Turn a Spare Mac Into an Office Wall Dashboard: Screen On, Keyboard and Trackpad Locked

Most engineering teams end up with a wall screen. A TV or an old monitor near the desks showing the Grafana board for the main service, the CI status page, the support queue, or the sales number that the whole company watches at the end of the quarter. And most of those screens are driven by whatever spare machine was lying around, which, in a Mac shop, is a retired Mac mini or a MacBook with a cracked lid. The hardware is fine. The problems are the same three every time: the screen goes to sleep, someone walks past and pokes at it, and one morning the board is hidden behind a login prompt or a software-update dialog that nobody noticed for two days.

This post is the setup for a permanent internal dashboard on a spare Mac: what to put on the screen, the macOS settings that keep it awake, and how VibeLock keeps the board visible while making the keyboard, trackpad and every other app untouchable. It is the internal cousin of our trade-show demo-loop post: that one is about a looping demo in front of strangers for three days; this one is about a board your own team looks at for a year.

Pick one thing for the screen

A wall dashboard that rotates through nine panels is a dashboard nobody reads, because the panel you care about is never up when you glance over. Pick one page and leave it there: the single Grafana or Datadog board for the service that pages people, the GitHub Actions or Buildkite status for the main branch, the on-call queue, or the one revenue number. If two teams want two boards, that is two screens, not a carousel.

Open it in a browser tab and put the browser in full screen (the green button, or ⌃⌘F), so the address bar and tab strip disappear and the board fills the display. Most dashboard tools have a kiosk or TV mode that hides their own chrome too; in Grafana it is the kiosk toggle in the view menu, and most others have an equivalent. Set the dashboard’s own auto-refresh to something sensible, a minute or five, so the page keeps itself current without anyone touching it.

The three ways a wall screen dies

1. The display sleeps

The default macOS energy settings turn the display off after a few minutes of inactivity, and nothing is less active than a wall screen. On a desktop Mac, go to System Settings, Energy, and set the display to never turn off, and turn off the automatic sleep option so the machine itself stays up. On a MacBook, the same settings live under Displays and Battery, and you want the machine on power with the lid open or an external display attached. Also disable the screen saver, which otherwise replaces your board with drifting photos after twenty minutes.

2. Someone fiddles with it

A visible, unlocked Mac is an invitation. People scroll the board to see a different panel, open a new tab to look something up, accidentally hit a key that closes the full-screen view, or unplug it to charge a phone. A keyboard sitting next to the screen makes it worse. Hiding the keyboard in a drawer helps until the day someone needs it, and it does nothing about a trackpad or a Bluetooth mouse that is still paired.

3. Something covers the board

The quietest failure. A Slack notification, a macOS update dialog, a calendar alert from an account that was left signed in, or the dashboard tool’s own session expiring and dropping to a login page. Turn on a Focus mode (Do Not Disturb) permanently on that machine, sign out of anything that is not the board, and turn off automatic software updates so the restart prompt does not appear in the middle of the night. The session-expiry problem is harder, and we come back to it below.

The security problem nobody mentions

To show a dashboard all day, the Mac has to be logged in all day, usually with automatic login turned on so a power cut does not leave a login screen on the wall. That means an unattended, logged-in machine in a shared space, and the browser on it is signed in to your monitoring tool, your CI, possibly your email. Anyone who sits down at it has whatever that account has. The macOS lock screen solves the security problem and kills the dashboard, because it blanks the display. What you want is the opposite: the picture stays, the input goes away.

What VibeLock adds

VibeLock is a small native Swift menu bar app (about 2 MB, signed and notarized, no network calls, no accounts) that locks the Mac without turning the screen off. When you lock it, a system-wide event tap swallows every key press, click, scroll and trackpad gesture, so the keyboard and mouse next to the wall screen simply stop doing anything. Everything except the apps you allow is hidden, and kept hidden: if a blocked app tries to come forward, VibeLock re-hides it. Spotlight (⌘Space), Force Quit (⌘⌥Esc) and ⌘Q are blocked too, so nobody can quit the browser or the locker itself. And it holds the display awake while locked, which takes care of failure number one without relying on the energy settings alone.

For a wall screen the allowlist is one app: the browser showing the board. Everything else, Slack, Mail, Finder windows with files on the desktop, is hidden behind the lock. If the browser is in full screen on its own Space, that is fine; VibeLock works across Spaces and displays, and covers the full-screen windows of blocked apps with an opaque shield if someone swipes to them. Allowed apps come in two flavours, visible-but-not-touchable, which is what you want here, and typing-allowed, which exists for pair sessions where a colleague needs to approve a prompt. Terminals, Claude, ChatGPT and VS Code are pre-allowed because the app was built for people leaving agents running; for a dashboard you toggle those off and the browser on, from the menu bar.

Unlocking is Touch ID on a MacBook or a Mac with a Touch ID keyboard, or your macOS login password typed into VibeLock’s own shield, verified locally through macOS. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere. It needs the Accessibility permission that input blocking requires, which macOS asks for on the first lock, and it runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later. It is $10 once.

The daily routine

1. In the morning, unlock with Touch ID (or the password), check the board is still showing live data, and refresh the tab if the numbers look stale.
2. If the dashboard tool dropped to a login page overnight, sign in again now. This is the one step no locker can do for you.
3. Put the browser back in full screen if anything knocked it out, and lock again from the menu bar. The whole thing takes under a minute.

If the board needs to survive overnight and over weekends, the session length of the dashboard tool is what decides whether that works. Many monitoring tools let an admin issue a long-lived viewer session or a public, read-only snapshot link for exactly this purpose; a read-only link is also the safer thing to have on an unattended machine, because the browser then holds no privileged login at all.

Honest limits

• Expiring sessions still break the board. If your SSO logs the browser out every eight hours, VibeLock will faithfully show the login page, untouchable, until someone unlocks and signs in. Fix that on the dashboard side with a viewer link or a longer session, not on the lock side.
• It is not an MDM kiosk mode. VibeLock blocks input and hides apps on a running, logged-in Mac. It does not enrol the machine, restrict it at the OS level, or come back locked after a reboot. If the Mac restarts, someone has to lock it again. For a fleet of screens with a compliance requirement, that is an MDM job.
• Physical access still exists. The power button works, the cable can be pulled, and a determined person with the machine in hand is a different threat model. The lock is for the colleague who wants to scroll, not for an attacker.
• The energy settings matter too. VibeLock keeps the display awake while locked, but a machine that hibernates on a schedule or a display that is unplugged is outside its reach. Set the sleep settings as described above so the two work together.

If the screen is only ever going to show a video or a looping slideshow rather than a live board, the simpler setup in our post on keeping a video playing on a locked Mac covers it. For a live dashboard that people glance at fifty times a day and that must never be the thing someone types their lunch order into, the combination above, never-sleep settings, a full-screen read-only board, and VibeLock holding the input firewall, is the one that has kept working.