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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 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?
IT department probably
As a sysadmin I sometimes feel like an “it” when I’m forced to emerge from my cubicle.
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.
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’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 have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.
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?
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…
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?
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’m so glad we use Matrix at work. Our IT department even tells us explicitly not to use Teams if we can avoid it.
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.
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.
It’s so stupid, previously you could keep it permanently “online”
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?
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.
Arrow keys are pretty safe to hold down.
I often wondered how they did that, thanks!
- 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.
I’ll go one step further and hope their both sides of their pillow are warm from fresh piss. What a totally asshole decision.
- Open notepad
- Place calculator on spacebar all it’s activated
- …?
- Profit
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.
Why does it matter?
- a solo freelancer
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.
