The work PC in my office is part of the institution’s domain and the domain administrators have set up various group policies that take over the control of various system setting. One consequence of this is that my work PC goes to sleep if there is no keyboard or mouse activity over a short duration. This is good for saving energy but can sometimes be inconvenient when I have to leave a program executing on a problem overnight. Ideally I’d set up the power settings to never sleep but the group policy for the domain prevents this. Last year I discovered a gadget that prevents PCs going to sleep/hibernate/shutdown, called Mouse Jiggler. Although it was affordable, I realised I could quickly put together a simple device that fulfilled the same purpose although with far less elegance. My poor man’s mouse jiggler consists of an optical mouse placed on top of an analogue watch that has a second hand.

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