 375 MB/s. Typical screen content compresses well below
| the ~100 MB/s write speed of an HDD. Fullscreen video does
| not, instead gradually filling the write cache until either
| OOM or thrashing.
|
| - For onscreen content, I prefer the bitrate tradeoff of
| keeping PC color range and not chroma subsampling.
|
| This technique isn't as effective for this use case of
| recording several hours daily, since reencoding must be
| fast enough on average to keep up. Best to already have a
| home server (any spare desktop). Otherwise, use AOM codecs,
| known for poor multithreading, to encode at full speed
| without hogging CPU.
|
| ps, temporal compression means that dropping framerate
| makes surprisingly little difference with modern codecs.
| But I really should be writing down the results of my ad
| hoc tests...
| jenny91 wrote:
| 2000 kbps = 0.25 MiB/s = 900 MiB/h?
|
| That's only 1.14 TiB per year doing it 5 h/week * 5
| days/week * 52 weeks.
| ianbicking wrote:
| 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
| lazyjeff wrote:
| 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.
| anyfactor wrote:
| 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.
|
| I enjoy relieving those moments.
| bradlys wrote:
| What're you guys working on that this is a regular
| occurrence? I just never run into walls like this when coding
| stuff up.
| mleonhard wrote:
| I'm writing Swift code that calls Apple's UIKit. I'm
| constantly wasting time trying to figure out how to use the
| API properly, since it's buggy and poorly documented. Each
| solution brings relief, not euphoria.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Sounds like hell
| roman-holovin wrote:
| Debugging is huge part of this. For example, for web where
| you can plop breakpoint or print statement anywhere and
| have a good level of transparency into what is happening
| really helps resolve issues quickly.
|
| Game development where GPU is not really going spill the
| beans of what is happening under the hood that easily - one
| can stuck for a longer times easily.
| djmips wrote:
| 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.
| coldblues wrote:
| 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.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| This is a fantastic tip, thank you! I'm definitely going to
| try this out.
| jayknight wrote:
| Very similar to the process of rubber duck debugging.
| heroku wrote:
| why don't you just stream on twitch
| Pakdef wrote:
| I still have files I made from the 90s... but my guess is that
| they won't be around forever.
| amelius wrote:
| I make lots of screenshots.
|
| The problem is organizing them ...
|
| Perhaps if I ran them through OCR, it would be easier to grep
| through them.
| liotier wrote:
| Not just OCR, but object recognition - just has to be smart
| enough to read the window's title bar to tag the shot by
| applications present in it and by document name when some are
| visible.
| marcinreal wrote:
| 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.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| 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.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| 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.
| PcChip wrote:
| >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
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It's not always about hoarding.
|
| Legally it's very helpful if you create a paper trail of your
| work
| marcinreal wrote:
| 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.
| coldblues wrote:
| >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.
| peckrob wrote:
| 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. :/
| Victerius wrote:
| 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 have deleted everything from uni though.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| Interesting madeleine cookie
| [deleted]
| mastazi wrote:
| maybe some HN readers don't get the madeleine reference:
| https://www.thelocal.fr/20190814/french-expression-of-the-
| da...
| ace2358 wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It's probably not much help now, but if you still have the
| floppy disks, those pictures can definitely still be viewed
| again.
| krallja wrote:
| You can even bring them into the modern world with Mini
| vMac... by taking a screenshot of it!
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Anytime screenshots come up in conversation I have to recommend
| Flameshot, it totally changed my workflow with including them.
| You can create, crop, and edit screenshots really quickly and
| it's a must-install for me at this point. Open source and cross
| platform. https://flameshot.org/
| snerbles wrote:
| A wonderful tool that promptly broke when I switched to
| Wayland.
| LightHugger wrote:
| Flameshot is great, the only thing that would be better is if
| you could video record a screen region using the same UI
| instead of just taking screenshots.
|
| Most screen recorders are incredibly cludgy. They either
| require extra cropping and editing after the fact or tank
| framerate into being unusable. I don't understand the technical
| problems and the whys though.
| greenthrow wrote:
| I disagree with this advice. Nostalgia is a waste of time. I
| started coding in about 1988. I have nothing that goes back
| further than 2010. And I don't waste any time on anything I'm not
| currently working on. Keep working, keep moving forward. Don't
| waste your time looking backwards.
|
| That's just my opinion, obviously. But I find the obsession with
| nostalgia in our culture to be sad and destructive.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > But I find the obsession with nostalgia in our culture to be
| sad and destructive
|
| My occassional evenings spend looking back through the life
| that brought me where I am are sad and destructive?
|
| I find them to be very effective tools for reflection.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I do wish that I had kept a universally readable record of more
| of my work over the years. I've managed to preserve a fair deal
| of it, but there are notable holes and a lot of it is software
| which isn't going to run without some tinkering, particularly the
| projects with significant third party dependencies. Web stuff
| (e.g. RoR projects) is particularly bad in this regard, often
| being nigh unrecoverable.
|
| The bigger thing to emphasize I think though regardless of
| archival method is to make sure to regularly back things up. Some
| of my earliest things from the 90s were on the boot drive and got
| wiped when the family computer needed a reformat. Later on when I
| had my own computer, a lot of stuff was on an external drive to
| make room on the boot drive, but one day the external decided to
| kick the bucket and everything on it went up in flames because
| there were no other copies. I didn't have much cash at that point
| since I was a high schooler but I'm sure I could've figured out
| _something_ that would 've preserved at least the most prized
| documents.
