
Photograph Your Work - edward
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2019/01/06/photograph-your-work/
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pjc50
It's definitely a good idea, and an easy way of taking notes from a screen in
situations where copy-paste is not available. Or from oscilloscopes or other
instruments. Just one thing to beware if your phone is synced to Google
Photos:

> ""By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
> perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license
> to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly
> display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or
> through, the Services.""

~~~
ppod
They changed that a couple of years ago.

[https://policies.google.com/terms#toc-
content](https://policies.google.com/terms#toc-content)

~~~
pjc50
> "you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host,
> store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting
> from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content
> works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform,
> publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this
> license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving
> our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you
> stop using our Services"

~~~
wlesieutre
Any photos you sync to Google can be publicly displayed for google's
promotional purposes?

That doesn't sound great.

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jsmit
This is also true for any mechanical work on vehicles that you're not too
familiar with. You will always underestimate how forgetful you'll get after
even one day. When rebuilding or even performing small mechanical tasks on a
motorcycle, I always photograph and label every new state of the motorcycle
and link that photograph to the corresponding parts (nuts, bolts, gaskets etc)
in chronological order. And even then somehow I find myself getting lazy in
the process and think that I'll remember this little step or location of the
part.

~~~
krrrh
I often take short videos with narration after removing parts, especially
noting where they came from and where they were placed.

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photoguy112
Off topic, but I photograph everything around the house - windows, rooms,
walls, cabinets. I include measurements in my photos so that if I ever need to
buy something but not sure how it fits or how it will look, I reference my
photos. I also take photos of all consumable products in the case where they
run out or break, I can pull up a photo of what I purchased and re-purchase it
again, knowing it will work / fit as needed.

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linsomniac
This has served me very well for decades. Many datacenters will not allow
photographs, but if you ask they will usually allow you to photograph your own
equipment as long as it is only pictures of your own gear.

Years ago I was managing 10 racks, and I built some scripts to automate
turning an SD card filled with images into HTML pages. I would bring in my
midrange Nikon DSLR and take photos of the cabinets (upper, mid, lower, both
front and back). These high quality photos allowed for high zoom levels that
often came in handy. We had facility staff thank us for sending photos with
our work requests on remote hands issues.

Now I watch youtube videos with people taking apart and repairing electrical
and car related things and think "It sure could be handy to have a full video
record of repair work."

I've also been remodeling my house and have taken copious photos of the work,
both to help the inspectors, and for future work.

My brother in law just had a house water damage issue and several rooms were
torn down to the studs. I recommended he take photos while the walls were
open, for future reference.

There's a great use case for taking lots of photos.

~~~
deathanatos
I once installed a CPU onto a motherboard; the resulting machine didn't boot,
and the initial attempts at root-causing the issue implicated the motherboard,
so I arranged for it to be RMA'd. However, that meant the CPU needed to come
_out_ of the socket, and a small plastic placeholder that protects the pins in
the socket needed to go back in. I did _not_ take photos of it prior to
removing it, and afterwards I really wish I had. This manufacturer appears to
have made two different iterations, slightly different around just this area,
with the same model number. The manual's instructions (which were written in
broken English, b/c China…) were wrong (they were for the other version), and
directly contacting customer support got me the same instructions. The
pictures in the manual didn't match the hardware in front of me, so even that
didn't help.

I eventually "intuited" how it fit together, but I caused damage to the pins
in doing so. A single photo of the assembled version would have really helped.

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Zanni
I've got terrible eyes, and I've also used my camera phone to zoom in on tiny
serial numbers. Sometimes it's enough to use the built-in zoom for
magnification; sometimes I actually snap a pic and zoom it after.

I've got a desk in a co-working space with a locking cabinet underneath that
has a godawful (three-wheel, not dial) combination lock that is impossible to
read in low light. Worse, the dials are chrome so shining a light on it
produces specular highlights that make it even harder to distinguish the
numbers. I regularly have to snap a photo of the lock, zoom in, and adjust the
wheels based on the photo.

