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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't schedule meetings with people I don't actually interact with. Pretty simple. By the time we are doing synchronous communication, it's because async has hit an effort limit and there's good incentive for everyone to show up.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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 ͡° )
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.
My boss loves sending me messages saying "Are you working today?" within 3 minutes of being idle on teams at any point in the day.
Other times if i'm idle he'll call me just to give me some busy work or try and "catch me" not paying attention or something.
In the office I can be idle on teams for hours at a time and there's never, ever random spot checks for productivity... and we have no objectives, goals or project management (because he doesn't think any PM principles are effective.)
A bad boss can really make a job suck. If it was me I'd get a mouse wiggler, apparently there's a surprisingly many physical 'mouse movers' out there nowadays.
Back when my company was using teams I had a script that would press a button that's not actually on my keyboard (something like F25) every minute, so my teams was always green and it was not noticeable from my point of view
My boss bills customers for his on-site visits (technical) wherein he goes on site, plugs in his laptop, and makes me remotely do all his work remotely. I can't wait to burn this bridge when the time is right.
Mine tells me to take all appointments and do all errands i'd need to take off on my wfh days.
If i'm idle during those I still get the nasty grams, and 50/50 on any of them he asks if I took the day off because he doesn't see it in the team calendar or HR's PTO official system, even though there's zero expectation for us to take PTO for a doctor's appointment or other errand that takes a couple of hours at any point.
Guy has taken a day and a half this week to work on his own personal stuff without requesting PTO. I took 1.5 hours on one day and got nastygrams (the "I don't see your pto in the pto calendar" (again, tells me in person not to put it in... but every time i'm remote and idle for an appointment there's now a record in writing asking me where I am and why I didn't take pto.)
Later, when I see the guy in person he totally understands and it's not a problem... so what the fuck are you messaging me for like this asshole? Why? The fuck is your problem? It's in my fucking calendar, and i'm not taking actual time off or a half day or something - so why would I put in the team wide calendar that i'm going to a doctor? They don't need to know!
I'm not actually suggesting this is the case in your situation, but there definitely exist work environments in which employees are given contradictory directives so that non-compliance can be logged and used as justification later for lack of giving a raise or disciplinary measures.
That implies he is also sitting around watching Teams instead...being productive.
And at the end of the day, unless you're working at a start-up, your business won't fail because someone wasn't nickle-and-dime-ing individual workers on their productivity time.
It really depends on what you actually need, how much setup the IT department can manage and how well the change is communicated and managed, I guess.
We use it (i.e. the Element client) mostly for chatting and another open source solution (BigBlueButton) for online meetings, but voice and video calls are possible directly with Element. Matrix lacks the out of the box office product integration for collaborating on presentations, spreadsheets or text files that Teams has. It can be extended via widgets though, which includes at least etherpad and afaik there are options for nextcloud (which has collabora) integration as well, so with a bit of setup, even that could be emulated.
So that would of course require some setup and maintenance and if the company used Teams before, some training and help for the users as well.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 have teams open all day at my PC and on my work phone because that's how I get contacted to fix things. Annoyingly domain accounts no longer log us into teams so I have to reauthentice it 3 times a week. Worse still is every few months they'll reset the settings to default so that if I have teams open on my PC all notifications play there. My PC is always muted and I rely on my phone for notifications because I'm usually walking around the building and remoting back to the cube. So I'll go through days where I'm pissed off because I'm not getting notifications only to remember to go check the settings on the PC to find out yup its set to only play notifications there.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's always interesting hearing from people that this works, because I could be working solid for 2 hours straight but not actually put my cursor in the Teams application and so it thinks I'm away
I have had that happen in the past but not recently. I would think having teams be the active window while holding the key down would have the same effect though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to open a blank document and put something heavy on the spacebar, too. That was until someone unveild me the secret technique of placing a spoon on the laptop's touchpad. It changed my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Micromanagement. If you go "AFK" in just 2 minutes... your boss might start asking questions. Where did you go? Why weren't you working? All sorts of bullshit every bad manager would pull out. In a misguided attempt to try to ensure you give "110%" performance!
I had a manager years ago, she tried to enforce phone codes. She would then compile a report. Trying to determine when you were on break, when you went to use the bathroom, how much time you weren't in the phone queue, etc. She was eventually demoted from her position for basically making enemies of everyone she managed. And that report didn't help any meaningful metric.
