Thanks to @narthur for posing this earlier in the year and for my Beeminder goal making me gradually get ingeniousness like this collected in the forum for posterity:
@narthur: Anyone have ideas on how I could automate beeminding time spent in my home office?
@larsivi: Pressure pad in the chair? Assuming you don’t stand too much
@poisson: I suppose “train yourself to use toggl” is probably not automatic enough
@larsivi: Install a CO2 sensor, and log the time it is above ambient levels
@rperce: smart, but I don’t love the incentives there…
@theospears: Raspberry pi with camera module and openCV
@larsivi: tagtime?
@narthur: lol good ideas!
I wonder if there’s a way to use a smart motion sensor somehow…
I guess there are motion sensor modules for raspberry pi / arduino, too.
So write a script that sends a datapoint to a Beeminder goal if it detects motion within each five-minute period?
@gbear605: Ask GPT-4 if it sees you present?
@rperce: this board gives you hardware face detection if you’re already going raspi/arduino. i haven’t used it myself but it was mentioned in this video
@poisson: Do you use the home office by just bringing in a laptop that isn’t always there, or something?
@narthur: Yes, that’s right. I have a dedicated office room, but my laptop goes in and out.
@theospears: If your phone is always with you, you could use a pi or similar to measure the strength of its WiFi or Bluetooth radio
@dreev: [re: GPT4] at first i thought you were kidding but this would work like a charm. possibly expensive at high granularity
@gbear605: I was 50% kidding; I don’t have the ChatGPT premium, so I’m not totally sure how it works