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Set up a solo meeting with yourself. During meeting it doesn’t change the status at all, so after you join that solo meeting in the morning set yourself to available and you will be available whole day.
That is a very Microsoft kind of behavior
This is also the way to put a real meeting your in on hold.
It makes it look like you got interrupted and had to step away.
I love how inaccurate that status is. No one can depend on it.
I’m going to give you a mega useful tip.
You need to create a group. You can kick the user later and say it was an accident. Then you start a meet inside of that group. You can be the only one in the call. Change your status from Busy to available again on top. Just leave yourself muted inside of that Teams call. Your Teams will never go inactive and neither will your laptop.
I open notepad and shut the laptop lid halfway on the enter key. Always green, always working.
This is a good tip. I haven’t used it in a while but you can also log into it from web interfaces so i think it was possible to shutdown the desktop app and log into it from other places where it didn’t have the same kind of access.
Hmm, I just open notepad and use a stack of coins or something similar to hold down a key to stay active if I need to.
It’s stupid we even have to care about our status on teams. Why should anyone give a fuck about your teams status as long as you’re getting to your work done properly and on time?
Although to be fair right now I’m using a client laptop so my employer basically sees me as offline all the time but I’m reachable by teams or email on my phone.
Anyways it’s just dumb. Fun trick though, I didn’t know you could do that.
There’s a tool for Windows called Caffeine that simulates pressing the F15 key, which is almost never used by any software being that most keyboards don’t have function keys that go that high.
From the webpage:
If you have problems with your PC locking or going to sleep, caffeine will keep it awake. It works by simulating a keypress once every 59 seconds, so your machine thinks you’re still working at the keyboard, so won’t lock the screen or activate the screensaver.
What’s does F15 does? My keyboard only goes to F12
It’s up to application software to define what it does. I have never seen a keyboard with function keys beyond F12 in person, but they do exist. Software is very unlikely to respond to F15, which is why Caffeine uses it to keep the system awake. Notably, the program can also instruct Windows to stay awake using its native mechanism instead (possibly insufficient for something like MS Teams) or another virtual key code of the user’s specification.
I do have a Mac keyboard that goes up to F16 even
F12 and F3
I can’t install unapproved software on my work laptop, probably like most others hence I ain’t messing with that.
The best is to get a physical mouse jiggler
Preferably one that moves your current mouse. The USB dongles all have the same hardware id and can be tracked.
For what it’s worth, with Caffeine, it’s a single, portable executable, so it doesn’t need to be installed in the conventional sense, but if your IT department monitors processes or whitelists what is allowed to run, this would still be a problem.
I just always have mine set to show away. Management stops noticing when you are yellow in meetings regularly.
If anyone is wondering yes, it can see that you were in a meeting by yourself all day
who is “it” exactly?
IT department probably
As a sysadmin I sometimes feel like an “it” when I’m forced to emerge from my cubicle.
Pennywise is the character’s name, IIRC.
why? I’d rather everyone knows it’s bullshit than they think it’s accurate
Mouse Jiggler with Adjustable Timer
It’s simple enough to just make one too.
I used bots for games 20 years ago, I mean it should be easy to trick mouse movement…
If you leave the teams app open on an ios device, it will remain green no matter what you do. When I’m wfh, I just leave teams open in my iPad. I’m green all day long and it still adjusts the color to red for meetings. The main thing here is to remember to turn it off after hours. If you are still green at 10pm every day, it might look suspicious.
And slightly wet
Go on
Wow we are all slaves. :( I type this between my Teams meetings.
I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.
That sadly doesn’t work for my workstation, the VDI still locks after 5 mins and I need to 2 factor authenticate again. So I bought a physical mouse Jiggler for 7ish euros and I’m happy again.
I got roasted by friends calling me lazy because of it, fast forward 3 months and half of them asked me where I bought it. Now most of them have it, including several of my colleagues.
For the computer it’s an actual mouse since the input is external, so it just works. I’m always green baby ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
I just use teams-for-linux which has auto-online built-in.
Auto-online? 😯 I’m very curious: how do you know it has that? It hasn’t been working that great for me, Microsoft won’t always sign it in.
It’s listed as a feature and you can see it in action if you’re like me and keep displays on for 10+ mins of inactivity… I think the only conflict to it would be if your computer put itself to sleep for power saving.
