Gnome Typing Monitor
I decided to turn on gnome-typing-monitor (the settings for which are unintuitively located in gnome-keyboard-properties) to force me to take breaks more often to exercise my eyes and hopefully help prevent RSI.
Timer Resets
The first thing that confused me about its behavior was that the timer would reset at strange times. The help file explains:
If you stop using the keyboard and mouse for a length of time equal to the Break interval setting, the current work interval will be reset.
Since I have it set at 1 minute every 20 minutes (I'd really like something like 20 seconds every 20 minutes, just as a rerminder to look around and stretch a bit), the timer will reset if I am idle for 1 minute.
Incessant Red Blinking
While I like the fact that it puts a little icon in the notification area, said icon starts flashing incessantly when a break is about to happen, which is extremely annoying. I grabbed the control-center src rpm to see if there was any lazy way to get this to stop happening. Unfortunately, the blinking behavior looked pretty unconfigurable without patching the source.
Workrave
I had seen mention of another program called workrave. I must have done something wrong the first time I tried to install it with yum, because I looked again, and it's in both fedora extras and dries. So I disabled gnome-typing-monitor and installed workrave.
The application window was easily disabled in Preferences:User Interface:Status Window. Workrave has 3 separate timers. I turned off "Daily Limit", and have my other two timers set as:
Micro-break: 1 minute break every 20 minutes. No prompt before breaking.
Rest break: 10 minute break every 2 hours. No prompt before breaking.
