All of us have been there.
Standing in front of the audience in a conference hall, moving our mouse vigorously, asking everyone

“See this? Here?”

“



ummm..”

“Now?”

“See the mouse pointer?”

It breaks the flow of our conversation and our connection with the audience.
The solution is so simple: having a highlighter on the mouse pointer.

I finally got it a few months back

A few months back, I was preparing for a video call where I was to present a software interface and walk through the audience.
And I didn’t want to constantly ask people or guess they could follow my actions on screen.
So after spending years without using a highlighter, I finally came across a tiny application that helps me have a mouse highlighter.
Now whenever I want, my mouse pointer looks like this:
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Okay, don’t like yellow? Let’s make it green:
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Umm, too small? Let’s make it bigger and revert to yellow.

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You can also do this, it is quite simple

Just install a tiny program called “PenAttention” from this link.

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PenAttention?. Quite a literal name, isn’t it? Because it is developed by one of the Computer Science professors at University of Alaska, probably to solve his own problem. That’s a nerdy way to name things.
By the way, this program only works on Windows machines, so if you’re using MacOS, you might need to search for something else.

Once installed, you don’t even need to customize

Whenever you want the highlighter on your mouse pointer, just click on the installed program “PenAttention 11” on your computer and your mouse will get the highlighter.
You don’t need to configure anything, but if you want, you can go to the program hidden near your clock on the Taskbar and click settings.

You will see this window.

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Notice that this program doesn’t look very “finished” or “professional”. Because it is handmade for personal needs and later released. But still, this gets the work done, so it is pretty impressive.

That’s how I’ve begun using this tiny, but useful program in my regular work. What do you do? Is there any other program or a default configuration in Windows that you know, but I don’t? Hit Reply and share it with me.

Reads of the week:

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Sometimes, we can’t say “no” because we feel obliged. A beautiful read on that feeling. Most adults can take a ‘no’, and may even be grateful to us for putting boundaries on their demands.