*/1Get out. You’re fired.
The sysadmin version of
if(predicate) { return true; } else { return false; }Oh does * mean every minute anyway.
YES
Believe it or not, jail.
What
JAIL
Believe it or not.
Yes but why are you saying that to me?
You are learning which is great.
Gotta chain that with
arecordtoo if you want the full, Orwellian experience.How to add a picture from the Webcam?
ha, yeah. Throw in some
fswebcamtoo. lolDon’t forget to export your clipboard to plaintext
What does that command do?
Takes a screenshot every minute and saves it
Can you search the screenshots with OCR though? That’s Recall’s main selling point
You can start by running
sudo apt install tesseract-ocrand then reading its docs.It appears to be as simple as
tesseract <infile> <outfile>. Possibly could even pipe (or tee) the screenshot straight into that and save both an image and a text file in a single command line.So something like this should do the trick:
gnome-screenshot -f - | tee /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).png | tesseract - /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).txtSkip the database, just use
grepto search that directory if you need to find anything. Voilà, homemade Recall.It is much better to search using ElasticSearch or Sphinx. Grep is super slow, non indexed and can’t do natural language full text searches. It’s pretty much useless for any real world text search you’d want from OCRed content. And all these better tools are free and open source, so really a no brainer.
I’m sure there are many ways to improve on this solution, but they would all require significantly more effort (ElasticSearch isn’t exactly trivial to set up).
This is really just a proof of concept, the most minimal viable implementation that gets you something similar in terms of functionality.
For instance, Windows Recall stores OCR content tagged by app, this solution doesn’t. Also, as others have mentioned, a practical implementation should likely check if anything has changed at all and discard any screenshots that don’t have any new data.
That’s not the worst idea ever. Say a screenshot is 10 mb. 10x60x 8 hours =4800mb per work day. 30 days is 150gb worst case scenario. I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same, then don’t write a new file. Combine that with OCR and a utility to scroll forward and backward through time, it might be a useful tool.
Are you on 16k resolution or something?
When i take a screenshot of my 3440x1440 display it’s 1MB big. I mean this doesn’t change the issue in its core but dramatically downsizes it
they’re running 10 screens in parallel
Running OCR every second sounds like a great way to choke your CPU
Once a minute, and only if the screen contents change. I imagine there’s something lightweight enough.
In order to be certified for running Recall, machines currently must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit, basically an AI coprocessor). I assume that is what makes it practical to do by offloading the required computation from the CPU.
Apparently it IS possible to circumvent that requirement using a hack, which is what some of the researchers reporting on it have done, but I haven’t read any reports on how that affects CPU usage in practice.
Recall analyses each screenshot and uses AI or whatever to add tags to it. I’d assume that’s what the NPU is used for.
That’s what recall is… It’s literally screenshotring and. Ocr / ai parsing Combined with a sqllite database
If only MS used DuckDB then they wouldn’t have such a huge PR disaster on their hands.
Am I the only one who honestly thinks Recall is totally useless? I feel like everyone is acting like it’s useful and the only thing to debate over is whether it’s “worth the security risk”. But I feel like it’s not even worth anything at all. Even if there was no risk and I was 100% in control I don’t think I would ever use such a feature.
Wouldn’t you waste just as much (if not more) time looking through old screenshots, than to just go look up a solution the old fashioned way? Whatever you were looking at is probably still in your browser history too.
I know the point is it has some AI crap with it, but that still requires you to remember enough information about what you’re looking for to filter them. And if you know that much information I think you could probably just find whatever you were looking for again normally.
That’s because you know how to find information in a computer quickly and precisely. Recalk is for clueless people. They can ask the computer in plain English.
