When you move your mouse, it makes a small, consistent movement. But how far does your mouse move? To measure how far your mouse has moved, you need to take into account its travel speed and the distance between the cursor and the mouse pad. To do this, you can use a ruler or a straight edge to measure the distance between the cursor and the mouse pad. Then, divide that distance by 2 to get the average travel speed of your mouse.
Thanks to forum member ScottW, our own Microsoft MVP, for the idea for this article.
Use Mousotron to Measure Mouse Distance
Mousotron is a little application that measures not just how far you’ve moved your mouse, but also your keystrokes, mouse button clicks, and even the scroll wheel usage. It lives in the system tray, but it also has a widget that displays on the desktop.
The only problem is that the default setup is really quite ugly…
If you head into the setup, you can change the Orientation to Vertical and the Background to No Colors. You’ll want to choose the correct size of your monitor if you want accurate measurements as well.
Once you’ve changed those settings, the window is much more pleasant to deal with.
And of course, it minimizes right over to the system tray anyway, so no need to have it up and running all the time.
Download Mousotron from blacksunsoftware.com
Using KeyCounter for Counting Specific Keystrokes
Ever wondered just how many times you hit a particular key on the keyboard? A simple little application called KeyCounter will check exactly which keys you are using, and how many times you are using each one.
When you first start up the application, nothing will show up in the left-hand pane. You’ll have to either choose a single key to monitor, or just choose the “All the above keys” radio button, and the “Add keys to list” button.
Download KeyCounter from donationcoder.com
So… just how many times have you typed geek today?
