Using a Virtual Private Network (VPN_ makes it easy to change your public IP address, at least in theory, but some apps don’t tell you much about what’s happened.
You might get a message that you’re ‘Connected’, for instance, but no details about your new location. Or the app may tell you that you have an IP in a particular country, but not the nearest city.
NueLocate is a tiny portable Windows tool which checks your public IP address, multiple times a second. Whenever it changes, the program displays your new IP in a table, and uses a geolocation service to identify its city and country.
If you think this sounds ridiculously simple, you’d be right, but it has some applications beyond just finding your location details.
- NueLocate’s connection timestamps show when you’re connected and can help measure approximate connection times.
- NueLocate displays your real IP if the VPN drops, highlighting when your identity is exposed. That’s ideal when testing a kill switch, for unattended logging of connection drops, or just understanding how the VPN client really works.
- Leave nueLocate running during a VPN session and it logs the locations you’ve used.
- If your client is able to change your IP at regular intervals, set that up, leave nueLocate running and it’ll gather a full report of what the VPN is really doing.
- Need any of nueLocate’s data for reference? Click Copy and it’s copied to the clipboard as plain text in CSV format.
NueLocate is a tiny .NET program, barely 50KB, which should run on any modern Windows PC (and probably quite a few old ones, too.)
It doesn’t require installation, write to your Registry or hard drive, or modify your settings in any way. Just download the archive, unzip it anywhere and run.
Be aware: right now, Chrome is warning that ‘nueLocate.zip is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous.’ There’s no reason for concern– the file is entirely harmless. Chrome is being cautious because it hasn’t seen the file before, and hopefully, over time and with more downloads, that alert will disappear.