With all these "IT can see when you connect a USB device" comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I've never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I've been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That's pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I've used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.
Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I've known many many different IT people working at every level and I don't think I've ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren't being productive. Just don't break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don't try to fix it yourself. Personally, I've never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I'm not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit "productivity" targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it's bullshit. If there's an IT department out there that's full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.
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 set the status to something other than active. If it says buy or away 100% of the time, even while on a call, then any crazy manager that's monitoring it will start to think it's bugged.
If you start a chat with yourself click the message textbox and hold down the left shift key the teams will think that your typing and it never changes the status. You don't need to make any changes to your system or install anything with this. Just place a heavy object on the shift key.
Guys just open word and have something press the page down key, for example a game controller. Pc never sleeps, and you’re always green on teams/webex/whatever. Keep it simple.
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?
Blank in quotes because it was a skosh more involved: you needed a nonbreaking space or some kind of special character like that. A regular space would just get trimmed away.
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.
Bonus: share a 24h fireplace video to your meeting, now you’re listed as ‚presenting‘ and do not disturb activates. The 24h fireplace video will keep your device from going to standby/sleep.
My trick to get actual work done.
Every single production monitoring software I've seen on any machine I've ever run had some way to make it look like 100% uptime to whoever looks, and that hack was found within a single shift.
Turns out the most effective system for monitoring production is to actually see if someone is producing what they're supposed to in a reasonable amount of time
Ok, but management is lazy, incompetent and/or suffering from imposter syndrome (rightful for some). So they don't know what reasonable is, or what they need to produce, only need to make a number match a projection.
Definitely don't go on Amazon or Ebay and buy a cheap mouse jiggler. It gets detected as a generic input device and moves the mouse cursor 1 pixel left, then right 24 hours a day. They are available for under a fiver a piece. Plug it in at day's start and unplug it before you walk away from your pc.
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FTTY
I opened my email and it fucking defaulted to Copilot. Like, bitch I clicked my email. Not your half baked AI bullshit.
perfection
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.
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 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.
If anyone is wondering yes, it can see that you were in a meeting by yourself all day
who is "it" exactly?
Pennywise is the character's name, IIRC.
IT department probably
As a sysadmin I sometimes feel like an "it" when I'm forced to emerge from my cubicle.
When that one power user who writes their own scripts walks by the IT area: "Come play with us!"
Information technology. The department at your company who knows everything.
I just always have mine set to show away. Management stops noticing when you are yellow in meetings regularly.
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:
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.
https://imgur.com/Xc5RCfG
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.
What's does F15 does? My keyboard only goes to F12
F12 and F3
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
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.
I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.
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.
I don't schedule meetings with people I don't actually interact with. Pretty simple. By the time we are doing synchronous communication, it's because async has hit an effort limit and there's good incentive for everyone to show up.
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.
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.
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.
If you have Excel you can use VBA to send keycodes too. :-)
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..
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.
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 ͡° )
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.
My boss loves sending me messages saying "Are you working today?" within 3 minutes of being idle on teams at any point in the day.
Other times if i'm idle he'll call me just to give me some busy work or try and "catch me" not paying attention or something.
In the office I can be idle on teams for hours at a time and there's never, ever random spot checks for productivity... and we have no objectives, goals or project management (because he doesn't think any PM principles are effective.)
A bad boss can really make a job suck. If it was me I'd get a mouse wiggler, apparently there's a surprisingly many physical 'mouse movers' out there nowadays.
People don't quit jobs, they quit managers.
Back when my company was using teams I had a script that would press a button that's not actually on my keyboard (something like F25) every minute, so my teams was always green and it was not noticeable from my point of view
My boss bills customers for his on-site visits (technical) wherein he goes on site, plugs in his laptop, and makes me remotely do all his work remotely. I can't wait to burn this bridge when the time is right.
The saying is true for 95% of jobs. People don't quit bad jobs, they quit bad bosses.
There's a natural divot on my desk that does it for me.
But I also have my outlook calendar filled with my scheduled hours so my status shows I am always busy (working my schedules hours).
So hasn't been a problem and it's been years.
Mine tells me to take all appointments and do all errands i'd need to take off on my wfh days.
If i'm idle during those I still get the nasty grams, and 50/50 on any of them he asks if I took the day off because he doesn't see it in the team calendar or HR's PTO official system, even though there's zero expectation for us to take PTO for a doctor's appointment or other errand that takes a couple of hours at any point.
