Automatically press a key every 60 seconds
You can do this in AppleScript, iff you've enabled access for assistive devices:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using command down


This will (obviously) invoke cmd-,.

If, for some reason, you can't enable access for assistive devices, then it's pretty easy to do this in code (by creating a CGEventRef and then posting it to the system, essentially).  If you'd like help with that, then head over to stackoverflow.com, where that question has been asked a few times.

As for getting this to happen every 60 seconds, you could turn it into a launch agent and let launchd do it for you:

&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
 "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"&gt;
&lt;plist version="1.0"&gt;
&lt;dict&gt;
    &lt;key&gt;Label&lt;/key&gt;
    &lt;string&gt;com.stackexchange.apple.12692&lt;/string&gt;
    &lt;key&gt;Program&lt;/key&gt;
    &lt;string&gt;/usr/bin/osascript&lt;/string&gt;
    &lt;key&gt;ProgramArguments&lt;/key&gt;
    &lt;array&gt;
        &lt;string&gt;osascript&lt;/string&gt;
        &lt;string&gt;-e&lt;/string&gt;
        &lt;string&gt;tell application "System Events" to keystroke "," using command down&lt;/string&gt;
    &lt;/array&gt;
    &lt;key&gt;ServiceDescription&lt;/key&gt;
    &lt;string&gt;Auto Keypress&lt;/string&gt;
    &lt;key&gt;StartCalendarInterval&lt;/key&gt;
    &lt;dict&gt;
        &lt;key&gt;Second&lt;/key&gt;
        &lt;integer&gt;0&lt;/integer&gt;
    &lt;/dict&gt;
&lt;/dict&gt;
&lt;/plist&gt;


Toss that in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and you should be good to go (once you load the plist and/or log out and log back in).