Filed under: OS, Software, Productivity, Freeware
logKext keylogger
One my family members seems to lose her work distressingly often, particularly long blog posts she composes in browser windows which then crash. In trying to think up a solution to this problem I hit on the idea of using a keylogger that would record all of her keystrokes, and thus allow me to recover the text. I found just such a program-a freeware kernel extension called logKext. The kernel extension loads at startup and you can access the keylog through a terminal based client, which will write the keylog to your desktop as a text file. What I discovered, however, is that this is not a terribly useful way to recover text, precisely because folks rarely type straight through, rather we often hit backspace or delete to make corrections. So when you look at the keylog you'll find a huge number of <del>s, etc. Nonetheless, in a pinch it will bring back text, and if you were truly serious about it, you could probably run the keylog text through a text factory or similar text processing methodology to automatically remove the <del>'s, etc. As a far more practical solution, I convinced her to stop composing in a browser, but in a text editor with auto-save, and then to cut and paste into the browser after she's finished (though now I'm thinking of getting her going in MarsEdit).
Of course a keylogger can be used for much more nefarious activities (and it is not really detectable in normal operation unless you know it's there), but I pass over those in silence. The logKext keylogger is a free download from FSB Software.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian said 7:31PM on 3-29-2007
There was another good option on freemacware for tracking keystrokes
http://www.freemacware.com/keytrack/
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William said 8:56PM on 3-29-2007
What browser does she use? Maybe she could try a browser that didn't crash so much?
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Dave Chartier said 9:03PM on 3-29-2007
Depending on what her workflow is like, you could maybe set her up with a Google Docs & Spreadsheets account, which can post to many of the major blogging engines. She could still use a browser, you wouldn't have to shell out for MarsEdit and Google Docs features auto-saving.
Of course, you might lose some blog-specific stuff like categories or tags, but those can often be overcome by simple plugins that allow for embedding that info in the post itself.
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muaddib420 said 10:18PM on 3-29-2007
use google docs. http://docs.google.com/
it's free, it autosaves and you can access it on any computer.
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pplante said 5:23AM on 4-02-2007
Wordpress auto-saves posts, not sure if that helps though.
Google Docs would be a good choice here.
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Paul D said 3:19AM on 3-30-2007
Actually, Safari saves your form entry text in a file somewhere in your library if it crashes. There's a hint at Macosxhints.com on recovering it.
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Jan said 3:59AM on 3-30-2007
She could ask the vendor to incorporate http://livesaver.24inch.org/ I wrote it just to save you from crashing browsers and operating systems. Ultimately, of course, the browsers should do that themselves, but for now, it is pretty useful. Yes, this is a shameless self-promotion, but LiveSaver is Open Source, so I hope you don't mind.
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SJJ said 11:32AM on 3-30-2007
The GhostWriter element of Spell Catcher works well for this too. Saves the text typed into text files in folders broken down by application. Really neat.
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J said 8:10AM on 3-30-2007
and how do you know if something like this has been planted on your system?
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Andreas Tellefsen said 8:53AM on 3-30-2007
I don't think a key logger is the solution here. As you pointed out, a desktop blogging client would be a good solution, another solution would be a browser that is less prone to crashing.
If she is running Firefox, you can install a Greasemonket script that will automatically save the contents of all form elements, should the browser crash, or the page reload for whatever reason. Textarea Backup script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7671
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