Guy has taken a day and a half this week to work on his own personal stuff without requesting PTO. I took 1.5 hours on one day and got nastygrams (the "I don't see your pto in the pto calendar" (again, tells me in person not to put it in... but every time i'm remote and idle for an appointment there's now a record in writing asking me where I am and why I didn't take pto.)
Later, when I see the guy in person he totally understands and it's not a problem... so what the fuck are you messaging me for like this asshole? Why? The fuck is your problem? It's in my fucking calendar, and i'm not taking actual time off or a half day or something - so why would I put in the team wide calendar that i'm going to a doctor? They don't need to know!
Sounds like your boss has a boss and those checkin/nasty grams are how they measure their tasks.
I'm not actually suggesting this is the case in your situation, but there definitely exist work environments in which employees are given contradictory directives so that non-compliance can be logged and used as justification later for lack of giving a raise or disciplinary measures.
That implies he is also sitting around watching Teams instead...being productive.
And at the end of the day, unless you're working at a start-up, your business won't fail because someone wasn't nickle-and-dime-ing individual workers on their productivity time.
I'm so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.
Hire me please xD
Let me guess, you signed an NDA and can't tell us where.
I'm trying not to dox myself, but it's a university in Germany. :D
How is matrix as a discord/teams replacement for work?
It really depends on what you actually need, how much setup the IT department can manage and how well the change is communicated and managed, I guess.
We use it (i.e. the Element client) mostly for chatting and another open source solution (BigBlueButton) for online meetings, but voice and video calls are possible directly with Element. Matrix lacks the out of the box office product integration for collaborating on presentations, spreadsheets or text files that Teams has. It can be extended via widgets though, which includes at least etherpad and afaik there are options for nextcloud (which has collabora) integration as well, so with a bit of setup, even that could be emulated.
So that would of course require some setup and maintenance and if the company used Teams before, some training and help for the users as well.
Hope I can bring this kind of change to a company at some point. Matrix is the shit
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.
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?
If it’s not on dnd it should still ring, not that hard to test though.
You still get messages and stuff in meetings including the audio chimes, unless you’re presenting (that sets DND)
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)
Even better! /j
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.
It's so stupid, previously you could keep it permanently "online"
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.
Tools like this also do not work with multiple screens.
I have teams open all day at my PC and on my work phone because that's how I get contacted to fix things. Annoyingly domain accounts no longer log us into teams so I have to reauthentice it 3 times a week. Worse still is every few months they'll reset the settings to default so that if I have teams open on my PC all notifications play there. My PC is always muted and I rely on my phone for notifications because I'm usually walking around the building and remoting back to the cube. So I'll go through days where I'm pissed off because I'm not getting notifications only to remember to go check the settings on the PC to find out yup its set to only play notifications there.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
I often wondered how they did that, thanks!
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.
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.
It likely has a distinctive vendor ID and product ID that it provides to the OS.
I just put a weight on the ctrl key when I'm away or fucking around on my phone.
It's always interesting hearing from people that this works, because I could be working solid for 2 hours straight but not actually put my cursor in the Teams application and so it thinks I'm away
I have had that happen in the past but not recently. I would think having teams be the active window while holding the key down would have the same effect though.
??
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
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.
I'll go one step further and hope their both sides of their pillow are warm from fresh piss. What a totally asshole decision.
What I did was to set it to "Away" permanently
I'm so glad that I don't know enough about teams to know what most of this means.
Right?
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.)
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.
A quarter is the perfect thickness to wedge into a key to keep it pressed
Just have a meeting with you as the only invite then set status as available. It’ll stay like that all day.
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.
I used to open a blank document and put something heavy on the spacebar, too. That was until someone unveild me the secret technique of placing a spoon on the laptop's touchpad. It changed my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why does it matter?
Just here to flex?
Partly, but also out of the loop
Micromanagement. If you go "AFK" in just 2 minutes... your boss might start asking questions. Where did you go? Why weren't you working? All sorts of bullshit every bad manager would pull out. In a misguided attempt to try to ensure you give "110%" performance!
I had a manager years ago, she tried to enforce phone codes. She would then compile a report. Trying to determine when you were on break, when you went to use the bathroom, how much time you weren't in the phone queue, etc. She was eventually demoted from her position for basically making enemies of everyone she managed. And that report didn't help any meaningful metric.
With all these "IT can see when you connect a USB device" comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I've never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I've been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That's pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I've used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.
Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I've known many many different IT people working at every level and I don't think I've ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren't being productive. Just don't break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don't try to fix it yourself. Personally, I've never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I'm not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit "productivity" targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it's bullshit. If there's an IT department out there that's full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.
Generic USB HID Device driver on a microcontroller with commercial USB IDs and IT doesn't see shit. Looks like an old USB mouse with no support.
We definitely do not look at any Teams activity data - SMB environment though
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:
It has the side effect of preventing my computer from entering screensaver/lock screen when I really am away.
Sometimes Teams doesn't even know if you're online during a video call
And slightly wet
Go on
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
Wow we are all slaves. :( I type this between my Teams meetings.
I do get that this is the real differentiator to businesses in a chat app. how much it spies on employees. we need to unionize yesterday in tech
Just set the status to something other than active. If it says buy or away 100% of the time, even while on a call, then any crazy manager that's monitoring it will start to think it's bugged.
We just all set it to yellow the entire time so people don't think they can call out of the blue.
Your not working if it takes u more than 2 minutes to any thing
That's the fucking point wtf
your job sucks
If you start a chat with yourself click the message textbox and hold down the left shift key the teams will think that your typing and it never changes the status. You don't need to make any changes to your system or install anything with this. Just place a heavy object on the shift key.
I have a ~10 line powershell script that presses the scroll lock key for 1 second every 60 seconds. Way simpler.
I have a similar one. Much simpler. Here it is:
This will show up in process monitoring.
And sit in a log that no one is paid enough to continuously check.
Should be picked up as suspicious behavior and highlighted, your company just isn't big enough.
Highlight doubt it. Anyway I run powershell scripts all the time when forced onto Windows, so 🤷♀️
Or place a 🥄 on your touchpad...
Open outlook and mark yourself as busy in blocks throughout the day.
I just tell them it doesn't work on my system.
I love how inaccurate that status is. No one can depend on it.
Mouse Jiggler with Adjustable Timer
It's simple enough to just make one too.
Super simple to write a script that prevents it.
Guys just open word and have something press the page down key, for example a game controller. Pc never sleeps, and you’re always green on teams/webex/whatever. Keep it simple.
I once read the easiest thing is putting a spoon on your touchpad
I downloaded jiggler on my MacBook and never looked back.
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?
Blank in quotes because it was a skosh more involved: you needed a nonbreaking space or some kind of special character like that. A regular space would just get trimmed away.
Unfortunately not, no.
No but people still set those to give the ol AOL effect of when you hover over them.
Ooh he's got a LinkedIn Lunatic quote "So professional"
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.
It is deliberate.
warm and moist…
I setup a meeting with myself so that it's always red. No green, just red, so I'm always busy.
Bonus: share a 24h fireplace video to your meeting, now you’re listed as ‚presenting‘ and do not disturb activates. The 24h fireplace video will keep your device from going to standby/sleep. My trick to get actual work done.
Every single production monitoring software I've seen on any machine I've ever run had some way to make it look like 100% uptime to whoever looks, and that hack was found within a single shift.
Turns out the most effective system for monitoring production is to actually see if someone is producing what they're supposed to in a reasonable amount of time
Well the consultant I'm paying half a million dollars says otherwise.
As someone working for a consulting firm ... Yeah ... Checks out.
I mean I'm not seeing that money but also it's wild to me what companies are willing to spend money on that's basically toss it into a fire.
Really goes to show how this shit is all made up.
Ok, but management is lazy, incompetent and/or suffering from imposter syndrome (rightful for some). So they don't know what reasonable is, or what they need to produce, only need to make a number match a projection.
just put a spoon on your trackpad
I used bots for games 20 years ago, I mean it should be easy to trick mouse movement...
have your free bot fix it while you get stuff done. i'd just make mine yellow all the time. wut is teams?
I'm so glad I don't have to use Microsoft for anything, where I work we use Google on Mac.
I did always find Google meet better that teams
why? I'd rather everyone knows it's bullshit than they think it's accurate
here nobody uses it anyway, so i dont even log on :3
🖇️ can help? same guy
And all you need to stay at green status is a 🥄...
Definitely don't go on Amazon or Ebay and buy a cheap mouse jiggler. It gets detected as a generic input device and moves the mouse cursor 1 pixel left, then right 24 hours a day. They are available for under a fiver a piece. Plug it in at day's start and unplug it before you walk away from your pc.
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.
meta repost downvote this shit