I just finished writing a small program that, every 5 minutes, takes a screenshot of my whole screen and uploads that along with text describing every window I have open along with which window is active to my Evernote account. Â I'll upload it to github after I test it for a few days.
Next up is figuring out a way to get a list of every tab I have open in Chrome and uploading that as well.
After that, I'm going to figure out a way to upload to clip every page I have open for longer than … maybe 5 minutes? … into Evernote. Â I'd also like to write an extension for Chrome to clip articles that I view in Google Reader for longer than a certain amount of time as well.
I was spurred into this by reading the below linked article about +Chris Dancy.
I'm a little worried about dropping all this data into Evernote. Â I mean, what if the company goes under? Â In the future, in addition to clipping to Evernote, I will FTP this data onto storage that I control as well as dropping it into a database.
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The Quantified Man: How an Obsolete Tech Guy Rebuilt Himself for the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Our work is being re-quantified — in a big way — and Chris Dancy, a director in the office of the chief technology officer at BMC Software, thinks it’s time for employees to take these metrics into …
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I used a combo of google docs, Evernote and google calendar. Love your program. Love your thinking.
That a depressing look fo the future, companies putting you into virtual shackles
You're already writing to Evernote's API. While you're at it, just build yourself a utility to dump your data and save it in a portable format somewhere secure occasionally.
But how easy is it to search and retrieve something you've forgotten how you found or where you saw it?
It's very easy in the calendar interface. Not as much with Evernote. Contextual relationship make that seem easy. Not sure if your asking me 🙂
+Jacqueline Lichtenberg Like +Chris Dancy says it depends on the structure of the service you're uploading it to.
What I've got right now is just a very small first step. Â With what I have now, I can see what I was doing at any given time, or I can search for all the times I was using program X.
Evernote OCR's the text in the screenshots, so I can also search for text that way.
Going forward, I will have to increase the structure of the data that is uploaded and either find more applicable services or design my own site.
Along those lines, I will probably next create Google Calendar events every time I upload along with a link to the specific Evernote note for that time.
The specific question you ask about forgetting how you found or where you saw something is an interesting problem that I'm not sure how I will solve yet.