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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

Okay but what about the unchangeable five minute idle timer in Teams?

Open teams in the browser, open console and paste:

setInterval(() => {angular.element(document.body).injector().get('presenceService').setMyStatus(1, null, false); }, 15000)

This snippet is my own, made by looking at the source code, maybe the 15 second interval is overkill so feel free to adjust as you need.

nice work. anyone aware of an analogous script for Slack?

Use mouse-move Autohotkey feature and a run a script to move the mouse 1 pixel ever 2 mins. Or on macOS use coffee app.

For macOS, you can just use Automator to record clicking into the Teams app, then something else, and put it on a loop. No external apps required.

Any decent manager shouldn't care but you can easily automate a python script to do some non consequential key presses every few minutes.

I actually did that at a previous job where I had to use windows 10 and (I think) the sys admin policy was to 'lock screen' after 20 min of inactivity, so I eventually got fed up of having to login all the time.

Look into AutoHotkey if you're on Windows. It's a nice automation tool, particularly shining for anything input-related. You should be able to whip up a script that moves your mouse around on idle quite easily.

I remember using python at the time because I wasn't given admin rights on those machines (contractor) but they had python 3 already installed, it was just the quickest to do the job without admin escalation.

Just to clarify you can definitely also do mouse moves with python and ctypes.

One of the many regressions from what was available in OCS/Lync/Skype for Business...

Buy a mouse wiggler, problem solved.

I don't think it's that simple. From my experience, if you are in certain non-Microsoft applications and the mouse is moving it will still set you as Away and won't set your status to Available until you click into an application it recognizes.

> I don't think it's that simple. From my experience, if you are in certain non-Microsoft applications and the mouse is moving it will still set you as Away and won't set your status to Available until you click into an application it recognizes.

Is it just ignoring mouse movement, or actually monitoring interaction with the app it recognizes?

This mouse jiggler is programmable, and lets you insert keypresses and stuff into the script: https://www.amazon.com/WiebeTech-Programmable-Mouse-Jiggler-...

I'm no netsec expert but this type of programable usb devices sounds like a security risk specially on a company machine with access to an internal network.

IMHO, it's not any more of a security risk than a keyboard and mouse, which is literally what it is.

Reminds me of a story I read - some company had a batch job that ran for hours and for some reason if the computer went to screen saver, the batch job crashed and had to be restarted. Rather than actually find the root of the problem (of course), or disable screensaver (not allowed per security policy), they just assigned somebody to move the mouse every few minutes to keep the screensaver from activating.

So one day, the guy brings in a vibrating baby bouncer, puts the mouse in the baby bouncer, and kicks back for the rest of the day.

Both of the solution seems dumb to me. Can't you play a 24 hour video? AFAIK most media players prevent the computer from going to sleep. Or even better write a program that does it for you: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34836406/how-to-prevent-...

The entire situation is dumb.

Many (most?) companies that care to track your productivity in invasive ways will have security policies locking out USB devices.

Even plugging in a charging cable at my company will get you a visit from the IT Security department.

I've found having a youtube video, like 10 hours of black-screen open prevents my laptop from logging out. Not sure if that applies here though.

If you install it on your phone as well, it will always stay green.

that's hilarious if true "give away even more privacy in exchange for some pseudo feature"

you can put something to hold down the insert key, thats the best solution I found

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