Pass through idle/activity timer to guest?

[Jay_Levitt]

I just started using a brilliant program called PostureMinder. It watches your webcam and nags you when you're slouching. It's only available for Windows.

I have it working fine under XP, and Fusion 3 on Snow Leopard routes the webcam right through to the guest. But there's a problem; it needs to know when you're at the keyboard, or else it'll misinterpret the webcam image. I'm often active in Snow Leopard, but I'm not doing anything in the XP guest, and so PostureMinder thinks I'm inactive.

Is there some way for Fusion to pass my idle/inactivity state through to Windows? I can update to Win7 if needed. I imagine I (well, someone) could write an AppleScript that keeps checking system idle and sends keystrokes to the guest, but that seems the long way round.

[rcardona2k]

What happens in Unity mode? I would think that might pass through more activity than an isolated Fusion window. Of course if the Unity window doesn't have focus, it might just behave the same way.

[Jay_Levitt]

Yep, that's exactly what happens in Unity - if focus is on a guest window, guest thinks I'm active. If focus is on a host window, the guest thinks I'm idle.

[sailesh_a · Accepted solution]

Hi, there's currently no way to do what you're asking. It's a very interesting use case though and I'll forward it to our keyboard and mouse gurus.

Thanks,

Sailesh

[Jay_Levitt]

Well, this is very much the long way round, but it works...

1. Download key_rmenu_up.exe and copy it to your guest VM. It does nothing but send the single event "I just released the right alt key" to Windows. (Idea shamelessly stolen from Caffeine)

2. Download the passthrough_idle.rb script to your host

3. chmod a+x passthrough_idle.rb

4. Modify the config variables as needed.

5. ./passthrough_idle.rb

It loops forever, wakes up every 60 seconds, and if the Mac's been active, it runs key_menu_up using vmrun so your guest is active too.

If there's some way to send keystrokes directly to the guest, that would of course be much, much more efficient. Short of that, I have a few other ideas - key_rmenu_up.exe could become a simple server that accepts pings from the Mac.

key_rmenu_up is itself an AutoIt script, consisting solely of:

Send("{RALT up}")

I've uploaded the whole mess to github, too:

http://github.com/jaylevitt/passthrough_idle