I don’t like having the mouse actually wiggle for teams to stay active. Makes it really annoying to jump back in when you get an impromptu call and have to fiddle with things to get the wiggler back off.
There’s a program called caffeine that instead simulates a button like F15 (so one that’s unlikely to show up on a real keyboard or be mapped to do anything) being pressed once a minute, so you can just set the program to run and it will never interfere with you actually using the computer.
I’m a fan of scroll lock, not too useful but powershell is more than happy to turn it on and then back off 200ms later at random intervals… All while showing me a countdown to quitting time and a day counter until I’m out the door.
I have had a scroll lock vbscript that I have used for years that just turns it on/off every minute. This is the way.
However, we are on Windows 10 still (I assume parent company is paying for LTS) and Microslop keeps breaking teams on Win 10 so we are all using the browser version right now which shows you away if you don’t have that specific window/tab active, so it just shows everyone as away nearly 24/7, so management can’t use it as a metric at the moment and it’s fantastic.
Yeah caffeine has been around a long time. I’m sure these simple solutions won’t last much longer. They will us AI to monitor the actions are meaningful so people will use AI to make the actions look meaningful and so on…
I don’t like having the mouse actually wiggle for teams to stay active. Makes it really annoying to jump back in when you get an impromptu call and have to fiddle with things to get the wiggler back off.
There’s a program called caffeine that instead simulates a button like F15 (so one that’s unlikely to show up on a real keyboard or be mapped to do anything) being pressed once a minute, so you can just set the program to run and it will never interfere with you actually using the computer.
Yes, Caffeine is staple, I’ve been using it for decades (under windows too)!
(Also I’ve never actually noticed my mouse move by one pixel during work.)
I’m a fan of scroll lock, not too useful but powershell is more than happy to turn it on and then back off 200ms later at random intervals… All while showing me a countdown to quitting time and a day counter until I’m out the door.
I have had a scroll lock vbscript that I have used for years that just turns it on/off every minute. This is the way.
However, we are on Windows 10 still (I assume parent company is paying for LTS) and Microslop keeps breaking teams on Win 10 so we are all using the browser version right now which shows you away if you don’t have that specific window/tab active, so it just shows everyone as away nearly 24/7, so management can’t use it as a metric at the moment and it’s fantastic.
Yeah caffeine has been around a long time. I’m sure these simple solutions won’t last much longer. They will us AI to monitor the actions are meaningful so people will use AI to make the actions look meaningful and so on…
Microslop brought AI to Copilot or even just Teams to not only monitor minutes of activity but assess how active that activity was.
Luckily something like that is highly illegal here haha
Wait, AI monitoring (that only outputs summary data) is illegal?
EU should get on that!
Or quit the fucking company come on
yeah how dare i do work by hand for a minute or go pour myself a drink on one of my paid legally mandated breaks