My 10-year-old laptop has no fingerprint sensor. No Face ID. Just a keyboard.
And I was typing a 10+ character password every single time I locked my screen.
Lock. Type. Unlock. Lock. Type. Unlock. Repeat 40 times a day.
So I thought — my mouse has 3 buttons. What if clicking them in a secret pattern could unlock the screen instead?
2 left clicks → 2 right clicks → 1 left click. Screen unlocked.
I'm running Linux (Fedora + KDE Plasma) on a decade-old machine, so I asked Claude Code to build it from scratch. It wrote a Python daemon using evdev that:
- Reads raw mouse events directly from
/dev/input/(works even on Wayland lock screen) - Checks if the session is locked via
loginctl
- Matches your registered click pattern → fires
loginctl unlock-sessions
- Runs as a systemd service at boot
The whole thing is ~150 lines of Python. No PAM hacks. No special hardware.
Is it secure? Absolutely not — but neither is a laptop old enough to be in 5th grade. 😅
Old laptop. No biometrics. Zero excuses now. 🖱