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App::chronos – automatically record your computer activities

Often you want to know how much time you spend on a random computer activity during your work/home day. There are lots of apps that allow you to record the time, unfortunately you have to manualy turn them on and off. It can be really frustraiting when you forget to do so. So I have written an app that does that automatically.

chronos listens for X11 window switches and records how much time you have spent on every application. It runs a set of filters that guess the type of the application and its name. Moreover if the application can answer more than a question “what type am I” and additionally can provide like a visited URL, a contact you’re chatting with and so on, then the filter can parse that information and add to the log.

Activity details

As previously said the filters can parse additional information. For example right now if the application is a Firefox or a Chromium browser than the currently visited URL is detected. This is done by parsing current sessions. In case of a Skype or Pidgin, for example, the current contact name is detected.

Output

chronos prints the events to the stdout, so the log can be easily saved to any file you like. The format is simple: a single line in JSON, with UNIX epoch timestamps. For example:

{
   "_end" : 1412750698,
   "_start" : 1412750693,
   "application" : "Chromium",
   "category" : "browser",
   "class" : "\"Chromium\", \"Chromium\"",
   "command" : "",
   "id" : "0x4a00048",
   "name" : "\"reddit: the front page of the internet - Chromium\"",
   "role" : "\"browser\"",
   "url" : "www.reddit.com"
}

The JSON part has several fields. role, class, name and command are the fields recorded from X11 and they are saved as is. The filter program could for example detect what kind of a command line I am running (this time vim) and what kind of a file I am working on.

Reporting

Reading and analyzing the log file isn’t very handy, that is where the report command steps in.

As you already know the event is a JSON object that has various fields. The report tool can search through those events, group the results and sort the results by the time spent on them.

Show top 10 visited URLs:

$ chronos report --fields 'url' --where '$category eq "browser"' --group_by 'url' log_file | head -n 10

00d 00:18:27 url=www.youtube.com
00d 00:05:29 url=github.com
00d 00:01:59 url=twitter.com
00d 00:01:25 url=code.google.com

Here I am showing only url field, searching for category named browser and group by url.

Using --where and --group_by various useful reports can be produced specific to your needs.

--where syntax

If you have noticed option --where has a Perl-like syntax. That is actually eval-ed into a Perl subroutine that is than run on every event. This way the where clause can be as profound as needed.

--from and --to

Timeout

To configure how often you want chronos to sleep before recording any activity use --timeout option.

Idle time

chronos also detects the idle time and stops recording the activity. Idle time is detected by running xprintidle and comparing it to the --idle_timeout option, which is 5 minutes by default. So if you don’t type anything or don’t move your mouse for 5 minutes the previous activity is considered as ended.

Flushing

Various bad things can happen during recording. This could be the power outage or accidental killing of the chronos process. In order to be more robust chronos periodically flushes the activity to the log file. This can be configured by --flush_timeout option. And you won’t loose the event recording when you’ve been working on it for several hours.

Contributing

Different people use different applications. I cannot write the filters for every application out there, so if you use chronos and want an application and its options to be parsed, just write a filter package, it’s as simple as:

package App::Chronos::Application::Skype;

use strict;
use warnings;

use base 'App::Chronos::Application::Base';

sub run {
    my $self = shift;
    my ($info) = @_;

    # It's not a Skype application
    return
      unless $info->{role} =~ m/ConversationsWindow/
      && $info->{class} =~ m/Skype/
      && $info->{name} =~ m/Skype/;

    # Yay, it's Skype, let's parse the contact name
    $info->{application} = 'Skype';
    $info->{category} = 'im';
    ($info->{contact}) = $info->{name} =~ m/^"(?:\[\d+\])?(.*?) - Skype/;

    return 1;
}

1;

Tips & tricks

I personally have a bash script that combines several reports:

#!/bin/sh

LOG_FILE=$1
LIMIT=10
COMMAND="perl -Ilib script/chronos"

echo 'Top categories:'
$COMMAND report --fields 'category' --group_by 'category' $LOG_FILE
echo
echo "Top $LIMIT talks:"
$COMMAND report --fields 'contact' --where '$category eq "im"' --group_by 'contact' $LOG_FILE | head -n $LIMIT
echo
echo "Top $LIMIT URLs:"
$COMMAND report --fields 'url' --where '$category eq "browser"' --group_by 'url' $LOG_FILE | head -n $LIMIT
echo
echo 'Idle time:'
$COMMAND report --where '$idle' $LOG_FILE

And then:

$ ./report.sh log_file | mail -s Activities vti

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