[livinginfear]

> Wishing you were the one making six fixture for 2 - 6 hour days?

I am one of these people. While I do earn a stupid amount of money in the financial sector, the reality for me isn't really that enviable. I do about 3 hours of honest work per day, but the other hours of the day aren't spent with my feet up on the beach. They're spent waiting. They're spent negotiating with pointy-haired managers to unblock me, or arguing with peabrained bodyshop engineers about the utility of totally uncontroversial concepts like unit-testing. They're spent jiggling the mouse every few minutes so that my status doesn't go yellow on Microsoft Teams. If I got to take my '3 honest hours of work' in a single block, and then log off, I'd be content. Except that the few honest hours of work the bank wrings out of me are spaced out over 9 agonising hours a day, interspersed with pointless corporate garbage like "Agile"(tm) cargo-cult meetings.

I pay my mortgage, but I hate my career.

[lll-o-lll]

You know, it’s pretty trivial to automate that mouse jiggle…

[livinginfear]

I know. Some people have bought "Mouse Jigglers", and so on to do this. I cringe when I see people buy weird USB devices on eBay for this purpose. Who knows what lurks in the firmware of those things. Some people even buy little hardware turntables that physically jiggle the mouse every so often. On an SOE laptop with all kinds of corporate spyware, you'd have to be pretty game to install a driver to automate the task.

[joseda-hg]

You could just plug it into something like a USB Data Blocker, or to a powerbank, that way you don't even have to plug it anywhere in the office

[fragmede]

USB devices purporting to be a mouse or other human interface device (HID) don't need drivers as there's a spec they follow.

[livinginfear]

Yes, they should be class compliant devices. When I mentioned drivers I was talking about the possibility of an alternate driver that would simulate the 'jiggling'. I was just throwing one possibility out there. Mainly just to illustrate the point that anything running on your PC would be subject to some scrutiny from the bank.

[fragmede]

Ah, apologies. I misread your comment.

If you wanted to know the jiggler is safe, "just" write your own firmware and program a micro to do it.

[jdefr89]

Windows supplies an API call, SendInput() I believe lol. You can write a script in a couple minutes.

[baq]

If it’s a bank, you can be pretty sure another bored to death IT security dude will find it and it’ll be the highlight of the month.

The turntable idea is quite good imho. Could also repurpose a toy robot or something.

[pizzaknife]

if you enjoy videogames... i have a wooden dowel that might interest you....