Tracking time
A few weeks ago, I realised that I didn’t really have much idea of where the time I spent on my computer actually went, so I wrote something to track it. I just came across RescueTime, which seems to set out to solve this problem, but hasn’t launched yet. While I’m sure they’ve done a good job of things, I don’t really like the idea of using something that phones home here (though I can see why they’d love to have the data), and I’d also like to be able to analyze the data in different ways (with a spreadsheet, some custom script, Dabble, or whatever), rather relying on whatever they build.
So if anyone’s interested, I’ve uploaded the code I use. It’s very simple-minded—to track idleness, it waits for the screensaver process to start, so you probably want to set a low timeout; doesn’t daemonize; when storing URLs, it assumes you’re using Safari; and is also OS X-only. But maybe somebody can build something more interesting on top of it.
A README is still to come, but to get started, use something like:
$ sh time/time-log.sh &!