Monitor your Computer Habits, Keyboard and Mouse Usage along with Heat Maps

For someone who spends most of his time on the computer in a day, it might be a useful idea to monitor his computing habits by tracking various activities performed. It is, however, little difficult to monitor the activities by self but if you use a tool for this purpose, we can do that easily. Here is a tool called as WhatPulse that can monitor your Keyboard usage, Mouse usage, network usage along with providing heat maps with the statistical data to let you analyze your usage. Using WhatPulse you can not only find out what all applications you use mostly but can also find out how many times you pressed one key, the most pressed keys, the most clicked area on the screen, the applications that uses your most bandwidth and lot of other things. To be able to track all these things for you, you just need to download the client and install it in your system. You need to proceed by registering in the tool, registering with facebook will also do. After that, you will have access to many other features listed under the tabs on top. Tab Input will let you know the most used keys on the heat map with the cool color like blue displaying the less count and the hot colors like orange and red, displaying the most used keys. It will also show you the statistical data on top and at the bottom. If you scroll right in this tab, you will also be able to see the data for the mouse usage. The heat map for the mouse is little different but the same color combination applies. There are other tabs like Network that will give you the usage of your network and the bandwidth used by your system. I think it is a great tool to analyze your daily computing habits and see how much and what all things, you use on your computer. Let us know, how did you find the tool. Download WhatPulse

2 Tools to Find out When Someone Unknown Joins your WiFi Network

These days almost every house have a wifi network, as we have lot many devices like computers, game consoles like Xbox that need to be online all the time. So we can safely say that, almost every house today is wifi enabled. Now it becomes the duty of the owner to protect its WiFi network from unintended and unauthorized use.

While there are options to password protect your WiFi, it can be that the password chosen is not very strong. Most people I know, either select their phone numbers, birth dates, house number, vehicle number or other common to guess passwords. So if someone knows you very well, he or she can crack your password by either guessing or may be hacking.

Here are couple of tools that can notify you whenever someone tries to break into your WiFi network and is unknown to you.

Wireless Network Watcher

It is a small program developed by the famous Nirsoft that scans your wireless network and displays the list of all computers and devices that are currently connected to your network.

The program is free to use and really easy to use too. Wireless Network Watcher displays the following information: IP address, MAC address, the company that manufactured the network card, and optionally the computer name, for every device connected to your network. You can also export this info into some spreadsheets. The only thing which is worth noting here is that, it will list the devices only connected to the network in which you are connected.

Who’s On My Wifi

The other tool designed for this purpose is the “Who’s On My Wifi” and as the name goes, it notifies you whenever someone unknown tries to access your network. All you need to do is just install the tool, and scan the network for the first time where it will detect all the devices. Mark the known ones as Known (with an option to name them, so that it becomes easier to identify them).

You might see some devices that are connected to your network after all you never know if your neighbor is using the network without your consent. The tool is not completely free however you can download the free copy from the website.

Silence all Music Apps on your Phone at Specified Time for Pleasant Sleep

I don’t know how many of you are like this but I do like to listen to music every night before going to sleep. Sometime its either on my laptop and other times its on my phone. Listening to my favorite songs before going to sleep help me lighten up the mood and also helps in sound sleep but we need to take care of shutting the app or the laptop down before going to sleep.

If you are someone who also likes to listen to music on your phone then here is something that might come useful to you. This app is called as Super Simple Sleep Timer and as you can make out from the name of the app, it’s a simple music sleep timer app that helps in turning down the music app on your phone after the set time (just like there used to be atimer off button on our TV sets).

For the obvious reasons of saving battery and closing the app before going to sleep, this app will help all those who sometimes fall asleep while listening to the songs. So what you need to do is just install this app, run it to configure the settings and let it work.

The app is very simple to use, as you just need to select the music app from the list of apps you have on your phone, set the sleep time duration (in minutes) and press the Set Sleep Timer button to let it start monitoring.

There is a speaker button in the center too, which lowers the volume first, shuts the music app and then restores the volume back. I found the app quite useful as I am someone who likes to fall asleep to music. You can also add time to the already set duration.

So if you liked the app, here is the download link for you to give it a try.

Download Super Simple Sleep Timer

Display your Own Name or any Text on Windows Taskbar

Everyone loves customizing and personalizing our own computers, as it feels really good and helpful. There are lot many ways to change picture backgrounds, audio and some names at various places in Windows however there was no way to write our own name (or a text) somewhere on the taskbar until I realized it was possible with a some small tweak.

While Windows already display the computer name in the Windows menu but I am not sure if you would like to see your name along with the time on the taskbar. Personally, it did interests me as seeing my name or something I want to see most times is always displayed on the taskbar. Moreover it looks different too. So if you also wish to put your name or a text on the taskbar here is how to go about it.

Steps:

1. Open the Control Panel
2. Go to Clock, Language and Region settings.
3. Click on the Region and Language option
4. In the Region and Language window that opens, click the Additional Settings button.

5. A new window opens called as Customize Window, go to the Time tab here.
6. Now you need to change the AM and PM symbols to any text that you want to put. So basically we are changing the AM and PM values with the text to be displayed always.
7. There are more customizations that can be used, like you can replace h by H, to see the time in 24 hr format and other things as mentioned below in the window.
8. Note that, when you wish to go back to the original settings, you just need to click the Reset button to undo the changes.

I think having your own displayed all the time on the taskbar looks cool and more personal, so if you also liked the tweak, then try it for you. [via TWC]

Spell Check whenever you Type in Windows with tinySpell

It’s always good to have a spell checker so that whenever you type, it can show you your spelling mistakes and also let you know the correct terms. However, it is currently a limited functionality that is being limited to only some of the text editors like MS Word, or a browser or something else but it’s not present everywhere, the biggest example being the Notepad, so old yet so plain and simple.

For people like me who are into writing a lot, definitely needs something that can alert them in case of a spelling mistake and show them the suggestions. Having this kind of facility into all the applications of Windows is a good idea, isn’t it? So that whenever and wherever you type, you don’t have to open the text editor again to see if there are any mistakes.

Here is one simple to use app called as tinySpell that actually lets you know whenever you commit some spelling mistake and also shows you the suggestions. It is a small utility that allows you to easily and quickly check and correct the spelling in any Windows application.

Features:

• Small application that detects spelling mistake in any application in Windows
• Sits silently in the system to monitor the mistakes and beeps to alert the user. Also changes the color of the tray icon from white to yellow.
• See mistakes even in the copied clipboard text
• Also helps to detect errors even when you rename a file or a folder
• Makes use of dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus to fetch suggestions for the mistyped word.

The tool works great and is also open to customization like you can make the tool to stop monitoring certain applications and even let it learn certain words so that when you deliberately use those words, it doesn’t show any error.

tinySpell works great on all version of Windows and also comes in a paid version which have some more features. So if the tool was able to get your attention, download it from the link below.

Download tinySpell