# The &kodometer; Handbook

&Armen.Nakashian; &Armen.Nakashian.mail;
1999
2001
&Armen.Nakashian;
&FDLNotice;
2003-09-17
3.2

&kodometer; is a little gadget to measure your desktop mileage

KDE
KOdometer
odometer
mouse
mileage

## Introduction

### What is &kodometer;?

&kodometer; measures your desktop mileage. It tracks the movement of your mouse pointer across your desktop, and renders it in inches/feet/miles! It can do cm/meters/km too. The most exciting feature is the tripometer, and its utter uselessness.

The next version will be USEFUL!

## On screen operation

A labeled screen-shot of &kodometer; in action
A labeled screen-shot of &kodometer; in action

A screen shot. Note the fashionable lack of a titlebar.

The Odometer is the total distance traveled by the mouse since the last odometer reset. The Tripometer is the distance traveled by the mouse since it last stopped moving.

### Menu Options

If you've gotten this far, you probably already know that there is a &RMB; mouse button context menu on &kodometer;, which contains a number of choices.

Enable

  Toggle mileage tracking. This is good if you want to cheat on your mileage. Note: This is illegal in most countries

Metric Display

  Because &kodometer; was written by an American, it obnoxiously assumes you want to use Inches/Feet/Miles for measurement. If you come from some more modern country in Europe, to use metric measurements, turn on this option.

Auto Reset Trip

  This option will cause &kodometer; to set the Tripometer back to zero every time it starts up.

Reset Trip

  Set the tripometer to zero.

Reset Odometer

  Set the odometer back to zero. You might get in trouble for this!

About Mousepedometa

  Pops up a little dialog box with information on who to blame for the program.

Help

  This menu entry opens up the &kodometer; help - this very document.

Quit

  Quit &kodometer;

## How It Works

&X-Window; displays are usually configured with a screen-size variable. That is, how big your screen is in real-world measurements, not pixels. &kodometer; grabs this value and uses it come up with a &dpi; (dots per inch) value for your display, and thus can relate the number of pixels you've traversed to the number of inches the pointer appears to have moved on the screen.

But lets be real! Its horribly inaccurate! &kodometer; makes no pretense of being even remotely accurate. In fact, someone has measured the movement of their mouse across the screen with a ruler, and found that the distance algorithm is almost 25&percnt; off! The original author's response to this complaint was who cares?.

## Credits and Licenses

&kodometer; Copyright © 1998-2001, &Armen.Nakashian;.

Documentation copyright 1998 &Armen.Nakashian;, with small updates and markup cleanup for &kde; 2.2, &Lauri.Watts; &Lauri.Watts.mail;

&underFDL; &underGPL;

&documentation.index;