|
| These days I have everything automatically incrementally backed
| up with Backblaze but now that Time Machine on macOS uses APFS
| snapshots and is more storage efficient I also want to use my
| home server for backup.
| 300bps wrote:
| I taught myself Commodore BASIC and 6502 Assembly including
| writing a BBS program between 1982-1985.
|
| I kept literally nothing from that time or probably even a decade
| after.
|
| Literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
| yair99dd wrote:
| I've been using timesnapper on Windows. It will capture a screen
| shot and timeline it based on title/program text. For years. The
| time portal aspect is fascinating, and ultimately useless.
| karencarits wrote:
| This looks interesting but my antivirus didn't like it as it
| detected "SWF.Exploit.Kit.Rig.tht.Talos" when downloaded from
| https://timesnapper.com/
| LeonB wrote:
| Founder here... looking into this.
| kragen wrote:
| Alex says, "Digital work is inherently ephemeral." This is
| precisely backwards; digital work is one of the _least_ ephemeral
| aspects of human material culture, exceeded only by occasional
| miraculous analog exceptions like the Pyramids, potsherds, the
| Lascaux paintings, and Otzi 's axe. The Torah is digital--encoded
| in a sequence of discrete symbols rather than continuously
| varying quantities--and that's why it's survived for 3000 years.
| The digitization of Socrates's words by Plato and Xenophon is the
| reason we argue about him today, 2500 years later, rather than
| his forgotten Persian contemporaries or even Heraclitus.
|
| Being digital is what makes the idea of an "exact copy" make
| sense. You can make an exact copy of some version of the Torah or
| the Symposium because it's only the discrete letters that matter;
| the analog nuances of tone of voice or thickness of pen stroke do
| not count.
|
| So digitality is the _alternative_ to the ephemerality of the
| analog, which is inevitably eaten up by moths and rust. We all
| know this about digitized _language_ , but for some reason now
| that we've digitized _reasoning_ in the form of computer
| programs, we habitually throw up our hands and declare defeat in
| the face of inevitable ephemerality.
|
| This is bullshit.
|
| What I really want, instead of screenshots, is a deterministic,
| reproducible computing environment. The idea is something like
| uxn or Nock: a platform that's simple enough to stay compatible
| forever, and efficient enough to be used for many things, even if
| there are a few things that I do on a computer that need more
| performance.
|
| There are a lot of inspirational examples that offer tempting
| evidence that this is possible for large, interesting classes of
| computations: the Smalltalk-78 revival emulator Vanessa
| Freudenberg wrote, the UM of the Cult of the Bound Variable
| (which had over 300 successful independent reimplementations),
| Nguyen and Kay's sketch of Chifir, Lorie's archival UVC, Wirth's
| RISC, uxn/Varvara, the JVM, and the numerous emulators of things
| like the MS-DOS environment, the NES, and the Gameboy that are
| good enough to run the original games.
|
| I'm not saying it would be an improvement to do all your digital
| creative work on an emulated Gameboy in order to ensure that it
| was reproducible. I think we can do a lot better than that. None
| of the presently existing archival virtual machines are adequate.
| But I think the reproducibility of Gameboy games tells us that we
| don't have to accept bitrot as the price of using computers.
|
| Alex says, "They're not as good as having the original, working
| thing - but they're much better than nothing". Well, let's figure
| out how we can have the original, working thing! This is
| software, it's a simple matter of programming.
| downwithbgp wrote:
| Depending on how much one's willing to stretch that argument,
| they can also point out that all known life is digital.
|
| Human genome is, effectively, a historical digital record
| (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10231).
| kragen wrote:
| I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the base
| sequence of DNA, or the residue sequence of a peptide, is
| digital, and yes, that's what makes reproduction as we know
| it possible.
|
| Many aspects of life, however, are analog. Magnesium
| concentrations, membrane polarizations, molecule
| orientations, temperature, and so on.
| sitkack wrote:
| Wasm can be a key piece of the system you seek. A simple VM,
| the heap is serializable and the linkage to the outside world
| has to be fully defined.
| kragen wrote:
| Wasm definitely has some useful ideas for efficient
| reproducible computing, but it is ridiculous to describe it
| as "a simple VM" in comparison to Wirth's RISC, the Cult of
| the Bound Variable's UM, Chifir, Smalltalk-78, or even the
| NES or uxn/Varvara. I think this page lists _over 1000
| instructions_ : https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/synta
| x/instructions....
| asdff wrote:
| Zoom meetings have been great for screenshot potential.
| Previously if someone had an interesting slide at a conference
| you would have to zoom way in with your phone and hope you got it
| with enough resolution from your seat.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| Not exactly a screenshot, but I recently found a file from
| December 1991 that was a proprietary image file of the home
| screen of a local BBS I used to visit in high school. Was
| actually able to convert it to a PNG after some work. This might
| be my oldest file that I personally saved to disk. Now if only I
| had all those cassette tapes from my TRS-80.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Tropy is an application to turn photos into documents and
| organize the items via collections. It's free and open source. My
| partner's research involves collecting images and they find it
| works well.
|
| https://tropy.org/
| morsch wrote:
| 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.
| jll29 wrote:
| 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.
| artur_makly wrote:
| We've automated this nicely for you on any public URL, and even
| some private one's that use cookies for access:
| https://VisualSitemaps.com
|
| Lot's of folks use us just for archiving purposes. We also have a
| nifty Ai that compares visual changes in the screenshots.
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