Build information radiators are useful for improving the visibility of the state of the build – bright green if it’s good, or bright red if it’s broken. On our current project we’ve been trying to assemble all the hardware to get some lava lamps going, but in the meantime we’re using a very old PC and its tiny CRT monitor to glow bright green or red.

A problem we had was the Power Options settings turns off the monitor after 20 minutes of (in)activity and it’s been too difficult to get Administrator privileges for the machine. Although not necessarily the most ideal solution, the most amenable one for Friday was a small program that moves the mouse cursor every the minutes. Get the results here if you want.

Usage:

java -cp MouseMover.jar <number of minutes each time you want the mouse moved>