Nice (very quick) hack.

I was hoping to find something about how he was reading the stored height information from the desk so that he could either automatically or over SSH set the desk to specific heights though.

His hack just moves the desk up for a second approximately every 50 minutes. So I guess he just lets it go to max height when he's away, manually sets the height to where he needs it to stand, and just goes back to sitting whenever he feels like it.