my wife took my $5 timex watch and just put her mouse on the face of it. kinda blew my mind because her request was very out of left field. but it works!
I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].
I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.
[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.
[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".
The mousepad itself has an eink or similar display to change it over time and have the mouse detect some motion. The "active" part is turned off (to just be a regular display) when there is pressure on the wrist rest.
The mousepad is a USB hub (to get power for itself) that you can also plug the mouse and keyboard into so that its one less cord back to the computer.
Years ago when optical nice were a new thing, I pranked my co-worker in the IT department by taping a feather to the optical sensor and then taping the mouse right behind the power supply fan on his tower PC. Then I plugged in a second mouse and put it on his desk. The constant jitter of the mouse drove him bonkers. He replaced the desk mouse several times, went back to a ball mouse and even reimaged his PC (we used Ghost back then to image the company PCs in-situ). Every time he replaced his desk mouse I thought he'd see the rogue mouse, but he always did it "blind", tracing his cable back, pulling it out and fumbling with the replacement usb plug for 5 minutes, cursing USB ports. If he once pulled out the tower or crawled back there to look he'd have seen my ruse.
I must check whether placing a mouse on laptop's screen would work. As the screen blanks out would it register as a move and the system would not lock itself?
It's way easier than it sounds. Logitech provides a tool that lets you program their gaming mouses. They use Lua. I don't know Lua but there were plenty of guides for different gaming macros like recoil compensation and the Logitech documentation was decent enough.
This is making me feel old. Totally agree it is difficult, but not impossible.
Logitech is the problem here for even allowing this in the first place. No CRC checks for mouse firmware or anything? It screams poor implementation. I will not be surprised if anti-cheat software starts banning people or companies like Logitech.
Kind of sad to see the number of threads and communities online encouraging this. The point of games is to have fun, when you cheat all that goes out the door.
If on Windows, I use their "Power Toys" (free, btw), which has a keep awake function. My company user policies do not allow me to manage my energy policy, which is what kept shutting off my screen (and therefore necessitating the complicated password). Power Toys solves this problem.
Pretty sure that isn't legal in most countries where HN'ers work from
Which is not to say that it is not done, but personally I have enough options that I would like to see them try to fire me over something like that. If I'm staring off into the distance to think about something or reading source code without pgdn'ing for five minutes, yes it's not uncommon that my screen turns off while reading something (until I get around to setting the timeout higher at least) but that doesn't mean I'm not working.
Does this eventually "wear out" our monitors/displays because now they never turn off. I have expensive monitors and I work from home and keep my laptop always docked. Never turning off the displays makes me wonder if I am rushing them to going bad too soon.