Five Free Apps That Analyze or Protect Your Computer Habits!

Posted 01/21/2009 at 8:00am | by David Murphy

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Having trouble staying productive at work or home?  Tired of feeling like you're staring at the screen and accomplishing absolutely nothing?  Want to speed up your file transfers?  Protect your surfing habits?  Synchronize your files across your PCs and Macs?  These are all themes we're going to explore in this week's freeware and open-source software roundup.  Were there an official title for this week's grab-bag of programs, it would be that: The Hodgepodge Edition.  But when you drill down and consider what each program brings to the party, a picture starts to emerge.  These applications are designed to enhance your productivity.  We've explored this subject before, so feel free to check out our earlier recommendations for making the most of the time you spend at your PC.

Temptation Blocker

 What it does: You'll hate this application with a passion, but there's no better way to keep you out of the programs that distract you.  Select any number of applications, including your Web browser of choice, games, and instant messenger programs, and set a time limit.  Temptation Blocker won't let you fire up these apps until the countdown hits zero.  It's a great way to keep you from screwing around. And if you're already a master of productivity, it's a great method for hacking off your friends and co-workers: Install the app, set an eight-hour countdown, and watch them suffer.

Download it here!

Keycounter

 What it does: Ever have those days when you hit the closing whistle, only to struggle to remember what it is that you actually did at your desk all day?  Were you even at your desk all day?  Answer these important questions with KeyCounter.  This application doesn't log your keystrokes--that's a different kind of productivity altogether.  But it does keep track of your keyboard activity over the course of the day, as well as your mouse movements.  When you go back to analyze the results, you get a fancy little graph that tells you exactly how busy you were at your computer at any given time.  While the program can't differentiate between "working" busy and "reading Slashdot" busy, at least you'll have an idea of what you're up to on your own machine.

Download it here!

TeraCopy

 What it does:  It's hard to find an activity more agonizing than waiting for huge files to copy from one location to another.  But you can trim the amount of time you spend staring at Windows Explorer's status bar by copying and moving your files using TeraCopy. After fiddling around with the app's buffer size, we were able to shave 4 seconds off of a 700MB single-file copy.  That's not bad--imagine the kind of time you could save when transferring 700 files, or a huge 70GB file?  This app is a simple, drag-and-drop solution for long file transfer waits.

Download it here!

Syncplicity

 What it does: Just like any of those other applications like Dropbox, Windows Live Sync, and the lot, Syncplicity watches folders you specify and uploads their updated contents to the Cloud.  You can then pull down (or synchronize) this content across other devices you own, be they desktops, laptops, or machines based on different operating systems.  That's right--Syncplicity works on both PC and Mac platforms.  Support for the latter is in a closed beta period right now.  But by the time you've gotten a feel for this app, you'll surely see a cross-platform Syncplicity soon enough.

Download it here!

Portable Tor

What it does: Want to protect the anonymity of your Internet browsing while on the go?  Slap Portable Tor onto a USB key and you can surf about the Internet from all kinds of public and private locations without anybody knowing where you want.  Consider Tor a giant game of phone tag.  You submit your request to a fellow Tor client, which bounces it along to another one, and another one, et cetera.  Once it finally reaches your destination, said location is only able to decipher that the request came from the last Tor node--not your PC.

Download it here!