Virtual meeting pause countdown

Description

Virtual meetings are common in today’s world and it’s also known that you should take a break in a longer meeting. I prefer to show the participants a little countdown until the break ends. Since I dislike doing repetitive tasks manually, I created a small PowerShell script to do this for me¹:

Starting pause countdown

Explanation

Countdown display

Webuhr.de is used for displaying the countdown. I didn’t try to do a fancy countdown on my own, since there are already existing once in the web and if the URL is not accessible you probably won’t participate in a virtual meeting anyway.

The script launches the URL in private mode of a browser. This should prevent that any confidential information are displayed along with the countdown window. The downside of this is, that the I can’t make us of the default browser for opening URLs and therefore need to explicitly define the opening command for the browsers. The script tries the following browsers in this order:

1. Edge
2. Chrome
3. Firefox
4. Internet Explorer

If no browser is started, you will get an info with the option to copy the URL into the browser of your choice.

Error message, if browser could not be started

Form options

1. Pause name The default title of the pause is Pause ends this can either be changed in the form for a single use case.

2. Available pauses By default, the drop down will list the next 16 five-minute intervals after the current one. This adds up to 1:30h in total, which should be enough even for a launch break.
3. Sound reminder If checked, a reminder will be played two minutes before the pause ends.

Individual settings for a pause.

Time format

The time format depends on your regional settings. If your system uses a 12-hour format with am/pm designator the drop down values as well as the end of the pause will use the same format.

Depending on the regional settings 12-hour or 24-hour format is used.

Default settings

The setup of the script is defined by the first lines.

• $pauseTitleText defines the default name of the pause
• $numberOf5MinuteOptions defines the number of displayed option values. If you need more/less you can change the number here
• $reminderChecked the default value of the Play reminder checkbox. Most of my breaks are no longer than 10 minutes, so I don’t need an reminder.
• $alarmSoundPath the path of the sound file to play.
• $playReminderMinutesBeforePauseEnd the reminder will be sound this number of minutes before the end of the pause.

Depending on the regional settings 12-hour or 24-hour format is used.

Possible issues

Script doesn’t work

If you run the PowerShell script and nothing happens, there are two options:

• Windows doesn’t trust the downloaded file
• You are not allowed to execute PowerShell scripts

Windows doesn’t trust the file

You can fix this by right clicking the file and tick the unblock checkbox.

Unblock file

Execution of PowerShell scripts is not allowed

You can download the batch file. The batch file will tell the system to temporarily allow the execution of the specified file. Both files must be in the same folder.

Download

Since PowerShell scripts and batch files can harm your computer, the download is blocked by default. Therefore, I’ve linked the source code which you can download via save as. If you need the batch file make sure to use the name displaypause.ps1 for the PowerShell script or modify the batch file accordingly.

Save the source code by right clicking in the browser and choose save as.

• PowerShell Script
• Batch file

1. At the time the gif was created the ‘Sound reminder’ option was not available. ↩