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Better Living Through Data
jradavenport (3020071) writes "Using two years of continuous monitoring of my MacBook Air battery usage (once every minute), I have been able to study my own computer use patterns in amazing detail. This dataset includes 293k measurements, or more than 204 days of use over two years. I use the laptop over 50 hours per week on average, and my most productive day is Tuesday. Changes in my work/life balance have begun to appear over the two-year span, and I am curious whether such data can help inform how much computer use is healthy/productive."
It's nice that you have data. Not having data is worse.
But you have a one-subject unaligned, uncontrolled collection of data. The line between inference and magical thinking is narrower than you think, and just because the skinner box gave you food when you crooked your neck doesn't mean crooking your neck causes food to come out.
>> The first feature that popped out to me: you can see I spend most mornings at a cafe.
Get a job, get a girlfriend or get a family and this "problem" will be solved for you.
but the data serves you no purpose, besides that it probably shows your battery isn't as good as it used to be.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I am curious whether such data can help inform how much computer use is healthy/productive
You could keep stockpiling this data for your whole life, die, and draw the conclusion that all that computer usage must have killed you.
I use the laptop over 50 hours per week on average, and my most productive day is Tuesday.
Yes, I'm sure that what you measured was productivity.
Maybe an even better measure of productivity would be a measure of how much energy your GPU uses?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
An amazing fact: It is a proven fact, that everyone who ever died, used to breath the air. So, if you don't want to die, don't breath the air
But I decided to use your numbers as a baseline definition of unproductiveness anyway. Really, I had no idea you could abuse a computer this way.
"and my most productive day is Tuesday"
Are you seriously attempting to correlate battery use and productivity? Using MS office should have very little battery drain as compared to CPU/GPU intensive applications but it doesn't mean one is more productive than the other. I can open a browser and play a flash game and use more battery than I would if I were writing code. Simply using the laptop also doesn't mean productivity, as browsing the internet isn't productive but uses battery life.
Got any thorough analysis, with Power Point slides, on the frequency at which you clip your toe nails?
Waste byproduct in SI units would be helpful, as well.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
thats a little too much porn, even for healthy young males in their 'prime'.
So, who is supposed to give a shit about this drivel?
Timothy has been posting so much crap lately, I'm about to block his stories.
Tim Lord, you're a moron. Stop posting stories, this isn't your personal blog. And no, writing them and then having Roblimo or another slashdot editor post the stories doesn't make it any better. Just stop, we don't want your thoughts.
There you go suggesting yet another 'useful' way for companies to monitor me and try to monetize my data. So target advertising won't be enough, soon it will be targeted and timely delivered as well in the process slowing down my (what's supposed to be) high speed connection. At the same time I get bombarded with irrelevant junk that is transforming what is supposed to be my productive time in to a never ending fight to maintain that conference call and somehow kill that the pop-up of some skillful, artistic and beautiful but in appropriately timed video of the girl doing naked yoga poses.
How do I convince my CEO that my cousin used the computer without my knowledge just once before all the pop-ups started to happen? Maybe I can send her a log of the my battery usage.
this person had nothing better to do with their life, no outside activities to occupy their time, no significant (or insignificant) other to fool around with, or anything else that "normal" people would do.
Clearly they are so bored and don't have enough work to do that they had to find something to occupy their life.
Congratulations! You are the shining example of someone living in their parents basement.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
typical clueless mac user claims to get "work" done on macbook.
Totally OT, I'm afraid, but the "bigdata" tag reminded me of this music video for Big Data Shoes that I discovered just yesterday. It's funny. Watch it.
Wow, what a totally worthless article!
just a guess: none. Unless, of course, we're comparing it to other activities like running, cycling, playing with children, sex, and driving the right kind of car. Then it's less than none.
Compared to alcoholic drinking, computer use is very healthy.
Learn to use the search function cmd-space. You can launch everything from there and can do simple stuff directly in the search field like 145 * 75 * 0.19 to calculate VAT for a bill. .... the unix shell.
Learn about the shortcuts.
Consider digging into AppleScript and/or automator.
E.g I have a nice script that allows me to create an appointment/event in a google calendar (which I access via webcal with the iCal application) by clicking on a date in a web site.
Learn to use the Terminal.app
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We're taking this guy's word that he was "working" on his tablet 50 hour weeks. Right ...
With only battery stats, he could've been doing anything, watching youtube, downloading porn, or playing plants vs zombies.
Better stats would have included what apps he was running, how much he interacted with them, the number of taps and slides etc.
Also, how about recording some other things, like sleeping and eating habits, fitness regime if any, and time spent socializing (at 50 hours/week, I don't assume he has any other than FB).
We feel for you, who has nothing better in life than to try draw some conclusions from battery consumption. /. is perhaps indicative of how low one can stoop to make a story.
That this kind of drivel makes it to
history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -n 20
Better than using battery life. Course it only works for commands you run in the terminal.
Usage patterns of your computer can give about 80% accuracy at authenticating you as the user (that is, if we think it's you, by looking at your usage pattern, we confirm that with 80 % accuracy).
are also tuesdays.
That's the secret, behind-closed-doors day when editors and staff read submissions instead of sending them straight to the front page, thus weeding out inept, bland geek fantasies the partial aim of which are to get some half-ass' blog more readers.
QC, ./ - for the love of all things holy, do it before another 12yo steals the job.