For the last week (12 Aug 2007 to 18 Aug 2007) I decided to do some spot sampling of my computer activity at home.

On Cronus I had this exciting line (or earlier variants of it, I tinkered a bit) in my cron:

0 * * * * sleep `perl -e ‘print int(rand 3600)’`;/usr/sbin/screencapture -Sx /tmp/screensnap.jpg; /sw/bin/mutt -a /tmp/screensnap.jpg -s “Cronus Hourly Screenshot” abulsme@abulsme.com < /dev/null; cp /Users/abulsme/Documents/screenoff.jpg /tmp/screensnap.jpg The end result, an hourly “sample” of my screen, but at a random time so that it wouldn’t be predictable and I wouldn’t change my actions knowing when it was going to take a screenshot. I actually set this up as a test for something else I wanted to do, but then decided to let it run a week and see what I would find. The results would of course not be the same as if I’d looked on a less granular time scale, but it is still interesting. All of the below is based on which application was the active application at the time of the screenshot. Lets see some of the things I found: Overall… * 55.4% – Cronus’ Screen Asleep
* 29.8% – Sam using Cronus
* 9.5% – Cronus’ Screensaver On
* 3.0% – Cronus Crashed
* 2.4% – Amy using Cronus

Now, of the time I was the user and the screen wasn’t asleep or screen saving and it wasn’t crashed, the top 5 items were:

* 36.0% – Mail
* 20.0% – Safari
* 10.0% – iTunes
* 6.0% – Finder
* 6.0% – Excel

Leaving 22.0% of the time on various other apps.

Interesting, eh?

OK, time to turn the screenshots off. For now anyway.