Utility shuts off net connectivity for up to six hours

Lifehacker's Gina Trapani writes about a Mac utility for people who can't resist the temptation to check email or browse the Web while working on a project.

Freedom serves a simple purpose: It disables all wireless and Ethernet networking on your Mac for up to six hours at a time. After the time you specify is up, Freedom re-enables your network adapters and display a confirmation.

Freedom Temporarily Unplugs You From Online Distractions (Lifehacker)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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angusm

#1, #8

One simple fix is to edit the ‘hosts’ file on your machine so that it gives the IP address of your favorite procrastination sites (i.e. boingboing.net) as 127.0.0.1. Then when you succumb to the urge to “just glance at BoingBoing to see if there’s anything new”, you’ll be rewarded with a ‘Server not responding’ error or something similarly unhelpful.

The ‘hosts’ file lives in ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc’ on Windows, and in ‘/etc/hosts’ on MacOS X and Linux. After changing this file on a Mac, you’ll need to run “lookupd -flushcache” in the Terminal to force the Mac to re-read it.

Of course it’s just as easy to remove the line, so in the end it all comes down to your own willpower.
Amayain

@10

I like it! It would be easy enough to create two host files and create a batch file for swapping them out.

Of course the downside would be that i could simply swap it out whenever i wanted to waste time.

Any way to effectively lock down that batch file for a period of time?
Darth Obvious

Ummm you need a software nanny to keep you from straying? Focus grasshopper focus. Think free will.
legion

Oh, this app has been around for years. It’s called “Comcast”. N00bz.
BubbaFett

Just take a deep breath, get up and count to ten, and say “I will not go to icanhascheezburger.com until I get my work done.”

What if you accidentally make a typo and cut yourself off from the net for the next 1000 hours, rather than 10? Catastrophe, I’m sure.
Darth Obvious

@chromal, it is inewspeak, I found the Orwellian name a bit ironic my self.
mork the delayer

Qwest provides me this service, but you can’t control when it happens, and they charge you the same rate they do for DSL service.
Anonymous

Over on Windows, we call this feature ‘searching for wireless network’.
porkchop

#5 Caroline–

THANK YOU for suggesting LeechBlock! It’s exactly what I needed!

I might actually become slightly productive again! :D
Anonymous

Thanks Caroline for pointing out LeechBlock! I’m going to try it. MeeTimer sort of solves the same problem but I didn’t like it.
Cpt. Tim

its like the gastric bypass of internet usage.
chromal

Ironically named app. A better name might be ‘imprisonment.’
velocity girl

#17>

You’ve obviously never suffered from an internet procrastination addiction. “Freedom” is an appropriate name, trust me.
wynneth

This is hilarious since the two blogs I read EVERY DAY are BoingBoing and LifeHacker.
sabik

Hmm, most firewalls should do this easily… just block port 80 outgoing and you’re done. You can even put in exceptions for sites you need for work.
Master Mahan

I was not aware of LeechBlock, so thank you for mentioning it, Caroline.

A similar program that helped me get through college is Temptation Blocker. This serves to block programs rather than specific sites, which is quite handy if you can lose hours to Puzzle Quest or Minesweeper like me.
Amayain

Now if there was only a program that would disable network access EXCEPT for the few websites i need for my job.
Robbo

I’ll get it – but only after they come out with a hack that let’s me by pass it at will … uh, wait …
BrokenRobot

Jesus, now I really DO need to buy a Mac for school.
Cloudform

A beta feature of gmail has a similar feature, but only for mail.
Caroline

Cue snippy “willpower” comments in 5…4…

Seriously — this is great for me. Sometimes you just need to dive in and code, but the internet is a great temptation when you hit that frustrating, tearing your hair out, how the heck do I solve this problem point. The trouble is that you might need a 15-minute break to figure out that problem, but the internet will distract you for a full hour. If I can’t get on the internet — short of shutting everything down for a full restart, which I normally won’t want to do when I’ve got a lot of stuff open and in flux — then I’ll just have to do something else for 15 minutes, and most other stuff is easier to keep to the intended break time.

Amayain @ 1, have you tried the LeechBlock plugin for Firefox? It’s just about perfect for that, and if you use Firefox exclusively, it’s not easily by-passable. (You can set it to not allow you to change settings during the times you have stuff blocked.) My trouble is that I use Safari and am not willing to uninstall it, because Firefox has had so many memory-leak issues on Mac OS X. I’d love to switch to Firefox altogether if they fix that (haven’t been able to find any data on it for the new release).

BrokenRobot @ 3, buy it! Buy it! Dude, the Mac people used to drive me up a wall, but since I bought mine I see what all the cultish talk was about. It really is pretty awesome. (No, I am not getting paid to say that.)
Amayain

No i haven’t. To be honest, i use a PC with Opera and IE as my browsers. The plugin sounds great, but i would probably just end up switching browsers…. or remote desktoping to a different machine, lol.

<== lacks any willpower.
erratic

I DL’d it and set it to 1 minute to test it out. After 6 hours, my net was still down and I had to reboot to get it back. Not ready for primetime
antidisestablishmentarianism

Sorry would have posted earlier but I was locked off of my internet.
william

I second the rec for LeechBlock. It’s genius. A great idea, backed up by a lot of thoughtful development.
Anonymous

Please port this to Windows. I need it. Badly.
velocity girl

Wow. Why didn’t anyone tell me about this two years ago?! This would have helped shave off a good year and a half of the two years I just spent writing my thesis/procrastinating.

The ironic thing, is that if I DID have this utility, I would likely never visit Boing Boing again!!
dolbydog

Sad to say, this doesn’t work.

It wouldn’t revive my wifi when it was supposed to, so I was forced to defeat it, which I was able to figure out in about 2 minutes.

I will share how, but only if asked to.