Impress people at the cafe with a cool hacker screensaver

Make a cool video play fullscreen in your absence from the computer to look like a hacker.

Okay, that sounds lame, doesn’t it? Still, it can impress a couple of people at the café, or at least give them something to look at while you are grabbing another bun or coffee refill (again).

Setting up a custom keyboard shortcut, a cool video and the mpv command line video player are really all that is needed. I found a four-second long loopable “privacy” video at videezy.com that will do the job. Then, install mpv if you don’t already got it:

sudo apt install mpv

Test the video playing in loop with no sound in fullscreen, closing it with ctrl+w:

mpv --fs filename.mp4 --no-audio --loop

Then, find your way into the settings and the keyboard shortcut section. On my linux budgie laptop, this looks like this:

I chose CTRL+ESC as the trigger for this, not occupied by anything else, and easy accessible too. Now, let me grab a refill at the café I’m currently sitting at.

Hitting CTRL+w when you’re back, will close the video and you can continue all your highly classified work (which of course you would never leave your laptop from in the first place, this was just for fun anyway).

You might have noticed that the video file in the screenshot was matrix, which I was at first planning on using, but then, that would be too much for someone. Or, maybe I can have that command as an alternative. After all, the The Matrix Resurrections are playing in the cinema these days?