For the longest time, I’ve wanted a background process that would just increment a counter with each keystroke. A friend here (who has the exact same laptop I do) commented on how it was kind of scary that all of my keys had become really shiny and worn down from use. I couldn’t even give you an order-of-magnitude guess of how many keys I’ve pressed since the life of the laptop.

But that’s all changing. A friend had sent me a link to a site called WhatPulse before. It’s essentially… a background process that counts keystrokes and also measures how far your mouse has moved. Concerned about possible privacy implications, I immediately installed it.

Here’s my profile. It’s probably quite inaccurate right now, as I didn’t install it until recently, when I did some Wikipedia cleanup, which is probably 90% clicking, and of the remaining 10% typing, about 95% of that is copying-and-pasting templates and such. So clicks are artificially high, while keystrokes are artificially low.

After a few days’ time to normalize, I want to try to extrapolate this out over the lifetime of my laptop and see where I’m at. (I have a feeling I’ll be somewhat embarassed. Speaking of which, about 5,000 pageviews on Wikipedia for me now, since whenever I last reset my Firefox profile, which was not long ago. And I’m coming on 900 edits on Wikipedia, too.)