~~~
puzzle
Even if you have good vision, a phone is useful when you need to look at
something that is in a cramped space, e.g. behind a wall mounted TV.

~~~
vorpalhex
Or if something is at an odd angle. I once had to grab the model number of a
transformer mounted in a chime box that was mounted over a set of stairs - I
simply setup a ladder by the railing and used my phone to grab a few photos of
the entire box.

~~~
KineticLensman
Yes, I’ve held my phone through a small hole drilled in a ceiling to locate a
dripping water pipe.

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tonyedgecombe
Slightly off topic but I've noticed all the good contractors I've hired in
recent years take photographs of their work after they have finished. I'm
beginning to think it might be worth asking to see the photos before they
start as a filter.

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probably_wrong
I get the feeling that asking that would be confusing correlation and
causation. Do you know whether the bad contractors take photographs too?

Although your method is bullet-proof in one sense: if a contractor agrees to
show you pictures of other clients' infrastructure, you might not want to hire
someone who is such a security risk :)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Well I was thinking more about people that do work around the house.

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Kagerjay
I run timesnapper on my windows computer, it records a video of everything on
my computer for the entire day. In the event I need to reproduce errors for
sysadmin work

Whenever I have to debug / gut components out from my PC, you pretty much had
to take pictures. Especially if you need to determine which point of failure
you have (hardware, or software related).

~~~
m_st
Great idea, I'm starting that too now. Thanks for the suggestion.

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sxiin
Yes, this is equally important when repairing some electronic gadgets with
tens of little screws and interlocking parts, etc.

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stallmanite
Great article.

I’ve never thought of using slo-mo video to capture overly fast error
messages.

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Tehchops
The sentiment is correct, but there are a number of caveats depending on the
nature of the work.

Dealing with any data that is defined under a compliance policy of some kind,
for instance.

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gwern
Having grown up in digital scarcity or perhaps 'photo poverty', one of the
things I've had to learn after getting a smartphone is to take more photos, at
the drop of a hat, for anything I might want to recall later. Caption on
artwork? Photo. Item at grocery store? Photo. Interesting cat posture? Photo.
Where I parked in a parking garage or giant parking lot? Photos.

Gives one a hint of how useful good lifelogging could be.

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usermac
I keep a daily log of all my work with screenshots and phone pics along with a
narrative. It has saved me countless times.

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xte
As an admin I will _never_ _ever_ put ssh private keys on any kind of mobile
crap. I have no control on it, I can't trust it in any way.

However yes, I like photograph not only to fix for future reference something
but also to document what I'm doing, and also other kind of logging, sometimes
useful if something goes wrong not because of me but someone like to say it's
because of me...

And for that a traditional pocket voice recorder is really good, plus eventual
camera on it :-)

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Jetroid
Similar thing, but I once needed to see the readout of a binary transmission
coming at a baud rate of 31250Hz using a low quality (and hence minimal
featured) oscilliscope. The individual bits were too fast to see in real time,
so I used to slow-mo camera to record it, and got what I needed.

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alex_hitchins
Definitely do this. It's incredibly handy to be able to send a video to
support of a startup sequence failing or some other hard to describe scenario.
Only point of caution I'd raise is if any confidential information is
contained in the images. I know one data centre that forbid cameras within the
aisles.

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voidmain0001
Unrelated to the content, but related to the website, Cisco Umbrella / OpenDNS
tells me that etbe.coker.com.au is blocked due to a security threat. Yet, I
threw the URL at VirusTotal and Google Safe Browsing and they both returned
with a clean analysis. Either Cisco TALOS is ahead of the curve, or way off.

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shriphani
I always photograph (and sometimes even record video) of the build process of
all my sculptures and carvings. They more than anything else help me reflect
on my work and avoid the same pitfalls the next time.

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dorfsmay
Saved me a few times when doing laptop surgery!

