Long-term projects are so rare. It takes real insight to carry out a project like this before digital cameras came around and made taking pictures too cheap to measure.
I recently got a laptop with a built-in webcamera. Once I got it working with Ubuntu, I thought, why not have the webcam take a picture every day or so? Ultimately I set it, via cron, to take a picture and a screenshot every hour that the lid is open, like so:
@hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then import -quality 80 -window root png:$HOME/photos/webcam/xwd-`date \+\%\s`.png && optipng -o9 -fix `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.png|head -1`; fi
@hourly if grep open /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state; then fswebcam --resolution 1280x1024 -S 2 -F 3 ~/photos/webcam/`date \+\%\s`.jpg && jpegoptim -m80 `ls -t ~/photos/webcam/*.jpg|head -1`; fi
(Check for lid being open, use imagemagick/fswebcam to grab an image, output a date-stamped file, and then optimize it - saves space like 40% for the screenshots, not so much for the webcam. It doesn't matter so much when a few weeks has yielded about 60MB, but it will help in the long run.)
cool stuff!! i am paying tribute to your idea the cron job for webcams in the best way possible - by imitating it.
Also predictionbook seems nice as do your predictions.
I recently got a laptop with a built-in webcamera. Once I got it working with Ubuntu, I thought, why not have the webcam take a picture every day or so? Ultimately I set it, via cron, to take a picture and a screenshot every hour that the lid is open, like so:
(Check for lid being open, use imagemagick/fswebcam to grab an image, output a date-stamped file, and then optimize it - saves space like 40% for the screenshots, not so much for the webcam. It doesn't matter so much when a few weeks has yielded about 60MB, but it will help in the long run.)Another long-term project I'm trying is recording predictions and my confidence in them: http://predictionbook.com/users/gwern
Presumably this will teach me exactly how foolish I was when I was younger, and what strange beliefs I held about the future. world