I once wrote a quick Java program that recorded our project's build output (about 5 minute's worth at the time) and captured the time between each line of the output. Then it could play back the build output at the same pace. I could run that in a loop in a shell window and I could nap for an hour while it looked like I was waiting on a build to finish.

We joked about having a screensaver that looked like code being written and played realistic keystroke sounds like you were typing.