This year is the 3rd year that I’m a judge for the Jolt Software Awards. A couple of nights ago, I thought that I had submitted my votes for the first round of voting to select the finalists. As it turns out, somewhere along the way my votes got lost (I blame my general sleep-deprived stupor these days).
Fortunately for me, I was running TimeSnapper at the time. This incredibly useful utility takes a snapshot of your desktop every 5 seconds and records the result as a PNG image. So it was a simple matter to replay my day around the time I was entering my votes to see exactly what I voted for.
This morning I was chatting with my mother in law during our morning baby / toddler shift and I told her the story of Vannevar Bush’s description of a Memex which was his vision of a life recorder. A modern implementation of Vannevar Bush’s ideas is Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project.
A fairly full day’s worth of work for me is about 350MB worth of screenshots. That means that it would take about 100GB to store a year’s worth of screenshots, which translates into about $40 Canadian dollars today. Now until this data is searchable, I doubt that it will be tremendously useful, but I find it fascinating that it costs so little to digitize an entire year’s worth of my computer activity.
If you could synchronize those screenshots with a keystroke logger and a network activity monitor, you could quickly make a quick-and-dirty searchable archive. Hmmmm ….
