linuxmemes @lemmy.world ordellrb @lemmy.world 5 mo. ago

Not Total Recall (1990)

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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-ocr and then reading its docs.
  
  Fulfills the AI quota 👍
  
  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).txt
  
  Skip the database, just use grep to 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.
  
  You can use textract to make it even simpler (still uses tesseract under the hood though).
  
  I can't imagine it'd be that hard to write some code that does that using an existing AI model.
  
  I found a small command to run KDE Spectacle (screenshot software) with Tesseract so I can OCR a screenshot if I want to, I only had to install Tesseract and a main language, you could easily do the same with an API and/or a local AI.
  
  You're probably right.
  
  Llava and Bakllava are two Ollama models than can not only extract text but also describe what's happening on screen.
  
  Using tesseract-ocr, as the other guy suggested, is probably simpler and less resource intensive though.
  
  This is a shitpost and not a real suggestion.
- its a cronjob that runs each minute (*/1) in any hour, any day, any month, on any weekday, gnome-screenshot obviously takes a screenshot and outputs it to the given file path and filename, where the filename is written as the current date as string and .png as format
- It's a crontab entry which, once a minute, uses the gnome-screenshot program to take a screenshot of your monitor and save it to /Microsoft/yourPrivacy.

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