Dropping Rescuetime for ActivityWatch

Activity Watch logo

I tend to weigh up different systems and applications I use every once in a while. Especially weighing up the benefits to me.

One such application is Rescue time.

I used it in the past and over the last few months reinstalled it again. However this time I tried to automate the reports out of the free account and pretty much failed. The only way I could really do it is if I paid for the pro account at the cost of (a discounted) $6.75 per month.

So enough I thought… A little look around alternative to and decided to give Activity Watch a try.

ActivityWatch is an app that automatically tracks how you spend time on your devices.

It is open sourceprivacy-firstcross-platform, and a great alternative to services like RescueTime, ManicTime, and WakaTime.

It can help you keep track of time spent on different projects, kick bad screen habits, or just understand how you spend your time.

Its pretty good and doesn’t drain my laptop while watching my laptop. Of course being local and under my control only, I don’t really need to worry so much about whats collected. You can of course limit things as you go, turn off tracking or just delete the data any time.

I have it on my Dell XPS laptop and on my work phone and its good except one thing. Currently there is no sync server, so each device has its own server. But they are working on this… Once they do, I’ll likely install it on my server and put the client on more of my devices.

The other thing I’m hoping for is to see more use of the stopwatch activity watch bucket (buckets are the pools of data collected). Since Project hamster is currently being rethought and I like to track my work progress alongside my activity.

As a whole the project has a lot of potential and worth the wait I hope for the features expressed above.

Quantifying my attention across devices

Rescue Time in Jan 2018My frustration with tracking my smartphone use, the apps permissions and data use; drove me back to rescue time.

I decided it’s time to combine the time I spend on different devices together in a sensible way. Previously I had used rescue time even with the bulk collection of personal data a worry. But a long time ago there was no sensible rescue time tracker/scrobbler for Linux. I remember trying the early betas and not being impressed at all.

So coming back years later I was happy to see a scrobbler on every platform including android and Linux. Not even a tgz but a deb package which is easy as pie on Ubuntu. After installing it and recovering my old account; I was up and going quickly. It doesn’t use much resources on android or Linux and sits quietly in the background.

The breakdown is impressive and making changes to the categories makes things very interesting. For example here’s Monday time (bear in mind I was ill in the morning but you can see once I was awake, I was off and running)

RescueTime - Categories 10 jan

I also have Hamster time data which I can combine if I like to really understand and drill down.

My hamstertime data for 8th JanIt might seem like overkill but as most of this is automated, theres little I need to do.

RescueTime for Linux (beta)

I got Rescuetime installed and working on Ubuntu! Thanks to Joe’s comment on my blog post about Rescuetime meet Arya

After years of broken promises, missed deadlines, and disappointed RescueTime Linux users, we are finally preparing to launch the officially supported Linux version of RescueTime.

Up to now, the only option for Linux users was the open sourced version of the RescueTime Linux Uploader hosted here: https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader. While this have worked out for many users, we have always wanted to have a version of RescueTime for Linux that mirrored the functionality of our Windows and OS X versions.

If you want to take part in helping us test out RescueTime for Linux, read on!

I take it all back Rescuetime! And thanks a lot Joe for alerting me to the beta, thought you guys gave up on Linux

Even worked for the latest Ubuntu with Gnome shell…You can also download a Deb file for i86 or x64, making it so much simpler than the bzr file previously. Finally make sure you file any bugs and give feedback as it is a beta…

Rescue time meet Arya

Arya

Rescuetime are meant to be working on a Linux version of their plugin but while we wait others are eating into their area.

We’ve already seen how Zeitgiest and Project Hamster could work together really nice. But this time theres another contender with some interesting ambitions…

Arya…

Arya is a simple Gnome 3 Shell extension that adds up how much time you spend using each of your applications. It’s not very fully featured yet, but in the future it will hopefully be a useful extension.

Things to come

  • Pretty graphs to show app usage over time
  • Activity level monitoring to suggest when you should take a break

Sounds like something else I’ve heard before… right? Rescuetime…?

If I was rescuetime I would get my hooks into Ayra now and either support Rescuetime inside of Ayra or use the source code to create your own plugin…

I know its only Gnome3 but maybe like Unity App-indicators it can work across different linux shells?

Wouldn’t it be great if Zeitgeist and Project Hamster had a love child?

Following my new years resolutions… I’ve been investigating other means to better track my time and effort.

I still love Rescuetime but getting it to work on Ubuntu has turned into a bit of a task in its self, it would seem. So while I investigate how to get it play nicely in Ubuntu and under Gnome 3. I’ve been looking at alternatives

The big opensource one seems to be Project Hamster… which has its core in the right place.

But I started thinking why isn’t Gnome Zeitgeist/Activity Manager used instead of a dedicated piece of software? Seems I’m not the only one asking this question… Wonder what the Gnome Zeitgeist team say…

Although I like Project Hamsters ideals, being able to track multiple machines over different operating systems is very useful for someone like me who uses Windows, Android and of course Linux. So I’ve been looking at Time Doctor but the point of view is at odds with what I’m looking for I think. I imagine it would be something my manager could ask me to install.

I think I’ll try and get Rescuetime uploader working… for now…

Evernote take notes from Dropbox and Rescuetime

I’ve said it many times but Evernote really winds me up no end. I even went down the completely open route for a while using Tomboy Notes and there online service. To be honest the only reason why I switched back was because of Nevernote and the fact Tomdroid, couldn’t sync with any online service unless you transfered the notes via SD card.

However I started thinking via Dropbox, it would be trivial to do the syncing part. The only issue left seems to be about the fact tomdroid doesn’t seem to support editing or anything like that.

Anyway, the thing is going back to Evernote. Is I’ve been looking around some of my other apps I also pay for. Dropbox is the key example here.

Dropbox does support Linux but to be fair there a little behind the windows and mac versions. Not by much but its understandable. Rescue time don’t officially seem to support linux but they do unofficially support someone elses linux uploader, it would seem.

The fact is Evernote could really help there dominance by helping Nevernote. If they don’t Tomboy notes isn’t that far behind and will rise up and become the choice for many people.