Kodometer User's Guide
Description: Documentation for kedit
Keywords: odometer kde kodometer

Armen Nakashian, `armen@tourismo.com`

# What's Kodometer

Kodomter Measures your Desktop Milage. 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. Its most exciting feature is the tripometer, and its utter uselessness.

Note: The next version will be USEFUL!

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:

- The Tripometer was reset.
- Kodometer was restarted, with the Auto Reset Trip flag on.

# Menu Options

If you've gotten this far, you already know that there is a 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're some sort of Eurotrash that wants 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!

# How It Works

XWindows 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% off! The original author's response to this complaint was 'who cares?'.