Simple activity logging

This could hardly be a blog without a post on productivity¹.

I am one of the many who dream about ‘the ultimate organisational tool’. For me this dream typically includes personal stats, time spent working on various tasks, data on attention spans, exercise schedule, and the like. Tangled up with this dream is the tendency to prematurely optimise anything.

The argument; “This (coding project) depends on that (coding work-flow), so, if I work on that then I’ll be able to work on this better, and also work on some-other-thing better too. Therefore working on that is more important. Rinse and repeat this argument, and you might reach;

If I knew how I worked, then I could work better².

I am currently in between organisational systems, so I have not made any great progress towards this dream. But, I made a little progress by throwing together a simple answer to the following question:

What did I do today?

Much of my time is spent on the same computer, so I can answer this to a decent extend by asking “what did I do on my computer today?”.

A simple way to do this is to capture what is on-screen periodically. I also determined to capture the web-cam at the same time as well, to see if anything interesting popped up.

Edit for honesty: Actually, anything that suggests this was carefully considered is a lie. My notes, verbatim, from the time it was first written:

Ended up on the subject of periodically capturing webcam and screen images. No idea how I ended up chasing this. Anyway, it’s all set up now.

I suspect it was a case of being bored with my tools.

Solution

I wrote a short Bash script to take a screen and webcam capture. This script was scheduled with cron. In the first instance, the script was run every minute the computer was on, and took both screen and webcam captures each time it was run.

After a few days use it became apparent that it was not ideal to have the webcam taking pictures at all times (it might capture yourself getting changed). Thankfully this can be addressed by modifying the scheduling of the script. As it was only the webcam capture I wanted to disable at certain times, a command line argument to select what should be captured was added to the script.

Script

I used the simplest utilities I could find that worked. These utilities were import from ImageMagick for the screen capture, and streamer for the webcam capture. The script as currently used is as follows:

  #!/bin/bash

  # Log a picture of the screen
  function screencap {
      # needed for import to work:
      export DISPLAY=:0.0

      # rough quality guide for 3Mpx: 20 = 130kB, 40 = 180kB, 70 = 250kB
      import -window root -quality 20 $FULL_PATH-screen.jpg
  }

  # Log a picture from the webcam
  function webcap {
      # webcam script
      streamer -f 'jpeg' -c '/dev/video0' -o $FULL_PATH-webcam -s '1280x720'
      mv $FULL_PATH-webcam $FULL_PATH-webcam.jpg
  }

  FILE_LOC=~/Pictures/Logs/$(date +%Y/%m/%d/)
  mkdir -p $FILE_LOC # make directory if it does not already exist

  FILE_NAME=$(date +%T)
  FULL_PATH=$FILE_LOC$FILE_NAME

  # Handle argument
  key="$1" # get first argument
  case $key in
      -b)
      echo "You selected both"
      webcap
      screencap
      ;;
      -w)
      echo "You selected webcam"
      webcap
      ;;
      -s)
      echo "You selected screen"
      screencap
      ;;
      ,*)
      # default, do nothing
      ;;
  esac

I saved the above as ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh and made sure it had +x permissions. This script saves a time-stamped screen-cap and a webcam photo to the save location. The webcam capture is done in two parts, image capture, then a rename operation. This is because I could not get streamer to save the image with the .jpg extension directly. A delay can be used with streamer using an argument like -w 1 if required to capture a good frame with your webcam.

Note that if you want to use webcam_screen_capture.sh in a terminal you will have to make sure ~/bin is on your $PATH.

Cron job

I scheduled this task to run once a minute using cron. For higher frequency running I suggest you see this SO thread.

Edit the cron task list with crontab -e
For capturing all the time I simply used:

* * * * * ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh -b

Or, for only capturing webcam images during 9-5, Mon-Fri, (screen captures all the time) I used:

# Webcam and ScreenCap Logging

# Times to capture webcam and screen
* 9-16 * * 1-5 ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh -b

# Times to capture screen only
* 0-8 * * * ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh -s
* 17-23 * * * ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh -s
* 9-16 * * 6-7 ~/bin/webcam_screen_capture.sh -s

As this is my only cron job, I can toggle the logging on and off by using:

$/etc/init.d/cron start

and

$/etc/init.d/cron stop

Otherwise, the lines in crontab will need to be removed or commented out to stop logging.

Success

Voila! With a bit of luck images will start appearing in a directory tree inside your ~/Pictures/Logs folder:

~/Pictures/Logs/2016/07/11$ ls
    08:58:01-screen.jpg
    08:59:01-screen.jpg
    09:00:01-screen.jpg
    09:00:01-webcam
    09:01:01-screen.jpg
    09:01:01-webcam
    09:02:01-screen.jpg
    09:02:01-webcam

As you might guess, I am mostly new to Bash scripting and cron. I ended up getting the cron part of this working first. Doing so, I stumbled on an exciting way to hack about - try to write an unfinished script that is run every minute. I ended up displaying seconds in the notifications area clock so I could see when the minute was about to roll over - I would have to save it quickly and then watch as the new attempt failed or succeeded.

Results and problems

Problems:

• Inadvertent recording
  • of other people
  • of yourself getting changed (attempted schedule-based fix)
  • security issues, depending on what you do?
• Only good for manual review
  • data not immediately useful for further analysis
  • no automatic stats generation
• Disk usage
  • currently using ~100MB per day.

The first days’ activity produced a log that upon replaying, was surprising and embarrassing. I considered myself savvier than usual with my browsing habits. This includes not following ‘low quality’ links, seemingly designed for click generation. I watched my first full-day log and saw how I obligingly clicked prominent link after prominent link as my day dribbled away. After seeing this evidence, I could not deny that I was wasting more time than I thought. It was a strong motive for change!

Although I don’t suppose I will review the logs often, and it won’t lead to any great leaps in productivity or insight (past what has happened), it does look to be a solid backstop. It might help prevent regrettable days spent chasing various subjects idly. Additionally, it can be simply funny to watch the expressions you make as you work (anyone for office-work reaction gifs?). At a stretch I imagine it could help you determine the cause of problems created by a bad working posture - a Computer Vision project maybe?

For the time invested, I consider this a success.

Perspective one month later:

I have barely looked at the logs. The exception to this is to delete a screencap or two that might have captured a temporarily visible password. However, knowing that this capture log is operating is still a time-wasting detterent. This is mostly noted when browsing the internet³. I almost get the feeling that future-me is watching what I do, and am looking disapprovingly over present-me’s shoulder. This seems to work even though I know that it is very unlikely I will actually look at the logs.

Perspective seven months later:

The last log I have from this was from 2016-11-23. I am again pursuing the Quantified Self dream. Somehow I have managed to not find any software in a similar class to this little doohickey here, until now⁴. I didn’t find similar programs until I went to implement them myself, found a StackOverflow answer from someone doing the same thing, and saw an answer that was essentially “don’t worry about trying to get that working, go and look at this pre-existing software that does what you want”⁵. The pre-existing software being:

• arbtt
• selfspy

Even longer term perspective:

I know this was useful at least once - it cleared up whether I had done a particular task.

Project Location

The project page hosts the latest version of this project.