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Ergonomic Screensavers?
trance9 sent this submission in:
"Where can I find an ergonomic screensaver? Most
screensavers lock the screen when you don't type enough.
I want one that locks the screen when I type too much.
After 10 minutes of non-stop typing, it should let me know
it's time for a break. If I keep going for another 5
minutes, it should insist. EMACS has a mode like this,
but I don't do everything through EMACS--I think it should
really be done by either the window manager, or some X add
on. Any ideas?" Interesting! With more and more of us
spending time in front of our monitors, would something like
this really help out with eye-strain in the long run?
I have thought about this, too. I see one major problem; if you are really concentrated on your work, you will want to go on anyway. Simply opening another virtual terminal and killing the screen/hand saver would allow you to go on.
I have small reminders popping up at around midnight that tell me that I should go to bed; but I never follow their advice. I think such a screen saver would be the same - if you can get around it, you will (or at least I will).
Perhaps one could make a neat trick in the saver so it would mess up the screen mode and not restore it until some time had expired. If the saver was then killed, one would have to restart the system to get his display back (you can never prevent against rebooting).
Actually, I think this could be left in the kernel, as a custom addition (it will never get accepted for mainstream kernels, I think). If the kernel cut off the keyboard for two minutes every fifteen minutes, there would be no way to get it back (you cannot kill the kernel).
Of course, all mentioned timings can be configureable. I have no problem making great plans ahead, but once the reminders pop up I find it really hard to actually follow my own plans. It *has* to somehow be un-interruptable if it should work for me.
(Not really anonymous, but not logged in since I am in Windows where I have absolutely nothing configured properly).
No, that will not help me. "shutdown -c" at 11:50 would cancel the shutdown.
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In the case of xscreensaver, each of the screensavers are actually free-standing programs that can be launched independtly of the xscreensaver process. so what you might be able to is hack something up that polls for keyboard input, and starts one of the screensavers after a particular "non-idle" threshold has been hit. not my area, but probably an interesting little hack. may be able to tie that in with the existing code in emacs that already does that...
xwrits also has a lock mode
Xwrits reminds you to take wrist breaks, which will hopefully help you prevent repetitive stress injury. It pops up an X window when you should rest, you click on that window, then take a break.
You want to go to bed at 12? No problem. At 11, you need only type "shutdown -h 60". That'll teach you to stay up past your bedtime.
grep -ri 'should work'
Here's a solution - start smoking. Granted, you can still type with a smoke in your hand, but I've found that my hourly sorties outside give my hands a rest & my brain a chance to think of better ideas.
my karma ran over your dogma