# The &kodo; Handbook

Armen
Nakashian

    armen@tourismo.com

23/07/1999
1.00.00

This Handbook describes KOdometer

KDE
KOdometer
odometer
mouse
mileage

## Introduction

### What's KOdometer

Kodometer 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!

## Installation

### How to obtain KOdometer

KOdometer is a toy application of the KDE project http://www.kde.org. It can be found on ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/, the main ftp site of the KDE project, in the kdenonbeta snapshots. Please consider using your nearest mirror ftp site to get the load away from the server.

### Compilation and installation

In order to compile and install KOdometer on your system, type the following in the base directory of the KOdometer distribution:

    % ./configure
    % make
    % make install

Since KOdometer uses `autoconf` you should have not trouble compiling it. Should you run into problems, please report them to my email address armen@tourismo.com.

## Onscreen operation

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 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!

## 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?'.