Self-surveillance (day 91)

I just started taking a snapshot of my computer screen every 15 minutes.  It's all automated on all three screens I typically use (mac laptop, PC laptop, PC desktop).   It's actually fascinating to see the shots at the end of the day.  How long I spent on something.  The tidbits I read during the day.  The videos I watched.  The emails I wrote.  Sometimes I don't remember having looked at a particular thing.  It all goes by pretty quickly and somewhat compulsively.  It would be neat to get a snapshot of my face as well...and to record my breathing pattern.  For now, it's just screenshots.  It's for the Breath I/O project.  I'll collect hundreds of screenshots and make a quicktime to map into the environment and onto the lungs.

For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up.  It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively.   All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens.   I run the following script in mine:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $(printf "/Users/mlantin/Pictures/screenshots/macscreen-%04d.png" $((`ls ~/Pictures/screenshots| grep -c ''`+1)))

On a PC it's not as easy.  I downloaded and installed the MiniCap application.  Then I made a script in cygwin, again using bash.   Then I made a batch file to run the bash script.  Then I made a shortcut to the batch file so I could set it to run minimized (so it wouldn't pop up the svchost.exe window). Then I used Scheduled Tasks to make the script run every 15 minutes.  Here is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

/cygdrive/d/Program\ Files/MiniCap/MiniCap.exe -capturedesktop -exit -save "$(cygpath -w $(printf "/home/mlantin/screenshots/desktopscreen-%04d.tiff" $((`ls /home/mlantin/screenshots | grep -c ""` + 1))))"

Here is the batch file (called takeashotdos.bat):

D:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l /home/mlantin/takeashot

exit

Here is the command in the Scheduled Task:

D:\cygwin\home\mlantin\takeashotdosshort.lnk

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