Displaying an accurate status in Slack (or whatever other employer-provided collaboration program you may be forced to run) is crucial in 2020. If you need to make a sandwich or take the dog out real quick, but you don’t update your status to show yourself as away, you might come back to a string of increasingly concerned or frustrated messages with lots of annoying question marks and the occasional interrobang.
[Becky Stern] decided that a physical interface would be a far more fun way to keep tabs on her status, and an excellent visual reminder to actually do it. We totally agree. Inside the box is a NodeMCU which is using [Brian Lough]’s Slack API library for Arduino. This made it easy for [Becky] to create a switch/case selector of statuses, and in each of these she can set the presence token as auto or away, and show a custom message with an appropriate emoji. These of course match the emoji semi-circling the selector, which is a rotary switch with a really nice knob.
While we’re on the subject of Slack notifiers, how about a companion cat to wave when you’ve been mentioned?
The dedicated Physical switch nails it.
At least Winston was lucky enough to be able to hide in an alcove, out of sight of the telescreen.
👏👏👏
“Displaying an accurate status in Slack (or whatever other employer-provided collaboration program you may be forced to run) is crucial in 2020.”
Not if you are smart enough to avoid the mindless ball-and-chain existence brought on by compelled Social Media exposure all together.
+1
Doubleplusgood. We’re all Ready
shackled to our bloody cell phones why would someone want to add something else? Workers of the world free yourself delete your slack accounts! Go for a drive or walk without your cell phone and if you have to have it turn off the bloody GPS.
Yeah, expecting someone to be instantly responsive is horrible even if they’re in the same office as you. If they’re working remote, send them an email and they’ll get back to you. This kind of big brother crap is awful and nobody should put up with it.
The big brother productivity crap is annoying, but isn’t a question asked over Slack better than a coworker walking down the hall, into your office and asking you the same question? And who wants to wait minutes on email for a yes/no question?
What straw man are you arguing with? Who says that you should barge into someone’s office and start asking questions? What exactly is the problem with email?
If you cannot wait a few minutes for an answer to your question then what do you do when the respondant is in a meeting or on the phone or out for the day?
That is wild, I love it.
What kind of person loves being attached to a ball and chain?
The kind of person who enjoys being able to pay their mortgage.
This is a great task for AutoIt. It is not hard to look for UI events and then send text and button presses as appropriate. For example, you could write a ‘stonewaller’ such that it looks for new message events, matches the sender to a list of pests, then selects a random stonewalling phrase such as “brb bio break”, “on another call atm”, “give me 10”, etc…
You might not be able to install autoit on your work system but you can compile your script elsewhere into an .exe and just run that.
Yeah we get fired for running random programs on work machines, good deal.
Just do what I do, leave every instant messaging service as “away” all the time! Lol