I’ve had no issues with it; can’t even recall one. Sign-in issues could just be your company SSO being shit as Microsoft’s SSO so often is…
powershell script that toggles the scrolllock key every 3 minutes.
Powershell is locked down on our machines via AD policy. I used to run a tool from the Windows Store, but they locked that down too. They didn’t come for the JVM yet.
If you have Excel you can use VBA to send keycodes too. :-)
I was in a similar situation so I bought a usb mouse wiggler, shows up like a standard usb mouse once plugged in and costs like nothing on AliExpress.
It really baffled me though, shut down all tools, on a developer machine, why?
At a friend’s company they scan every USB device, he already got in trouble for plugging in his private USB Stick once. Would this still work?
I used to hate it too but once you realize how clueless most devs are it becomes more and more understandable.
I went the other route: I set to away until 2030. Now they don’t know if I’m really away or not.
You are a fucking master mind! I wonder what other secret knowledge you possess, and I’m serious.
A buddy of mine at work refuses to ever accept or decline invites - even 1-on-1s with his boss.
That way it’s always a surprise if they are going to show up.
I know a guy like that. It’s infuriating because it’s a waste of everybody’s time when they don’t show up. Just decline for fucks sake! At least I can tell the PM that we tried unsuccessfully to schedule and that we have to delay and I can play some video games!
If I schedule a meeting and someone doesn’t accept that invite I just assume they’re not showing up and act accordingly. Might send them a ping a few minutes before hand but if they’re a stakeholder and needed for the meeting and choose to ignore the invite(s)/email … That meeting gonna get cancelled or rescheduled.
Not that that very often happens but I’d just start bothering said guy about it with pings or email follow ups until they get the picture. Or just cancel the meeting(s) if no response 24 hours before scheduled. Something like that.
Not even to be petty or annoying just because they should be accepting or declining for the simple fact that everyone else has schedules to keep too. Obviously this advice may be bad or not applicable but yeah that sucks.
Unfortunately my PM will say “let’s meet and see if X joins otherwise we end earlier”. Which means wasting a lot of time. Because X won’t join, the PM will start talking about irrelevant stuff, and if we’re lucky we waste 15 minutes, or more.
I just hate this PM.
What you say is reasonable and is also how I would have handled it. But in this project I have no power and the PM is…just not very good at it.
That sucks. I feel like a lot of stuff is easier and just better without even dealing with a PM - good ones can be worth their weight in gold though if you’re dealing with multiple folks on a project and they do their job right.
Unfortunately, that’s very rare.
Much less resource intensive on your dev machine to just use an esp32 and write a program to pretend to be a mouse and wiggle itself. Benefit is it is completely undetectable on every platform as well.
I wrote in another comment too: A friend’s company scans every USB device. He got in trouble for plugging in his private USB stick once. Are you sure this is undetectable?
A USB stick reports itself as a USB stick. A device you set up to report itself as what you want reports itself as what you want. The only thing a computer can talk about a device is what the device reports itself. That’s how computers and peripherals work. The computer provides power and the peripheral tells the computer about itself.
So if you make a device that reports the exact same information as your other mice then yeah the computer thinks it’s the same mouse. But it’s not usable as a USB then. It can’t do other stuff.
Yes your friend plugging in a USB will get them in trouble, cause they can exfiltrate data.
For me it’d be better to just run the stupid Teams app on my work phone, but that’s always been a hassle because it locks itself and then I don’t always get the notifications. My primary work laptop only has 16 gigs of RAM, and having Teams eagerly gobble up a significant portion of that is highly frustrating.
There’s been several occasions where I’ve been building or debugging something, RAM being tight, and the OOM killer correctly deduces that Teams has to go. Makes me laugh every time I finally check back on Teams and realise it’s been dead for a while.
The whole “two minute timeout” is a stupid thing anyway. A non-trivial portion of my job is to read and write documentation. That takes time, and you will sit “idle” for a few minutes while reading and processing. My Windows machine would kill the BT connection to my mouse and keyboard, which would sometimes require re-pairing to get working again. For the longest time I thought the problem was the mouse and keyboard, but those problems vanished once I got a Linux dev machine.
I fucking hate everything Microsoft.
