Mike Force lurks in a tray icon to help you ensure that the settings for your default microphone on Windows stick (also keep it unmuted if you want to). He e.g. defends the (partially) disabled against attacks by Nuance's dragon. 😉
Inspired by (and some code fragments from): https://github.com/wolfinabox/Windows-Mic-Volume-Locker
But like mentioned, Mike Force also has the ability to keep the microphone unmuted. And running nircmd repeatedly didn't seem ideal (laptop battery usage - although the difference is admittedly probably negligible...) to me.
While this tool is larger, actually running it is more efficient (these values were measured using the .exe files, at an interval of 0.1s):
| Mike Force | Mic-Volume-Locker | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor time | 0-0.016% | ~0.2% |
| RAM used | ~19 MB | ~18 MB |
| Drive space used | ~73 MB | ~10 MB |
The only noteworthy thing here is that after building the release, it should always be run. Not just to confirm that changes work as intended but because Windows Defender frequently falsely flags .exe files created with PyInstaller as trojans. If that happens, simply submit the .exe to Microsoft as described in the following article. It'll probably be whitelisted within 24h or so.
https://medium.com/@markhank/how-to-stop-your-python-programs-being-seen-as-malware-bfd7eb407a7
PyQt is used because infi.systray doesn't support checked tray menu items and with pystray, the dialogs that can be triggered only focused correctly the first time that they opened.
(As an added bonus, PyQt does things so much faster that a splash screen isn't needed.)