You must log in or register to comment.
It also eats up to 1,5gb of ram sitting idle as a chat program. So yeah it’s not running unless I need it and then it gets to shut down again. Luckily we don’t use it as our primary chat tool.
If you join a meeting with yourself only, you can manually set your status to available and it will never go to away.
I would expect it to say that you’re “in a call”
And you would be correct, that’s why previous comment indicated that you can then manually change your status, which will then make you appear as available. But as you are in a call, teams will no more automatically change your status to idle.
But what happens if someone calls you?
You see/hear the call as usual, and if you decide to pick up it pauses your meeting with yourself (just like it works when on any other meeting if you get called)
I learned from my wife that you can start a meeting by yourself using the Meet Now button on the Teams calendar, and that will keep you flagged as Busy.
Using team status to know if you are working or not is both rudimentary and unreliable. There are a lot of times the status is just displayed wrong, besides, if stuff is getting done, then that is a sign you are working
Yes! If you are in a work situation where your boss is doing this, find another job. Your performance should be based on outcomes, not butt and n seat time.
I run teams in a PWA on Linux which doesn’t have permission to check if I’m using my computer or not so I’m always listed as away unless I’m interacting with Teams directly. I hate teams so much.
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)
Not Scroll Lock?
Sadly, blocked by my company
Is powershell blocked?
For non-devs (like me), yes.
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.
Arrow keys are pretty safe to hold down.
I often wondered how they did that, thanks!
Get a USB mouse jiggler. There are hundreds of them.
https://www.amazon.com/meatanty-Jiggler-Undetectable-Separate-Computer/dp/B09NVH8HVN
They are undetectable because they are just another USB Mouse.
These other solutions are so annoying. Yes let me spend the mental energy to wedge keys downs or setup fake meetings every single time I have to take a shit.
It’s important not to plug in a USB device like that into your work PC. IT can likely see what devices are used on any system.
Instead use a physical mouse mover device that only requires power, like a USB cord plugged into a wall charger instead of the PC.
Doesn’t it show up as a mouse though ? That is what I see in Windows. I have 2 mice
Not the physical mover, no. If you plug a mouse jiggler thing into your work PC and it shows up as 2 mice, then IT can see the abnormality of that anyway because we don’t use 2 mice normally.
??
Stack of coins on the arrow key, works wonders.
Yes but I must take it off and put it every time I leave my desk
One of the beautiful things about being able to run Linux at work and use Teams in a browser is that my status is decoupled from what I’m doing on my machine. Obviously if I’m in a meeting or chatting with somebody through Teams my status will reflect that.
I bet my most productive days have me away/idle for hours on end, lol.
Yes. I wrote a script to make me green even though my employer doesn’t give a shit because I want the peace of mind even though I’m in your situation.
This micromanagement via surveillance is counterproductive any way you slice it. The peace of mind script makes me more valuable to my employer even though it might be inconsequential.
Bentham’s panopticon.
- Open notepad
- Place calculator on spacebar all it’s activated
- …?
- Profit
I’m so glad my company a) has a “nobody wants teams” stance and even recommends against it to our clients, and b) doesn’t give a fuck if I go idle for hours because they hired me to do a job and if it’s getting done they’re happy.
Micromanaging culture needs to die. Fire employees who don’t do the job and be done with it.
Thankfully no one seems to care about teams status at work. If I’m on teams it means I’m not working.
I’m so glad that I don’t know enough about teams to know what most of this means.
Same. I’m very happy I never had a job that required any of this shit.
I just drew pretty pictures for a living. (Yeah, also happy I got out before AI was a thing.)
- physical mouse “jiggler” (mine is a turntable) that isn’t connected to the work device
- physical key presser on a switch to press ESC every few seconds for when I’m pooping (this way the software shows both m n k activity)
I’ve even gone so far as to write a bash script that monitors the userdata folder that stores the JSON for activity and overwrite it with plausible but fake random activity data and screenshots, then name the process the same as the software so it’s virtually undetectable- logs will show “Productivity Software Name” writing to its userdata directory at the same time the actual software is writing to it.
…Have you considered finding a new job, perhaps?
I mean it took me all of 20 minutes. They have the screenshots saved in the folder, the JSON just is a time stamp and a list of urls I looked at in that time.
For sure, I just hate the idea of my employer spying on me constantly. I guess ones that don’t are few and far between these days.
What is this, a smart ash tray?
Thats right, its for your Bluetooth cigarettes.
Plug it into your wall then place your mouse on top of it whenever you go afk. The little dots on the bottom rotate and the mouse detects movement.
IT has no record of afk unlike all these powershell ‘geniuses’ in this comment section. At some corps those logs really do get checked.
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.
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.
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.
With a mouse jiggler, you can control your status manually, even from your phone while you’re in bed. Away at five, Busy at nine, Available when I’m actually at the keyboard only if necessary.
Just use a 🥄 on your touchpad
Unlike many others in this thread, I can’t download any programs on my work laptop. I just don’t have permissions.
So I found a much lower tech way of staying green. I go to the chat with yourself chat. Then I put a 3 pound weight on the backspace button. This keeps me green forever.
With my old work laptop, I was able to press backspace then wedge a set of tweezers in the key to hold it down.
Whatever works lol.
Use a 🥄 on the touchpad.
I tried this and it didn’t work. If I rub the spoon on the touchpad, it moves the cursor. But leaving it there doesn’t seem to do anything.
Interesting. Maybe you could play with the sensitivity or maybe it just doesn’t work with that spoon or pad.
When I leave it there then after settling it does not interfere, yet seems to do ‘enough’. At first when I heard of this I did not think it could work but it does.
Sometimes though teams is broken and changes status all the time then it needs a reboot and goes back to working.
Same with my wife. Which is why I gave her an esp32 with a program on it that makes it pretend to be a mouse. It will randomly move just like a regular mouse and the computer cannot tell it’s not actually a mouse. Just plug it in whenever you want to walk away.
Just have a meeting with you as the only invite then set status as available. It’ll stay like that all day.