Use a program called Caffeine. It presses F15 every 59 seconds. Nice thing is that F15 is a largely unused button, so it doesn’t interfere in any way when you’re actually doing something on the computer (classic mouse wigglers are very annoying in that regard)
Sadly, blocked by my company
You can try the physical wigglers? They’re like $20ish and can be plugged into a power source that’s not your work device if your company is particular about that too.
It’s basically a timer and a cheap motor that rotates a disc with a pattern that is meant to trick laser mice into thinking that it’s being moved across a valid surface. Some are better than others.
Other homemade solutions would be opening notepad and having a heavy object press a key, but that seems not ideal for random window pop-ups.
Is powershell blocked?
For non-devs (like me), yes.
Not Scroll Lock?
that’s used in excel
Christ, what for?
with scroll lock the arrow keys move between cells, without it they scroll the sheet.
Isn’t it the other way around?
could be, i didn’t verify
Well that’s useless
does what it says though
I use it every day :D
You’re only proving my point
Caffeine’s great. I use it to keep my computer on if I’m out doing errands so I can check my emails and whatnot with a remote desktop through my phone.
A proper wiggler should reset the timer every time you actually move your mouse so it never do it while you are using your mouse
And wiggle not every second too, like 1 pixel every 30 sec. That was the only thing I disliked with the cheap wigglers, they were great otherwise.
I seem to remember a blank custom status being enough to stop the indicator going yellow, no mouse movements necessary. Is that no longer the case?
Unfortunately not, no.
I just tell them it doesn’t work on my system.
I was getting marked as “away” in Microsoft Teams every day, even though I was working. I just wasn’t using Microsoft Teams, so it marked me as idle.
I wrote this Autohotkey script after my boss started complaining. It clicks on Teams every 2 minutes:
global running := 0 ^+1:: { global running := 1 while running == 1 { CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen") oldx := 0 oldy := 0 MouseGetPos(&oldx, &oldy) prev_active := WinActive("A") Try { WinActivate("ahk_class TeamsWebView") } Catch TargetError as e { } CoordMode("Mouse", "Window") Send("{Click 80 40 Left}") Try { WinActivate("ahk_id " prev_active) } Catch TargetError as e { } CoordMode("Mouse", "Screen") MouseMove(oldx, oldy, 0) sleep(115000) } } ^+2:: { global running := 0 }It has the side effect of preventing my computer from entering screensaver/lock screen when I really am away.
Complete waste of money. Use an esp32 and write a program to pretend to be a mouse. Benefit of the esp32 is you can reuse it for whatever you want in the future, whether that’s a smart sensor for a door, or a tracking chip for luggage.
Yea, no.
The benefit of the mechanical jiggler is that its airgapped from the system. I work in a field that is very very very specific about what peripherals are plugged in and, more importantly, where theyre made. So no, its not a waste, because theres no shot to plug in an unauthorized custom coded outside device. IT will be notified, it will be an immediate firing, probably charges for leakage/espionage.
You can have the esp report itself as whatever device you want. If you already have a mouse that is allowed to be plugged in then you just have the esp report itself as that. It is a mouse at that point, the system will not know the difference.
Right, and when IT walks around to do literally anything and notices a weird microcontroller plugged in to a USB port that’s designed to announce itself as approved tech, there’s no way that will go badly.
Places with good IT departments might even flag your machine for having a weird device config with two of the same mouse to go do a visual inspection, just because it’s abnormal and a VERY common attack vector as literally your not smart suggestion is what everyone else tries to do to get around USB restrictions either for convenience or for malicious intent.
Can’t tell if this is a joke or not. If IT is walking around doing checks then having your mouse sitting on a fucking mouse wiggler is going to raise a billion more eyebrows than an esp32 plugged in.
You’re not using either of these if you work in a fucking office dingus.
Places with good IT departments might even flag your machine for having a weird device config with two of the same mouse to go do a visual inspection
Fucking unplug the mouse! Like holy hell this isn’t a hard thing to understand. You’re just making excuses cause you can’t reasonably handle that maybe a $5 computer is a better solution than a shitty mouse wiggler.
yea… trying to outsmart IT… nothing can go wrong with that approach.
Most IT is full of idiots. There’s no “outsmarting” here. There’s nothing to detect, nothing to notice. And if you think that a mouse wiggler isn’t going to be noticed while a device that reports itself as an actual mouse will then you’re a moron.
kid, stop while you’re behind.
What is this, a smart ash tray?
Thats right, its for your Bluetooth cigarettes.
