today I switched from FrankenWM to Dwm. I decided to take a quick scrot of my setup before I blew it away and that got me thinking...

If you were to write a script that would randomly once per day take a screenshot of your desktop what sorts of things would you find?

Obviously looking at the title of this post I had a week in mind, but imagine if you had a script like that running for a year, two years. It would be like a little window into your past rice, past work, past friends.

But it has not been two years, a year, or even a day since I have had the script running, and to be honest I havent made a script yet. Due to my incompetence I was thinking using a shell script that would run in crond? Or would I need something higher level?
Im sure you talented folks will have much better ideas on the topic.

On the short term, running a script like this would show you what you're doing on a day to day basis and I thought since a picture is worth a thousand words and we are all on this amazing fourm which supports images. We should take advantage of the situation and share a bit about our day to days with one another.

Tell me what you think. Good idea or am I out of my mind?

no way man, its a good idea! I had the same and implemented something like that. I had written a script to scan designated directories and cp specific files to a scheme directory. Then the opposite to put back in place. I would run the script manually if I had a scheme worth keeping, dump the ingrediants into a tmp diretory, and manually mv to its final resting place. Hadn't yet implemented naming, creating, and pushing that final directory, but it was on the bucket list. Generally you're looking at a few files

• scrot for posterity
  .Xresources
  the wall
  the sourced color file if applicable
  wm config
  

That's really all that's necessary to relive an old scheme. The project has pretty much been shelved but maybe I'll get back on it. Haven't had as much of a need for it lately. If anyone is interested I'll try to finish it up and share out.

i think the idea is cool. my problem would be accidentally exposing sensitive information. my idea of said script would send a notification alerting the user that the scrot is coming (but set the notification's visibility time for less than the scrot delay) to give the user time to hide anything they might not want shown.

I agree with xero, I wouldn't want to expose any information. I do like the idea though. If it were me doing it I would have it set for a certain time of day (pop up notifications are one of the things I dislike in the entire world), so that I know when it will be run. Save images by date, and then go back and look through.
I like your idea.